There is something strangely appropriate about working on The Hanged Man in October.
October has always seemed like a month when the dead are a little closer to the surface. The leaves change, the days grow shorter, Halloween approaches, and suddenly the things we spend the rest of the year trying not to think about—death, ghosts, bones, decay, endings—are everywhere.
Maybe that's why I've been thinking about this card again.
Or maybe it's because I've been feeling a little stuck.
The Hanged Man is one of those cards that I have struggled with in a very personal way. In the traditional imagery, he hangs suspended upside down, seemingly trapped. But the longer I spend with the card, the less I see imprisonment and the more I see suspension.
He isn't necessarily going nowhere.
He's simply not moving in the direction he expected.
And sometimes that is exactly what being an artist feels like.
The original painting wasn't taking me where I wanted it to go, so rather than abandoning the canvas, I painted over it.
There is something almost unsettling about painting over a painting.
The previous image doesn't completely disappear. Sometimes traces remain underneath—the ghost of an arm, a change in texture, a shape that no longer makes sense but still exists beneath the surface.
In a way, it becomes another kind of palimpsest(reused parchment).
A record of the version of the painting that didn't survive.
And perhaps that is appropriate for The Hanged Man.
Because sometimes being stuck isn't about having nothing to show for your time.
Sometimes it means you are becoming something different underneath the surface....
The past few months haven't exactly made it easy to stay focused on a 78-card tarot deck.
Life has a way of interrupting art.
Recently, I've lost two family members and a friend. And also it seems like my relationship has reached an end point.
My aunt on my mother's side passed away about a week before what would have been my mom's birthday. I always called my aunt my second mom, so losing her has carried a particular kind of weight.
There is something strange about losing someone so close to another loss. Dates begin to overlap. Memories become tangled together. One absence reminds you of another.
And then there was my uncle.
I hadn't seen him in several years. He had been living in a nursing home, and I kept thinking about making the extra trip to see him.
I never did.
That is one of the difficult things about grief: sometimes the pain isn't only about losing someone.
Sometimes it is about all the things you thought you still had time to do.
The visit you could make later.
The phone call you could make tomorrow.
The assumption that there would be another opportunity.
There isn't always one....
And then there was a friend I gained after moving out here.
He gave us an Edgar Allan Poe stuffed animal with a little raven perched on his shoulder. He also gave us a tiny backpack with a dangling skeleton.
They are small, almost silly objects.
But grief has a strange way of changing the weight of ordinary things.
Suddenly a stuffed Poe isn't just a stuffed Poe.
A tiny skeleton dangling from a backpack isn't just a decoration.
Objects become evidence.
Proof that someone was here.
Proof that there was a relationship, a moment, a kindness.
Something remains...
This is perhaps where The Hanged Man becomes more interesting to me. We often think of being stuck as wasted time.
I certainly do.
There is a voice in my head that looks at unfinished paintings and unfinished projects and immediately translates them into failure.
You should be further along.
You should have finished this already.
You should be working on the next card.
You shouldn't still be struggling with this one.
But The Hanged Man doesn't seem particularly interested in productivity.
He hangs there.
He waits.
He looks at the world from a completely different angle.
And maybe the point isn't to force yourself out of suspension.
Maybe the point is to ask what you can see from here that you couldn't see while standing upright.
---
There is something particularly strange about being an artist while grieving.
The world doesn't stop.
There are still paintings waiting for paint.
There are emails to answer.
Bills to pay.
Laundry.
Work.
The ordinary machinery of life continues moving even when some part of you feels suspended outside of it.
And art doesn't always provide the escape people imagine it does.
Sometimes it makes you look more closely.
At death.
At the body.
At memory.
At the things we lose.
At the things we leave unfinished.
At all the versions of ourselves that exist underneath the current one.
Phantasmagoria was always going to be about these things.
I just didn't always know how personally I would encounter them while making it.
---
new
The Hanged Man is still unfinished.
The Major Arcana is still unfinished.
Phantasmagoria is still unfinished.
And, honestly, so am I.
Maybe that's why I keep coming back to this card.
The Hanged Man isn't dead.
He isn't defeated.
He hasn't disappeared.
He's simply suspended between what was and what comes next.
And perhaps that is not the same thing as being stuck.
Perhaps sometimes we are simply in the middle of becoming something we cannot see yet.
So I am trying to give myself permission to stay there for a little while.
To repaint the canvas.
To let the old image disappear beneath the new one.
To remember the people who are no longer here.
To feel the things I haven't finished feeling.
And then, eventually, to turn the painting right side up and see what has changed.
For this version of The Hanged Man, I chose a bat. There is something fitting about a creature that spends so much of its existence suspended upside down in darkness. We tend to think of being stuck as something negative—a failure to move forward—but the bat doesn't seem to see it that way. It hangs, waits, listens, and navigates a world that looks completely different from our own. Maybe suspension isn't always about being trapped. Maybe sometimes it is about learning how to see differently before you move again.
October feels like a fitting time for that.
The dead are close.
The leaves are letting go.
And somewhere in the studio, The Hanged Man is still waiting for me...
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