The Tarot Of Songwriting - 02 The High Priestess

Julia Fox, Psychomagic and the Inscrutable Feminine

The High Priestess - 

When I was 24 and living in east LA, I visited an energy healer at an establishment called The House of Intuition on Sunset Boulevard. She performed her skit, I guess you could call it, and offered me a care plan. One year into living in the self-indulgent capital of the world, I was mainlining Kool-Aid at that point and down for whatever. To open up a disturbance of my sacral chakra, I was to eat, drink, wear and sleep in orange - for three days. This meant I was to dye my bed sheets and water, eat sweet potato and salmon, and wear only orange rags. I had recently read Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic, which I had found entertaining. When taken with a pinch of salt, it did scan to me that performative acts, especially ones that confront you with public humiliation, could act as offerings to the unconscious and loosen stiff joints therein. So off I went and followed her instructions exactly. 

It was amazing to be the lunatic I would so often see in various forms in Los Angeles. Getting out of my shitty 00’s cocaine blue car at the grocery store or Griffith Park in my badly dyed orange kundalini yoga outfit, like it was nothing. I even did an orange rinse in my hair. There’s something feminine about this kind of madness. And there is indeed a kind of feminine madness that runs in my family - deep agonies that run down the matriarchal line on both sides - which I was at the time trying to heal, in a way. The healer had also prescribed that I sleep with The High Priestess under my pillow. I had the craziest dreams of my life, which I won’t bore you with here, except to say that they proved to me that you can move things along on a deep level by doing seemingly trivial things on the surface. This is the spirit of the High Priestess. 

Femininity has always been something of an unknowable secret to me; this is perhaps why I’m so drawn to writing about it. I feel like I received the package but was never given the manual. As I enter different age brackets, I recognise that I am in a pattern of eternal reconstruction into a feminine form that feels only by observation to be appropriate. I’m sure I’m not alone in this feeling. 

When I think of self-assured femininity, lately, I conjure the image of Julia Fox, whose autobiography I just listened to, jaw on the floor, and loved, and my best friend since young adulthood, Phoebe; She has and always will be another league hotter than me, always slight and tall and older looking at points where that counted as a bonus, and had the enviable unrepentant propensity for naughtiness - never minding being told off, where I would do almost anything to go unnoticed. She knew how to accentuate her already flawless features, got a job at Agent Provocateur straight of school, knew how to wear clothes as well as lingerie, how to charm her way out of not paying a train fare, and, having, unlike me, grown up in London, how to get out of sticky situations - once, when we were trapped in an unruly crowd at Notting Hill Carnival, without warning me she pretended to faint and, like Moses at the Red Sea, the throng divided as I carried her on my back to safety. There, she said, let's go home. 

When we were 20, she became pregnant - a surprise, of course. And when we were 21, she had a beautiful baby girl. She then became, definitively, a woman, while I would linger awkwardly in girlhood for many years to come. I remember watching her navigate early motherhood, seemingly unfazed, a babe attached to her beautiful breast, and feeling that I did not know how to be for her. A few years later, she was completing the prestigious degree she had started before the child, while I was living across the world taking mushrooms, dying my bedsheets orange and reading Psychomagic - missing out on her life and feeling a million miles from the friend I used to smoke in the bath with. I wrote her a long email saying how awful I felt that I hadn’t managed to understand her life or what she was going through and how this had resulted in a distance between us, which felt impossibly large. Her response was calm and concise, sure as she was that our lives would join up again down the line. And so they did. She was a woman reassuring a girl. I am godmother to her daughter, and they are now both godmothers to mine. 

This feeling of being an outsider, admiring the inscrutable feminine, dominated the writing of my fifth album, Semper Femina. It turned out to be a homage to my female friends, whom I admired with almost lustful intensity. But in a way, the entire project of my songwriting has been an interrogation of the unknowable disposition of femininity and the secrets kept therein. Thankfully, it will take a lifetime to understand. I‘ve noticed that the moments in which I think of myself as a girl are infrequent these days, certainly if my googling of “can you get botox while breastfeeding” is anything to go by (no, you can’t). I’m at the brow of the hill of womanhood. Maybe I even reached it in childbirth, when, shortly after attempting to appear sound-of-mind while trying to insist on a c-section ten minutes before giving birth at home, I felt the familiar feeling of tripping, at one with the universe and all the women who had done this before me. My conscious mind was quite reasonably attending to the facts, but it was something unknowable that got me over the finish line. This is the spirit of The High Priestess, as far as I’m concerned.    

The Magpie - 

From Second Place by Rachel Cuck

I like people who are comfortable in ambivalence. I find I’m drawn to people who may appear cynical but are secretly grounded in something fertile and alive. I find it draining and a bit deranged to be around people who mask with shallow acceptable niceness, whose faces drop when the camera pans away from them and they are confronted in their alone-ness with the terror of The Real. I welcome eruptions of truth, (especially when they’re funny, as often they are) though, not all the time - I value the preservation of unwritten rules of civility - but those unafraid of the truths within them tend to be fellows of mine. This is, however, a statement of fact and not value - by whatever unnatural tainting, this is just my preference. It’s why I’m so grateful for the existence of writers like Rachel Cusk. Her books about motherhood and divorce are breathtaking in their willingness to allow the darkness that flows under everything banal and domestic to huff up steam and obscure whatever fashions of feminism or even nicety might otherwise have described the scene. I was so incredibly grateful to have read A Life’s Work when I was pregnant. I had no idea, even after reading it, how controversial it had been at its release. I think that, by today's standards of what people call freedom, it would barely turn heads. Though Cusk’s motherhood experience is very different from mine, I am grateful to have been permitted to fear an ambivalence that didn’t actually materialise. I feel it’s generous of her to have offered that. 

A theme that runs through a lot of her fiction is a disconnection between the reality of being a woman and the idealised image of femininity. In Second Place, the middle-aged female narrator describes being thrown off course by the surprise appearance of a young, beautiful woman who accompanies an older male artist she had invited to stay in her guest house for a summer to work. She hadn’t mentally prepared to be confronted by youth and beauty, having expected to have the artist to herself, not in a romantic sense, but an intellectual one. Why this disturbs her so much is a rarely described and fascinating aspect of the workings of the feminine. 

“I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself.”

It reminds me of a Camus quote from The Stranger (which I can’t find, my apols) about how he had never loved someone who he did not also hate. Or something to that effect. A self-reflected disgust that arises from something unknowable in our own fabric. 

I do not enjoy dwelling on these ambivalences regularly, but I like to be reminded of the balance of light and dark within oneself. This factors heavily into my songwriting. In life, however, though it can be fascinating to spend time among rotting leaves under the canopy, I generally prefer the sunny side. 

Guitar Practice - 

I’m sorry to say I haven’t had much time this week to think about guitar as I’ve been preoccupied with announcing a new album and releasing a song (I’m also thinking about moving this section to its own post in the future). The song is called Patterns, and here’s an early version of it recorded in Normandy last summer - the title of the voice note then was “Zena Ballerina”