Reading Tarot in the Anthropocene: On Matt Stansberry and David Wilson's "Rust Belt Arcana"

Matt Stansberry (Author) and David Wilson (Illustrator) | Rust Belt Arcana | Belt Publishing | October 30, 2018 | 160 Pages

Rust Belt Arcana is a book of twenty-two short essays on plants and animals of the industrial Midwest, each paired with one of the Tarot’s Major Arcana, the special non-numbered cards in a traditional Tarot deck. In this book, The Hermit is an eastern box turtle. Death a crow. The Hanged Man a Virginia opossum. Justice: fungi.

There is a surface-level appeal to this arrangement. Seeing which animal aligns with which card is a sort of party game akin to picking which celebrity would play you in a movie. Reading about skunk cabbage is a lot more fun when you’re thinking about it as The Empress: earthy maternal influence that brings new life into the world. Plus, the full-page images by David Wilson at the beginning of each chapter have an alt-Arcana cool that makes this a book (or a deck) you want to own.

Thankfully, Matt Stansberry’s writing elevates the book beyond its premise by pushing past easy comparison. Each essay makes visible the often-overlooked animals that have adapted to hide in our cities, our lakes, and the shrubs between our suburbs.

For instance, when was the last time you considered the bowfin, “the last species of an ancient order of fish dating back to the Jurassic period”? Despised by fisherman, overlooked by most researchers, bowfin are the only primitive fish that care for their young. They nest in what few wetlands remain along Lake Erie where males aggressively guard fertilized eggs and herd young fish into a swarming mass called a bowfin ball.

Stansberry shows how bowfin embody the protecting, self-sacrificing aspects of The Emperor card, but also how they are under threat from a disappearing habitat. The Great Black Swamp, a wetland the size of Connecticut near present-day Toledo that, until 200 years ago, used to filter harmful nutrients and act as a nursery for “one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the world,” is now farmland that drains phosphorus into the Maumee River, creating blooms of algae so toxic that in 2014 they shut down the water supply for half a million people. Without conservation and restoration initiatives, “one of the most fascinating fish on the planet” might not have survived.

Besides simply educating readers about lesser-known creatures, the unique mix of naturalism and mysticism provides readers a fresh way of thinking about flora and fauna we think we already know everything about by illustrating our impact on them and them on us.

Take the crow, “our most potent symbol of death.” Stansberry uses the crow as an opportunity to reflect on our avoidance of death—“It’s as if we can’t bear to look at it directly”—but also how crows and death are “an antidote against complacency and self-pity.” Their behavior also closely resembles our own. They collaborate, they remember, they mourn their dead, they play. Crows also thrive around humans. “The mortality rate for adult crows living near humans over a two-year period is 2.3 percent, versus 38.9 percent mortality rate for crows living in unsettled landscapes.” We’re invited to consider how their destiny is determined by ours.

One of the best essays in the book is Stansberry’s take on the much-despised Virginia opossum. It is ugly. It is slow. It is born blind, without developed lungs or kidneys or a gastrointestinal tract. “It eats the dead. It fucks its kin. It spreads.” “And yet somehow they persist,” writes Stansberry. By likening the opossum to the Hanged Man, we form a kind of respect for a creature punished by the masses, subject of ridicule, but that never gives up, refuses to conform. An opossum will “finish a maze with food in it faster than a rat or cat. It will remember where the food is the next time it attempts the maze—with better cognition than dogs.” More importantly, they eat disease-spreading ticks. A single opossum can eat up to 5,000 ticks a year. In other words: they’re secretly essential to our wellbeing, yet, thanks to us, their population has declined by 40 percent since 1989.

Using the Tarot to talk about everything from turtles to trout reframes our understanding of wildlife in a way that invites us to consider our intertwined fate. It’s “Ecosystems 101” reflected in a crystal ball. A deck of wildlife Major Arcana may sound like a simple curiosity, but the truth is that our future is in these cards.

Unfortunately, the main draw of Rust Belt Arcana is to some extent the main drawback. Individually, each essay is engaging and easy to read. Taken together, however, they start to work against each other. For one thing, the basic Tarot-animal comparison format starts to feel repetitive, particularly if you read several sections in a row. Although Stansberry approaches each creature or plant differently, at some point they all have to address how the Major Arcana description matches that subject. Here, the signifiers tend to simplify rather than adding layers of depth and complexity. A typical example: “In many ways, the snowy owl in Cleveland embodies the qualities of the High Priestess.” Stansberry explains how the owl travels here on intuition, how it is difficult to study because it travels to the Arctic, beyond the range of research transmitters, and how it appears calm but is a nighttime killer. “All of these qualities echo the traditional themes of the High Priestess: intuition, mystery, calmness, water, darkness, and power held in abeyance.” The reflection doesn’t go much deeper than this, however, and any reader keen on exploring more of the symbolism or history of the Major Arcana may find the book wanting.

Additionally, because the essays function primarily as standalone pieces (a few first appeared as part of a “North Coast Biodiversity” column on Belt), the form of the book to some extent counteracts the message of interdependence. What we gain in appreciation for separate species we lose in understanding how those species interrelate.

When Stansberry does hit on the symbiotic nature of ecosystems, the scope widens and the prose is at its most effective. For instance, referencing research indicating an 80 percent decline in flying insect biomass in the last 30 years, he writes: “The rapid decline of insect populations, while in itself depressing, will have cascading effects on the animals that insects support in the ecosystem. Bird, bat, and amphibian populations are already declining significantly worldwide. Without pollinators, most plant species we depend on for food will no longer be able to function—impacting our food sources, as well as every other creature in an ecosystem.” Here we catch a glimpse of how the entire fabric of nature can unravel by pulling on a single thread.

But these moments aren’t a central focus of the writing, and the lack of connections between animals is likely a product of the form. As a result, the book can feel more akin to the little pamphlet of static card explanations that comes with each Tarot deck rather than the dynamic story that arises between the cards during a Tarot reading. A missed opportunity, perhaps.

I also should admit to wanting more from the writing itself. Some of the best lines from the book come from other writers. Stansberry quotes Loren Eiseley: “The hint of extinction in the geological past was a cold wind out of a dark cellar. It chilled men’s souls.” Paul Stamets: “Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.” Wendell Berry: “My life is only the earth risen up a little way into the light, among the leaves.” Annie Dillard: “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.” This isn’t to say the essays aren’t compelling, only that the prose doesn’t reach the heights of more literary creative nonfiction writers, as in, say, the vibrant animal-themed essays of Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello.

But one of the things I’ve learned from Rust Belt Arcana is that we miss a lot if we only focus  on the most exciting or the most popular or the most obvious. We miss, for instance, skunk cabbage, The Empress, “the first Ohio wildflowers to bloom each year” with virtually indestructible root systems and specimens that are several hundred years old. We miss Tim Jasinski, a wildlife rehabilitator who works in small but vital ways to make cities safer for birds, and who will drive across the city to rescue a single injured bird and nurse it back to health. We miss the abundance of quiet, ugly, frightening, strange, necessary creatures that live right here in the (also overlooked) industrial Midwest and the forces connecting us to them.