The Nine of Sharks

A post about Tarot and depression, but mostly depression.

Yeah, that’s right. The Nine of Sharks. Clearly standing in for the Nine of Swords. Perhaps I should do a whole deck, with jellyfish for water (you need the most watery fish for water, obviously), electric eels for wands and flounders for discs, as they spend so much time burying themselves in mud. Or starfish - they do have a pentacle thing going.

We all know the Rider-Waite-Smith Nine of Swords - the ’darkness before dawn’ card, I call it. You lie there, wide awake, sharp edges all around you. Sleep is long gone and not coming back. The seconds hang in suspended animation, yet the hours without sleep steadily grind by. The only thing you know for certain is that you will feel awful tomorrow and that tomorrow will come, whether you want it or not.

Unless it’s a little more the that. Unless it’s the Nine of Sharks.

There isn’t a Nine of Sharks so I drew one, I’m not very good at drawing so it’s a little rough but you get the idea.

The Nine of Sharks. Obviously.

‘Shark Fin Blues’ is one of the greatest songs written by one of Australia’s great songwriters - Gareth Liddiard of The Drones and Tropical Fuck Storm. It’s deservedly famed as a brutally honest portrait of what it really feels like to suffer from depression. The narrator is out in the middle of a nameless ocean, sharks of all sizes circling, “one there bigger than a submarine”. It’s a song which doesn’t duck the bleak central truth of living with depression - you live with it, you stare it down, you accept it and sit with that hollow, empty horizon and watch the sharks circle, until the boat sinks. But until the boat sinks, you keep watching and waiting. Because the alternative is one degree worse.

“I said, why don't you get down in the sea

Turn the water red like you want to be?

Cause if I cry another tear I'll be turned to dust

No the sharks won't get me they don't feel loss

Just keep one eye on the horizon man, you best not blink

They're coming fin by fin until the whole boat sinks“

I’ve suffered from depression, on and off, for a very long time, either as an interesting subset of various conditions or a thing in itself. It’s unpredictable. Sometimes the sharks will stay over the horizon for six, eight months. Once or twice a decade, they’ll settle in to circle for months at time. There’ll be times like today when I wake up and the black dread, the sense that I really wouldn’t have minded not waking up at all, is waiting for me. I know by now that all I can do is wait it out in turn and hope it’s a flying visit. Sometimes, the dread and worry and anxiety can be exercised away or banished by extended roams around the mountains of Hyrule in the company of Link and the family Nintendo. Sometimes my piano does the trick. But there are still those days when all I can do is sit with the sharks and watch them.

I believe - on the basis of no research whatsoever - that if you survive your first bad brush with this ugly business, you at least learn the necessity of keeping moving, whether physically or mentally. The essential things that need to be done, get done. The introduction of hybrid working was certainly a game changer for me - being around other people when depression unexpectedly hits is the worst! - as it means I can still show up and deal with the deadlines. I’m a passionate devotee of the Church of Showing Up. One doctor told me I was a ‘high functioning serious depressive’. I felt very seen.

So - sharks. There are plenty of cards examining the whole model of sadness and general negativity in the tarot - the Five of Cups, the weirdly optimistic Ten of Swords (think Gerald Manley Hopkins and ‘No worse there is none’) and so on. That’s why sharks are for depression, which not an emotion but a neutral, physical fact like night and day. You can give the sharks names if you like. “Fear and sorrow are the true Characters and inseparable companions of most Melancholy,” states Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, “though not all.” Emily Dickinson writes of the “icicles upon her soul”. For me, hopelessness seems to feature a great deal. I suppose that’s why the figure in the Rider-Waite has her face buried in her hands. She doesn’t want to see the sharks circling. She’ll learn.

One of my favourite (and bleakest) images of depression is the Groke in Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll stories. She’s a cold, shapeless monster emanating nothing but hopelessness and despair and all she wants to do is find sources of heat and sit on them until they go out. If she stands still on a patch of grass, it dies. All life that comes near her grows cold and dies - the heat death of the universe embodied. Poor Groke. All she wants is to be seen.

So. That’s enough about all this. My sharks have names like Fear, Sorrow, Icicles on the Soul and Hopelessness. Some of them are little. Some of them are the size of submarines. I sit, feet dangling over the edge of the crow’s nest as the deck slips below the water, and wait them out. So far, the sharks get bored first, even if I have to sit here for months on end. Sometimes, the boat starts to re-float (is there a friendly whale underneath?) It’s different for everyone - this is, as Black Flag once sang, my damage.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: If you're in a hole, if you have the blues and your various coping methods or family or friends can’t or won’t pull you out of it (and why should they? Being around a depressed person is hard work!) GET HELP. In the UK, call Mind or CALM or the Samaritans (especially if your ideating self-harm).

[The second part of the Grail posting project is on the way, promise!  But clearly it isn’t happening today]