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21 Mar 2022 19:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theprogressiveguyc&p of this tumblr post
( decided to move this convo to a new post, hope that’s okay)
starbright_cobweb said:
everyonewasabird the Three of Swords is straightforwardly - heart break. The traditional Smith-Waite image is of three swords piercing a heart.
Checking my fave book (by Joan Bunning), its keywords are heartbreak, loneliness and betrayal. It’s a bad card, by and large - not one of those cards like Death or the Tower that can have a hidden upside about renewal or necessary endings.
Just that sudden, juddering sense of oh.
So i think in particular this image of Combeferre doing something beautiful and loving and hopeful, and just being stopped - and with it, the stopping of everything that action meant, because there will be no more love or hope.
—-
my reply:
Oof. Yeah. Wow.
For what it’s worth, it’s interesting how that both does and doesn’t feel to me like Combeferre’s death in the brick? In the wider context of his life–yeah, that’s what happened, he spent his life, and the last moment of it, doing beautiful, loving, and hopeful things, and three swords stopped it.
But in the context of the barricade, Combeferre has, as I read it, this really strange, interesting arc. The other Amis all feel connected to the broader magic of the moment, they’re being funny or poignant and finding new levels of heroism as they go. (Enjolras is a slight exception in some ways–we see him showing the strain and brutality of war much more than the others, after the death of Gavroche and at the end when everything is brutal and he’s the last named character still fighting.)
But Combeferre, who’s never really been okay with violence–though he’s clearly decided it’s the right thing to do–is perpetually splitting himself in two during the barricade out of sheer cognitive dissonance and trauma. He sounds logical, because that’s his vocal tone, but nothing he’s saying quite holds together. He says he’ll never condone the use of the sword while he gleefully hyperfixates on guns; he tries to spare people in the middle of the fight because they look like Enjolras–he never goes completely off the rails, he has points to make, but he’s heavily dissociated and off and in a really bad place in a way that isn’t true of the other Amis.
And so that little image of his death we get has some grace in it, the way Enjolras’s and Grantaire’s do. We know that when there was no more need for fighting, Combeferre returned to doing what he believed in uncomplicatedly: that he tried to save a man from the other side, and that he had a moment to look at the sky.
So yeah–it very much IS a three-swords death that he got. And it also, in some way, it isn’t?
starbright-cobweb
ohhh this is really beautiful
& you know, it does point towards a new way of reading the card. I’ve never seen it understood other than as a very negative image - focusing on the swords.
But you’re focusing on the heart. In a sense, that’s what love is: a taking out of your own heart and displaying it without a veil or intermediary and saying here is my heart. That’s why the swords hurt so much. The heart dominates the card, it’s huge, its a scenario only triggered by there first being a heart that has swollen to such a size - without defenses. Heartbreak is horrible, but it can only follow a gesture of what is the best of us - to love openly and unashamedly.
( decided to move this convo to a new post, hope that’s okay)
starbright_cobweb said:everyonewasabird the Three of Swords is straightforwardly - heart break. The traditional Smith-Waite image is of three swords piercing a heart.Checking my fave book (by Joan Bunning), its keywords are heartbreak, loneliness and betrayal. It’s a bad card, by and large - not one of those cards like Death or the Tower that can have a hidden upside about renewal or necessary endings.
Just that sudden, juddering sense of oh.
So i think in particular this image of Combeferre doing something beautiful and loving and hopeful, and just being stopped - and with it, the stopping of everything that action meant, because there will be no more love or hope.
—-
my reply:
Oof. Yeah. Wow.
For what it’s worth, it’s interesting how that both does and doesn’t feel to me like Combeferre’s death in the brick? In the wider context of his life–yeah, that’s what happened, he spent his life, and the last moment of it, doing beautiful, loving, and hopeful things, and three swords stopped it.
But in the context of the barricade, Combeferre has, as I read it, this really strange, interesting arc. The other Amis all feel connected to the broader magic of the moment, they’re being funny or poignant and finding new levels of heroism as they go. (Enjolras is a slight exception in some ways–we see him showing the strain and brutality of war much more than the others, after the death of Gavroche and at the end when everything is brutal and he’s the last named character still fighting.)
But Combeferre, who’s never really been okay with violence–though he’s clearly decided it’s the right thing to do–is perpetually splitting himself in two during the barricade out of sheer cognitive dissonance and trauma. He sounds logical, because that’s his vocal tone, but nothing he’s saying quite holds together. He says he’ll never condone the use of the sword while he gleefully hyperfixates on guns; he tries to spare people in the middle of the fight because they look like Enjolras–he never goes completely off the rails, he has points to make, but he’s heavily dissociated and off and in a really bad place in a way that isn’t true of the other Amis.
And so that little image of his death we get has some grace in it, the way Enjolras’s and Grantaire’s do. We know that when there was no more need for fighting, Combeferre returned to doing what he believed in uncomplicatedly: that he tried to save a man from the other side, and that he had a moment to look at the sky.
So yeah–it very much IS a three-swords death that he got. And it also, in some way, it isn’t?
starbright-cobweb
ohhh this is really beautiful
& you know, it does point towards a new way of reading the card. I’ve never seen it understood other than as a very negative image - focusing on the swords.
But you’re focusing on the heart. In a sense, that’s what love is: a taking out of your own heart and displaying it without a veil or intermediary and saying here is my heart. That’s why the swords hurt so much. The heart dominates the card, it’s huge, its a scenario only triggered by there first being a heart that has swollen to such a size - without defenses. Heartbreak is horrible, but it can only follow a gesture of what is the best of us - to love openly and unashamedly.
