IN SHORT:
UPRIGHT: Rest, self-care, meditation, contemplation, recuperation. Take a time to breath.
REVERSED: Burnt-out & depleted. The need for a dormant period, removed from the world.
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IN DEPTH:
The Four of Swords shows a young adult lying horizontally atop a bench. Arms elongated and gently clasped, she stretches out into this defiant mode of rest. It has been a while since she came upstairs, these days she essentially lives in the basement, ruminating on the ephemera of her past: Posters, ticket-stubs, correspondences and journal entries. Hovering directly above and below her: there appears to be two swords. Each one corresponds to major battles or journeys in life—one she has put the rest, the other she is still processing.
To the middle-class liberal neighbors it might look like she has given up on herself, resigned to a solitary life lived in the basement. To others, it may seem as though she has become frozen in time, rarely changing or tending to her appearance since the day she descended downstairs to “figure some stuff out.” This can sometimes take on an uncanny or unsettling quality. And yet for the time being she is resigned to ‘sitting this one out’. She recognizes that she needs to heal before carrying one next chapter in life, and part of that process is being active and mindful about the way in which she narrates to herself, that story which she experiences as her ‘identity’. She mulls over the highs and lows of her past and ruminates on the question: “What have I been telling myself, about myself, and how has it impacted my experience in the world?”
Above her hangs a poster of two more swords places against one another on a stone backdrop. This image held high, signifies an ideal way in which she imagines these past battles becoming meaningful and forging her strength and wisdom for future. The Four of Swords tells us to restore ourselves before taking on on the next challenge. Even if you are a hyper-productive, the Four of Swords advises you to take some regular ‘down-time’, and recharge your battery. Now is the time to rest, meditate, recover, de-clutter, organize your environment and your thoughts.
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“The free time gained through a century of workers’ struggle was progressively subsumed to the rule of profit and transformed into fragmented and diffused labor.”
― Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future
“The Western mind is reacting with a panicked psychosis that could herald a suicidal act. Nothing can interrupt the dynamic of this intersection of paranoid delusions. The only thing we—as intellectuals, as activists, as therapists searching for new subjectivities—can do is prepare for chaos and imagine lines of flight.” -Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Resign
“Furthermore, resignation means re-signification—giving a new meaning to pleasure, to richness, to activity, and to cooperation. This is the fresh horizon that we can discover at the end of the tunnel of psycho-deflation. An egalitarian and frugal sensitivity is the hidden perspective that is unveiled there.” -Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Resign
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