The Farmer of A Blindness harvests what we produce when we would rather not see: carefreeness, the comfort of a world kept at a safe distance, the sweetness of half-closed eyes. The card does not call you a liar; it shows a place in your life where the dream has taken the place of the real, and it invites you, very simply, to open your eyes.
A turquoise beak and a barred window in place of a gaze
From afar, you might take it for a great leather bird. Its robe has the color of old gilded parchment, tanned and creased, fraying into tatters below the knees; the very wide sleeves are ringed with two thin red bands. The hood does not rise toward the sky as with most of its brothers: it stretches out horizontally into a long cone, ending on one side in a leather point, on the other in a turquoise beak. It looks like a magician’s hat worn by a child: the Childishness of the edge words, sewn into the costume.
At eye level, a small rectangle rimmed in red, closed by a dark grille: a boarded-up window. This Farmer does not look: it is built not to see, and that is what it cultivates in others. From the tip of the beak hangs a little chain, a black pearl and a gold medal stamped with an S, the card’s letter, which one readily mistakes for a dollar sign. Affluence dangles there like a charm, right in front of the blind window.
Under the robe, a turquoise damask skirt, a white lace-trimmed petticoat, and turquoise slippers with curled tips: drawing-room shoes, made for parquet floors and not for roads. The hands, turquoise too, hang with fingers spread, palms open, in the gesture of someone saying “don’t look at me.” In the portrait, it stands on a wet flagstone that mirrors the setting sun, between ruined arches covered in red Virginia creeper. The setting is so beautiful that you don’t notice the walls no longer have a roof. On the card, green tendrils climb in the corners; the edge words read Carefreeness on the left, Childishness on the right, Affluence at its feet.
In the round, it holds the nineteenth place, between the Farmer of A Tranquility and the Farmer of An Alliance. The neighborhood speaks for itself: just before it, the calm where “all is good”; just after, the trust we place in others. Between peace and trust slips the temptation to stop checking. Its back is red, like those of An Alliance, I Block and Anger.
What it harvests: the sweet honey of closed eyes
In the universe of the Farmers, you can picture this Farmer as a Field Harvester of a patient kind. It doesn’t invent the illusion: the illusion is ours, woven from our fear of going without, our need for lightness, our fatigue. It merely tends it. It rounds off the corners, it puts things off until tomorrow. The Farmers steer, maintain, intensify; they create nothing. This one, above all, maintains.
Its honey is first of all a Hab-Honey: the relief of not knowing, easy cheerfulness, the quiet pleasure of affluence. A clear, steady honey, without great peaks, produced in quantity, the kind found among Wells’s Eloi, well fed and well kept in ignorance (Le Rucher devotes an article to them: the Eloi and the Morlocks). The first book of Les Fermiers (The Farmers), currently published in French, puts it bluntly:
And it keeps a second harvest in reserve. The day the truth gets through anyway, it doesn’t arrive in small touches: it falls all at once, in the form of a betrayal, a debt, a discovery. Then it is Ba-Honey, and plenty of it. Two Honeys for a single gesture: closing your eyes, then opening them too late. Cruelty is not what drives it; need is. And blindness is a field that pays twice.
The envelope under the fruit bowl
A window envelope has been waiting for three weeks under the fruit bowl. You know roughly what it contains. Every morning: “tonight.” Every evening, something better to do. On Saturday, you book a good restaurant, because it has been a long week. The Farmer had nothing to do except watch over that receding “tonight,” and gather the small cheerfulness of a check paid without a second thought.
The compliment that moves you forward
In a meeting, a colleague warmly congratulates you: you are the ideal person to take on this project. You are flattered, you accept. You don’t notice that he is getting rid of it. No one lied to you. You were moved forward by a trick you didn’t want to look at, because the compliment felt good.
The coffee set on the table
Blindness doesn’t only hide the bad. Someone makes you a coffee every morning, sets it at your place, waits for a glance. You, your eyes on a life dreamed elsewhere, drink the coffee without seeing it. Love is there, and you do not perceive it. This may be this Farmer’s most discreet harvest: not the deceit you are unaware of, but the tenderness you let go cold.
“It is said of you”: the child who hides the truth
The sentence carries three traits, and each one is a door. You hide the truth: from whom? From others sometimes, but first from yourself. You never hide anything as well as what you first hid from yourself. You are like a child: not a reproach, an image. The child playing hide-and-seek puts their hands over their eyes and believes no one can see them anymore. A certain financial ease: the detail is curious, and accurate. Money cushions the shocks; it lets you postpone, compensate, buy a little lightness when what lies beneath starts to rise. Ease does not blind in itself; it makes blindness comfortable.
In the deck, “It is said of you” names what is being harvested. What is described here is not a vice but a disposition: a way of floating above things that is part of your charm and, sometimes, your weak spot. The game is played with a smile: it accuses you of nothing; it holds up a mirror.
A Blindness on the three axes
Love
- You are loved, but you do not see it.
- Character surrounded by deceit.
- Love is there, but you do not perceive it.
Two sentences out of three speak of a love that is present and invisible; only one speaks of deceit. Blindness in love is symmetrical: it masks what betrays and what loves. Drawn on this axis, the card asks you less “who is lying to you?” than “what, around you, is waiting to be seen?”
Work
- You are being manipulated and moved forward by tricks you seem unaware of.
- You are in your own world.
- A shaky situation, but it does not seem to worry you.
The Farmer doesn’t need you to be naive about everything; one well-placed blind spot is enough. A contract you didn’t reread, a partnership whose numbers you never asked to see, a structure that holds because no one touches it. “You are in your own world” is not an insult: sometimes it is your creativity. But an inner world without a window ends up looking like the barred hood of the portrait.
Soul
- Character whose life is a lie and who lives in their dreams.
- Your diplomas are not you!
- Appearance is not the person!
This is where the card reaches deepest. The greatest blindness is not about others but about yourself: taking your title, your costume, your role for your being. The two exclamation marks ring out like a hand shaking your shoulder. Look at the Farmer again: a superb robe, party shoes, and no face. The soul of this card asks you a simple question: if your diplomas, your address and your bearing were taken away, what would remain that you truly know?
Recognizing it at work in you
This Farmer doesn’t announce itself through pain. It announces itself through relief that comes too fast. A few clues:
- your gaze sliding off a figure, a message, a face, and landing elsewhere, almost by itself;
- an “it’ll be fine” spoken before you have looked at what is fine and what isn’t;
- a sudden tiredness, a yawn, as soon as a particular subject comes back to the table;
- a small irritation toward the person who insists: “you always look on the dark side”;
- the urge to buy something, go out, change rooms at the exact moment a worry surfaces;
- a laugh pitched a little high, a throat tightening for half a second.
None of these signs is serious. Together, they trace the outline of a zone you don’t want to enter.
Opening your eyes without burning them
Opening your eyes doesn’t mean swinging from one extreme to the other. Whoever discovers a deception is tempted to see deception everywhere: they trade naivety for mistrust, and the Farmer loses nothing in the exchange. Mistrust is an excellent Ba-Honey.
The path is slower. In the allegory of the cave, the freed prisoner is dazzled at first; he needs time to see. The same goes here: you open your eyes by degrees, on one thing at a time, without judging yourself. Seeing what is, continuing to feel, without immediately converting what you see into panic or denial: this is the threshold of the Third Honey, that energy of lucidity the Farmer cannot gather. You don’t drive it away. You simply stop supplying a honey it expected from your closed eyelids.
A Blindness in a reading
In the Three-Axis Reading, the position changes the lighting. On the Love axis, look first for the affection you no longer see before suspecting a betrayal. On the Work axis, reread what you have signed and ask yourself who profits from your enthusiasm. On the Soul axis, the card speaks of identification: which label have you mistaken for yourself?
Its neighbors refine the reading. Next to A Tranquility, it suggests that your calm could be partly a sleep: all is well, perhaps, but have you checked? Next to An Alliance, it questions trust: we team up with our eyes closed, and the next card asks you precisely what that trust rests on. In the Atanor Wheel, where the reading runs from the Black toward the White, the card read early, near the Black, points to an initial veil; read late, just before the White, it looks like the last blindfold you remove before clarity.
The game predicts nothing: for a moment, it lends you the gaze this Farmer lacks.
