Easy Sugar, Late Metal: Aries 2 and the Three of Wands

Hunger Resembles Me, But It Does Not Originate In Me

There is a kind of fire that doesn’t want to move forward. It lingers, coils, waits—but not for permission. For timing. You can feel it under the skin of certain actions: a pressure that doesn’t seek release, but shape—a heat that doesn’t explode, only compacts and waits. Not the burst, but the hold. Some say this is where Mars begins to strain against itself—no longer just heat, but heat aware of distance. In the second decan of Aries, this fire is lit with vision. Not foresight exactly, but the ache of wanting to be seen from a distance and knowing it may never return.

The tarot names this solar-ruled decan of Aries as the Three of Wands: Virtue. But what if virtue isn’t a quality one has, but a question fire asks of itself? This is not the virtue of purity or of patience. It’s the virtue of remaining in motion while time slows around you. To project a desire without knowing if it will return. To act with heat and still leave room for consequence. In Aries II, this becomes the condition: can fire be held open long enough to form?

Think of a hearth fire. Not the wild blaze of conquest or catastrophe, but the slow, steady heat that holds a room through the night. It must be fed in rhythm, not all at once. If you ignore it, it dims; if you overwhelm it, it chokes. This kind of fire doesn’t declare itself—it asks to be kept. It lives in the pause, the middle of the night, the long wait for morning. And in that stillness, hunger begins. Not just for warmth, but for the act of tending itself. Not metaphorical hunger, but the real, aching labor of keeping something alive in time.

In Carson’s poems, this kind of hunger appears again and again. For exmple, in her essay "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God," she traces hunger as a triangulated structure—between self, desire, and the divine. Each woman she studies becomes caught in a geometry of longing that cannot resolve, a circuit where voice stretches toward God without guarantee of return. And as Socrates once famously asked Phaedrus, “Is Eros too, not a God?“

These triangles do not collapse into fulfillment; they remain open, suspended, rhythmically incomplete. What persists isn’t just longing, but the discipline of keeping longing alive—of tending the fire even as it flickers unevenly across silence, rupture, and abandoned prayer.

In this essay, we’ll follow the triangle formed by Ares, Hephaistos, and Aphrodite. The entire drama is composed as an opera of 5 poems, wherein each figure of the triangle offers a different relation to fire and to time. Together, they dramatize the central tension of Aries II: what happens when desire is projected but not returned, when hunger exceeds its form, when the will to act meets the impossibility of power, hunger, and betrayal?

Hunger Tango

In Hephaistos’ Hunger Tango, Carson presents a triangle of misalignment: Hephaistos, Aphrodite, and Ares each represent a different relation to time, and a different position within a triangulated structure of desire. Hephaistos longs for Aphrodite, but she is oriented elsewhere—toward Ares, who acts and consumes without pause. What we see isn’t just a temporal mismatch, but a classic configuration of beloved, lover, and rival: a structure in which the beloved does not return desire, and the presence of a third intensifies the wound. Hephaistos is not just made to wait—he is made to hold the loop open. His fire persists because it is not met. Hunger, here, is more than ache—it is the lingering pressure of being excluded from the rhythm of return.

We can see this temporal misalignment sharpen by isolating their metaphysical roles. Ares acts instantly—he is appetite in its purest form: urgent, consumptive, and fleeting. Aphrodite resists duration—she becomes the divine image: not a participant in desire’s rhythm, but its object, untouchable and unmoved. And Hephaistos is what remains between them: the one who holds time itself. He becomes the echo of longing, the one through whom hunger is given structure and rhythm. Together, they form a triangle—each figure marking a different temporality of eros, and in that divergence, producing a structure of failed return.

The poem starts, we are told in a previous abstract, with Hephaistos brooding at his forge, fashioning "a trap out of volcanic chains hammered so thin they are all but invisible. With the help of his robots he rigs up this trap around the bed (his own bed!) where Ares and Aphrodite like to mingle in love."[1] With Carson, however, things are rarely ever what they seem at face value.

The volcanic chains are not just tools of entrapment—they are the almost invisible trace of hunger made rhythmic. “Daggers, diamonds, prepositions, Aphrodite.” Each link is a measure of time: not just metal, but syntax—fragments of relation hammered into form. The beat to which he dances his tango. “Hunger stays with me but it is not original with me.” It resembles him insofar as it has chosen him as its temporal expression, and demands to fill his shape. This then, is hunger as haunting. But here, hunger originates in memory. A love he once had, betrayed by the desired object’s embrace of a different lover.

In Hephaistos’ forge, hunger becomes the medium of memory, not just heat but the shape heat leaves behind. “Roses, roses, roses, roses, Aphrodite.” The prayer, like the fire, repeats—but it never resolves. The hammer becomes a metronome—a way of counting the space between want and denial. He extends the ache by attempting to fix them in a trap.

It is interesting to note that the intention of Hephaistos in this moment of fashioning is not to destroy the lovers. He merely wants to enclose Ares and Aphrodite in the very structure his longing has occupied: labor, repetition, rhythm. Each link in the chain is a temporal mark—a record of the interval between wanting and being wanted. His labor does not forget the betrayal; it remembers it, again and again. This repetition is not passive. It is a way of reclaiming power in a structure where he has been denied both comfort and control.

Aphrodite becomes the axis of refusal. “She had for me no hunger”—the absence of appetite becomes the formative force. She does not return his fire. Nor does she try to extinguish it. She simply doesn’t enter its tempo. And so hunger becomes shaped by refusal: not dramatic rejection, but slow disalignment. Ares, by contrast, is never made to wait. His fire is fast, reactive, already gone. He doesn’t feel the loop. He doesn’t need to. The imbalance is not just emotional; it is temporal.

By forcing the lovers into his tempo, Hephaistos longs to suspend their escape. His desire is to synchronize them to the time he has been forced to bear alone. “Isn’t that how marriage is supposed to be?” the forge seems to ask, ironically. This is not only mourning—it is agency enacted through form. A way of saying: if you would not hold my hunger with me, you will now live in my tempo. The trap becomes choreography. Hunger, hammered.

When Hephaistos says he “longs to be free” by attempting to produce a trap of fixation, it becomes clear that it isn’t the release from Aphrodite he seeks—instead he seems to be asking to be released from the very structure of desire itself. The triangle he is caught inside—lover, beloved, rival—is volatile, yet he does not seem to want to stop loving so much as he no longer wants to be the only one who hungers, who waits. He wants to be free from the forge’s rhythm. But in Carson’s cosmos, hunger is not chosen—it chooses. Power may build the trap, but it does not escape it.

The tango of hunger danced through the poem thus dramatizes a deeper metaphysical problem: what happens when hunger meets hunger, but unfolds at different speeds? What Hephaistos performs is not lack, but attunement to a structure that never meets him. This is Mars as keeper of the forge: not the god of conquest, but the god of staying lit. The virtue is not in the climax, but in the fashioning of hunger’s form.

Three of Wands - Love Under Will

The word virtue is one that often sticks on the tongue. In my life at least, it has always been a word that stops itself—too moral, too rigid, too falsely clear. But in the Three of Wands, “virtue” doesn’t mean moral uprightness. It doesn’t even mean restraint. It emerges as something stranger, something solar. A form of power held open before it moves. A fire that waits—not for permission, but for rhythm.

What does it mean for virtue to arise in the second decan of Aries, exalted by the sun? What kind of virtue exists in fire that does not burst forward, but instead lingers, coils, and waits?

Aries I is the spark—the ignition of Mars. Aries III is the rush—the battle, the marriage bed, the pleasure of conquest. But Aries II is the middle expression of Mars as fire, where flame becomes self-aware. It is fire suspended . Not inert, but pacing itself. This is the Sun at its most luminous, most elevated—not because it dominates, but because it endures. It holds its center. It burns with direction. Heat seeking form.

In the Rider-Waite depiction of the card, the Three of Wands gives us the image of a figure standing still, watching the horizon. Two wands are fixed in the ground behind them. One is held loosely. The scene is still, yet charged. The figure is not passive—they are contemplating direction. They have acted already, and yet they remain suspended in the space between action and return. This is virtue as attunement: the ability to remain in right relation to desire, even when the world withholds response.

Three of Wand, as painted by Pamela Colman Smith

But, let me be clear. When I say “virtue is attunement” it is a metaphysical stance. The Three of Wands teaches that power is not defined by the immediacy of action, but by the alignment of action with the rhythm of will. In this way, the card stages a moment of deliberate delay—an ethical calibration. The fire waits, not because it is weak, but because it refuses to move out of sync with itself.

This is where the old axiom begins to ring true: Love is the law, love under will. It is a phrase often repeated but rarely practiced. Now, my claim here is not that the phrase is simply mistaken for hedonism or selfish will—though that happens. The deeper issue is that it’s too often understood in abstraction, cut off from rhythm, form, and embodied context. As a slogan, it becomes weightless, something that justifies desire instead of shaping any understanding of it. But, to me, the axiom names a structure: a relational alignment between love and time, between longing and its proper expression. Desire is the current; will is the conductor. Love becomes law by acting in right relation—to others, to timing, to consequence. Will doesn’t dominate desire; it is the undercurrent bringing it into rhythm.

To be in virtue, then, is not to suppress hunger—but to let hunger enter rhythm. To let love burn under will, rather than over it. And this is precisely what Hephaistos performs: not abstinence, but the ritual shaping of desire’s fire into form. Not passive endurance, but devotional timing.

Ethical Aries

Devotional timing is a phrase that stops itself. It asks questions. Traditionally, Aries is ruled by Mars, the planet of will, desire, action, motion—the “go” impulse. But in the system I am drawing out, I am equating Mars as an image representation of appetite—wanting, pushing, initiating. Aries is the zodiac’s first spark: bold, brave, desiring to move headlessly—from the groin without thinking.

So when we say “will,” in Aries terms, my suggestion is that there is an accompanied bodily gesture, an embodied language in which will is able to speak. This gesture would be appetite in action—a direct line between wanting and doing. Aries I, in particular, expresses this as raw initiation. Fire unfiltered. I want. I need. I must move.

But Aries II is where things shift. The Sun isn’t just desire—it’s conscious desire, directed and coherent. It’s not instinctual appetite; it’s sovereign presence. It’s will that reflects. So when the Sun is exalted in Aries II, it brings form to fire. It doesn’t repress appetite—it attunes it.

This attunement is not passive. It is not about waiting in stillness or denying hunger. It is about holding the heat long enough to let form emerge. The Sun in Aries II does not abandon the raw force of Mars—it raises it. It teaches fire to listen to its own rhythm. The virtue here is not restraint, but timing—and not just any timing, but devotional timing, a mode of action that commits to moving only when alignment has been reached between appetite and form.

This is why the Three of Wands is a card of contemplation. The figure stands still, not because they lack will, but because they are in conversation with it. They are waiting for the right moment—not in fear, but in fidelity. And this is what love under will begins to mean—not love constrained, but love shaped. Not appetite erased, but appetite given duration. Hephaistos models this solar gesture: not the blaze of conquest, but the forge. Not the reaction, but the rhythm. Not abandonment of desire, but the slow choreography of its expression.

Easy Sugar

To gain a better understanding, let’s look at the poem Carson gives us to showcase Aries, Ares’ Sugar Aria;

If Hephaistos teaches us about desire shaped into form—hunger forged into rhythm—then “Ares’ Sugar Aria” gives us its counter-image: appetite that refuses to form, fire that never holds. The poem, sung “by Ares in the back of a taxi, night,” is less a mythic monologue than a portrait of dissociation through repetition. It loops. It flashes. It never lands. Ares becomes a figure of pure impulse, cycling through pleasure without duration, expression without attunement.

The title itself frames the performance: an aria is traditionally a stylized solo, a high point of emotional and musical elaboration. But there is, again, no climax here. The setting—a taxi at night—suggests transition, anonymity, and endless motion. We are neither in battle nor in bed; we are again in-between. Ares is in a taxi, off-stage yet in transit. The poem places us inside the internal churn of a god who cannot stop moving and therefore cannot find meaning in his movement. He never even thinks to ask for comfort as rest.

The aria contains a refrain: “It was easy...” / “Not really.” / “Easy sugar.” So we are in a loop. Not just of desire, but of self-mythologizing. This will be easy, guess not, oh well—lets move on to the next thing. Ares wants this story of ease to be true, even as he negates it. These three phrases function like they wish they were a mantra, yet they come across as more akin to a chorus in a cliché pop song—it doesn’t evolve, but it keeps coming back, insisting on a version of reality that feels increasingly artificial. The lines fold in on itself almost immediately. “It was easy...” / “Not really.” / “Easy sugar.” The glamour falls apart. What he craves is not enduring or refined—it is immediate, consumable, and empty of any real nourishment value.

“Not really” becomes a kind of anti-form—a grammatical structure of disavowal. It disrupts causality, and collapses potential transformation into a shrug. It lets the speaker participate in the performance of feeling without having to follow it through. It’s the punctuation of withdrawal.

In the case of sugar, Carson uses it to symbolize appetite that refuses duration—a sweetness that delivers immediate pleasure but dissolves before it can develop or stay. Sugar is desire without depth, sensation without time. Ares doesn’t just hunger—he returns to the same hit over and over. He’s afraid to metabolize pleasure, yet paradoxically addicted to its high—so he ends up chasing dragons again and again.

“It was easy...” / “Not really.” / “Easy sugar.”

Now, Ares isn’t the only one who indulges in the pleasure of repetition. As we have discussed, Hephaistos, too, enters a rhythmic loop—but his is crafted, deliberate, almost sacred. In the previous poem New Chorus (sung with his robots), Hephaistos chants, “Love is always new when it’s you.” Over and over, he repeats this line, and the chorus blooms with synonyms for new: newly caught, neological, fresh-curdled, just smeared. The language tumbles, iterates, reshapes itself—ritualizing the ache of renewal.

Lets look at a fragment of that poem here;

H:Love is always you when it’s new.
When it’s you when it’s new when it’s new when it’s you
love is always
always
when it’s you. [2]

The repetition in Hephaistos’ refrain—“love is always / always / when it’s you”—is not just poetic flourish; it’s a metaphysical tether. The first “always” signals a belief in love’s persistence, but the second “always” unsettles it. It doesn’t confirm eternity—it reveals the effort required to maintain it. Carson’s language turns “always” from a timeless guarantee into something performative, something Hephaistos must keep saying in order to keep it real.

In contrast to Ares’ “easy sugar,” which collapses into disavowal (“Not really”), Hephaistos’ “always always” feels like a ritual struggle to hold love open, to keep time from slipping. He isn’t claiming that love is forever—he is working to make it so. Through rhythm. Through his voice. Through the beat of his hammer at the forge—his labor becoming the form of his longing, his song.

Where Ares’ refrain cycles hollowly, Hephaistos’ chant becomes a liturgy. Repetition, through the craft of his voice, is not escape but structure. Each iteration holds the hunger open a little longer, lets it ferment, lets it become. He doesn’t flee the loop—he builds the loop into a forge. His repetition is the act of holding time long enough for longing to take form. Ares dissolves in appetite; Hephaistos shapes it into language. This is the core difference: Ares repeats to escape meaning. Hephaistos repeats to give it shape.

This commitment to the easiness of sugar exposes a deep crisis of form. Ares doesn’t just want sweetness—he wants it to mean something without having to do the work to hold it in pain. He wants it to be beautiful, he wants the intensity of the moment. Ares wants pleasure and beauty, but he doesn’t stay with those experiences long enough for them to become emotionally or spiritually meaningful. He consumes them too fast.

But sugar dissolves. Sugar doesn’t hold shape. So this mode of martial expression is one that hungers for form but can’t sustain it. This isn’t just appetite—it’s aestheticized appetite: the kind that performs longing but cannot bear its cost. The experience disappears before it has the chance to become real, integrated, or reflective. The “art” collapses immediately—not because the impulse is false, but because it cannot hold. What Ares craves is not expression—it’s escape. For sugar, like his aria, disappears—wet with grief.

When Ares says “I get my sugar at a hectic nightclub. I get it suddenly,” he’s describing more than a location. He’s revealing a temporal structure: pleasure that arrives too fast to hold, too loud to feel, too rhythmic to mean. The nightclub becomes the architecture of his avoidance—but also of his ecstasy. It’s not numbness he’s seeking, exactly, but overwhelm: a kind of sensual disintegration.

In the nightclub, the beat replaces memory, bodies blur, and pleasure becomes pure event. He doesn’t have to think about individual relation—or what happens when the dance stops—because within this self-sustained pleasure, he’s cast an illusion in which all bodies are already one. There is no other to reach for, no difference to hold. So we might say: he doesn’t want to understand desire—he wants to be consumed by it. His rhythm isn’t in attunement with feeling; he’s dancing around it, inside it, past it. The beat remains textured, erotic—but it never resolves. It repeats. It heightens. And then it disappears.

The nightclub, then, becomes more than a setting—it is the mood, the architecture, the emotional frequency of Ares’ internal rhythm. In the club, pleasure is looped, stylized, and unreflective: you don’t arrive anywhere; you don’t belong anywhere. You belong only to the ecstatic moment. The beat replaces belief—substance is exchanged for sensation. And this is exactly how the syntax of the poem moves: in glitchy, autotuned fragments. It mimics a voice caught in the multiplicity of self, refracted through fractal noise and dissonance. The lines are polished, processed, but severed from the body that speaks them. What emerges isn’t intimacy—it’s persona.

Ares isn’t really speaking from inside himself. He’s playing back samples of who he thinks he is, or was, or should be. It’s the sound of identity trying to catch up to itself. The gesture isn’t toward real relation—it’s toward a performance of what Ares imagines intimacy might sound like if he were willing to fully engage. He’s not confessing a feeling; he’s echoing the possibility of one. Tracing the surface of its skin. Instead of entering desire, he edges it. Just the tip, just to see what it’s like. The critique here isn’t of Ares as a character, but of the ecstatic structure he participates in—one not founded in mutual encounter, but in the echo of a self performing its own vanishing.

So when we reach the line, “Are you glad sugar. Are you resisting. Are you up to your knees.”—we should not be surprised to encounter a flickering tension in the aria: a hint that the object of desire—perhaps a lover, perhaps sugar itself as personified pleasure—reveals that the true fear is a rejection of relationality itself. The syntax signals a shift, a momentary opening toward reciprocity, or at least recognition. The line “Are you up to your knees” in particular evokes an embodied response to the threat of depth—of being slowed, overwhelmed, or made to feel. What might happen if he wasn’t suave, or cool? If he ended up in Hephaistos’ place—burning, waiting, exposed? The tragedy, then, is this: the very thing Ares longs for is the one thing he’s too afraid to hold.

There is something almost tidal in this recognition: if he allowed himself to be nourished by something more substantial than sugar, Ares would have to confront the fact that pleasure has depth. That desire can push back. That sweetness, if it’s to become real, must be endured. Not just tasted, but stayed with. Let in. Allowed to be vulnerable.

This is driven to emotional completion in the final refrain—“You who sadden. / Now burnt. / Now nocturne.”—the performance fractures, and something raw edges through. The “you” is no longer consumable; it is elegiac. Not sugar, but sorrow. Not touch, but the haunting of memory. He remembers the weight of being the one who saddens.

These lines come across like a soul-address, a recognition that sugar has its own debt. That there was, or is, a real other—someone who could sadden him, be saddened by him, someone he can’t fully name without unraveling. They suggests a passage: sugar transformed by heat into ash. The pleasure has ended, and what remains is aftermath. He didn't want to change, but change can't escape him. He is always in the taxi, always wandering.

“Now nocturne” as response to this recognition sounds like it might be the opening to a lament, but it’s not sung from the gut. It’s not an atonement, not quite a recognition that they should truly care. Again, what we are left with is a darkened mood, nocturne weather. Ares then isn’t producing a score composed from inner resonance—it’s again, the same looped soundscape. He goes into the opposite direction from before. A curated contemplation of sadness—all mind, no body. Pure static. Like autotuned grief or a pithy pop ballad, it is designed not for catharsis but for visibility.

It is sadness rendered as aesthetic without being embodied or ritualized. Not grief held in time, but grief flattened into noise. Not invocation, but echo. Just icon. Only image. No attention to the real. Pain as social capital.

Here, emotion is packaged and stylized for circulation. This isn’t grief voiced to be witnessed—it’s merely curated to be priced and bought by the highest bidder. Not confession, but a distinct flavor of affect capital. Aesthetic maintenance: soft, moody, erotic—but ultimately uninhabited. The beat has shifted, but the logic hasn’t. This isn’t music that rises from the chest. It’s the background hum of someone refusing to be changed.

Even the sorrow is made consumable. And so Ares stays where he always has: in the echo, in the image, circling the edge of intimacy but never stepping in. Just the tip, just to see what it’s like. The dance repeats. The taxi keeps moving. The night, like the beat, never breaks—never stills.

The Difference

Where Ares loops to avoid transformation, Hephaistos repeats to name it. So, if the Sugar Aria dissolves grief into autotuned static, then the following poem, Late Chorus, shows us Hephaistos hammering structure into his grief. Chewing through it, giving it form, working out different modes of its articulation.

This time the refrain, “Love is too late when it’s untrue” isn’t a collapse into disavowal—it’s an invocation. Hephaistos isn’t just repeating sadness—he’s building with it. The line is chanted, bent, reforged, stretched until it reveals the weight of time it carries. Unlike Ares, who uses repetition to flee consequence, Hephaistos repeats to confront it. Every “too late” is a mark in time—a blow of the hammer, a beat in the forge. The song does not try to escape the past; it holds it, replays it, reshapes it.

An example is as follows;

H: Love is too late
when it’s untrue.
When it’s unlate
is true love too.
Love is when late it’s not too true.
True is too love when late’s not you.
Too true.
Too you.
Too true. [3]

In these final lines, the repetition begins to warp—not toward disavowal, but toward semantic overflow. “Too true. Too you. Too true.” The grief becomes recursive, entangled. The syntax buckles not from collapse but from holding too much: too much pain, too much memory, too much time. Meaning stretches, doubles back, spins itself into new shapes. It’s not stylized detachment—it’s grief mid-transformation. The forge isn’t stable. The beat isn’t clean. But it’s real. This is repetition not as aesthetic maintenance, but as devotional labor. Where Ares curates sorrow into an image, Hephaistos inhabits it—lets it alter him. Lets it do its slow work.

This is where the connection to the Three of Wands begins to glow. Hephaistos, like the figure in the card, doesn’t lunge forward or consume the moment—he waits with it. He works inside time. Even his sorrow is an effort of attunement. Too late, too little, too you, too true—these aren’t just laments; they’re attempts to find the right resonance, to shape relation even when it hurts, even when it fails. The fire here is solar: not explosive, but sustained. Not raw appetite, but heat that listens. This is the virtue of Aries II—not moral righteousness, but the capacity to remain aligned with longing without forcing its return. To act with heat and still leave room for consequence. To speak from the forge, not just through the beat.

Capital

The next poem in the sequence is Bargaining Trio, which stages the logical consequence: the total collapse of value into price. The uncomfortable exposure of Ares in the Sugar Aria has shown us that he has already been commodifying desire. His form of pleasure is treated as a product: objectified, immediate, repeatable, consumable. “Easy sugar” isn’t just a feeling—it’s a purchase.

But how does pleasure become a product? The mechanism is abstraction through repetition: when Ares detaches desire from duration, from mutuality, and from consequence, he turns it into something modular—something that can be acquired again and again without transformation. Like any commodity, it becomes decontextualized from origin or relation. Sugar has no backstory. No intimacy. No cost beyond the hit. It is the erotic reduced to sensation, and sensation reduced to symbol. The phrase “easy sugar” circulates not as confession, but as brand—polished, marketable, emptied of internal struggle.

What Carson reveals is that the repetition itself is part of the commodification. Each refrain (“It was easy. Not really. Easy sugar.”) mimics the rhythm of advertising, of branding, of music engineered for mass consumption. Ares doesn’t metabolize feeling; he performs its aesthetic. His pleasure is optimized for visibility, not meaning. And when the illusion falters, when intimacy demands risk or change, he folds back into the loop. Not because he’s dishonest—but because his structure of desire has been formatted by exchange. The self becomes a vending machine of moods. Insert want. Receive sugar.

Ares and Aphrodite, trapped in the bed Hephaistos forged, attempt to pay their way out of the wound. The language is transactional. “How much silver, how much gold, how about five?” Their offers are flat, numerical, interchangeable. There’s no emotional weight, no specificity—just increments. Desire, here, is treated as a thing that can be settled by a fair price.

But Hephaistos doesn’t speak in numbers—he speaks in metaphors of magnitude. “How about night and day.” “Versailles.” “The distance between stars.” These aren’t counteroffers; they’re counterweights. While Ares and Aphrodite reduce desire to a price, Hephaistos responds with images that refuse quantification. He names what exceeds value: time, memory, beauty—the architectures of longing that cannot be bought, repaired, or returned.

Each metaphor he offers expands the scale of the exchange, pulling it away from the language of transaction and back toward the sheer weight of what’s been violated. His grief can't be reduced to abstraction—it’s temporal, bodily, carries historical weight He isn’t negotiating from pride. He’s naming the immeasurable loss—what was desecrated, not just betrayed. His voice isn't interested in the bid because he doesn’t want his grief to be bought or commodified. He wants the truth of what’s missing to be felt. His love is therefore concrete—lived and grounded in the hearth of his body.

This is the real tension: Ares and Aphrodite treat love as an abstraction—an experience that can be stylized, quantified, and detached from consequence. Hephaistos, by contrast, holds love as a temporal structure. His desire has duration. It holds memory. It remembers the labor. So when he says “How about the distance between stars,” he isn’t inflating the price—he’s revealing what’s been erased: the unspoken elongation of time without relational care, turned inward. His fashioning then represents the craftsmanship of self through the act of holding love in felt attention.

His repetition isn’t flat—it builds. It presses sorrow into language. Where Ares and Aphrodite repeat to flatten meaning into affect, Hephaistos repeats to unearth it. His final counteroffers spiral—“Ten for traduced by a trollop! / Ten for untutored tyrannic turbulence!”—but not because he’s lost control. It’s because he refuses to reduce desecration to digits. Each hyperbolic phrase is a refusal to let love be cheapened. The absurdity is deliberate. Hephaistos exaggerates not to entertain, but to resist the logic of equivalence itself. You cannot pay for what you’ve broken. You cannot buy back time. You cannot compensate for desecration with silver. Hephaistos doesn’t want reparation—he wants recognition. And recognition has no price save its own witness.

But with “transubstantiation,” his offer takes this to its limitr: he invokes the transformation of substance itself. He’s not just rejecting a price—he’s demanding a conversion of being. So when Ares and Aphrodite keep circling back to “last offer,” what they’re really saying is: we won’t change. We want to settle the cost, not suffer the consequence. Hephaistos, with “transubstantiation,” demands the opposite: no deal unless something becomes something else. Unless desire is actually transformed.

This is the real rupture. “Ten for why not try transubstantiation!” is not a bid—it’s a refusal of the entire frame of barter. Hephaistos isn’t negotiating anymore; he’s negating the premise. While Ares and Aphrodite loop through numbers, fixated on a transactional model of desire, Hephaistos invokes transformation at the level of essence. Transubstantiation is not an upgrade in price—it’s a different economy altogether. It’s love as alchemy, not exchange. So when he says “Done,” he isn’t accepting their final offer—he’s rejecting the very logic a final offer might produce.

He exits the loop not by settling, but by choosing a form of relation that cannot be quantified. Where they want resolution, he initiates metamorphosis. It’s not a collapse, but a consecration. He chooses to become something else—something truer, more enduring. Not sugar, but metal. A heat that holds.

Three of Wands - Love as Law’s Recursive Return

Hephaistos’ final gesture in Bargaining Trio—his invocation of transubstantiation—isn’t just a rejection of barter. It’s a return to form. A return to rhythm. A return to law—but not the law of equivalence. The law of eros. The law of attunement.

This is what “love is the law, love under will” comes to mean in the wake of this exchange: not as a doctrine of desire, but as a demand for rhythm. For right relation. For form that listens. What Carson dramatizes, across these poems, is that love only becomes law when it takes time seriously—when it refuses to flatten hunger into price, or collapse longing into spectacle. Law, here, is not a restraint—it’s a structure. A tempo. A solar ethics of staying lit even when no one answers.

When love is over will, it dissolves into sugar. Into loops. Into image. Into consumable sorrow and stylized avoidance. It becomes aesthetic without body, sensation without consequence. It moves too fast to mean.

But when love is placed under will—as vessel, where will is held—it takes on rhythm. It finds form. Hephaistos’ forge doesn’t just teach us how to endure; it teaches us how to attune. To metabolize longing. To stay in time. This is love under will: not passive submission, but devotional structuring—a choosing to remain in fidelity to hunger without collapsing into demand. This fidelity is what the Three of Wands models: the stance of solar fire that waits, burns, listens.

The law, then, is not a command. It’s a frequency. A rhythm that holds relation in time. We might now say: Love is the current. Will is the shape it’s given. Law is the recursive return to that shape when the world tries to fracture it. To say love is law, then, is to say: this matters. The timing matters. The fire matters. And not because it’s easy, or beautiful, or visible—but because it shapes you. Because you stayed with it. Because you let it change you.

And this is what Hephaistos ultimately performs: not forgiveness, not forgetting, not resolution—but law as memory’s tempo. Law as the choice to hold longing in shape, again and again, even when the beloved cannot return it. Even when the rival dissolves it. Even when the economy of meaning collapses. The forge remembers. The beat repeats. Love, under will, becomes law not because it binds—but because it returns.

In an economic system, return implies yield—something gained for something spent. Ares and Aphrodite are bound by this structure. They bargain. They make offers. They want closure. Their version of return is transactional: if I give this, what will I get back? What’s the exchange rate on betrayal?

But Hephaistos doesn’t participate in this model. His return is not a settlement—it’s a rhythm. A devotion. A recursive act of remembering that does not expect compensation. When he repeats, he isn’t asking to be paid back—he’s keeping love in motion, even when no one else shows up. He allows longing to stretch into time without collapsing into price. This is return as ritual, not reward. As structure, not surplus.

In this light, love under will stages an entirely different economy: one where value isn’t quantified but felt. Where return means fidelity to form. To rhythm. To care. The forge repeats not to remind the world of its debt, but to shape a world in which love might still arrive.

Return, then, becomes metaphysical. To return is to hold the beat. To not let the fire die, even when it’s burning alone.

This is not the economy of sugar. This is not Ares in the taxi, looping the beat of self-erasure. This is not Aphrodite avoiding time. This is not the bargaining table. This is the forge. The long wait. The labor of relation. And in that return—recursive, uneven, slow—something like law is born. Not law as punishment. But law as promise: I will not unmake the form. I will not break the rhythm. Even if you can’t hear it, I will keep the tempo.

Justice

But what do we make of justice in such a model? In Aria of Brittle Failure Theory, we are given the last, most vulnerable philosophy of Hephaistos. But it doesn’t arrive as triumph. It arrives as art—as a deeply personal, wounded praxis of making. Not to fix what’s broken, but to cut a line through it so fine the break becomes legible.

This is where justice becomes something stranger than moral fairness. For Hephaistos, justice is no longer about redress. It’s not the balance of scales—it’s the clarity of form. And true artistic relation to discernment takes work. Not just body. Not just mind. But the tended heart of both.

Justice, for Hephaistos, becomes the trace of endurance shaped into conversation with his art, here represented by his volcano robot choir. Not the restoration of what was lost—but the marking of its loss so finely, so precisely, that it cannot be denied.

The chorus begins with a scientific account of fracture. Not betrayal, not drama—just physics. This is Carson’s sharp irony: that heartbreak might be approached not through feeling, but through the neutral metrics of force and breakage. The language is deadpan, almost cheerful: “(so scientists say)”. But the body knows otherwise.

But with you Hephaistos it’s hard to know. / You’re strangely slow.

Here, the robots—his own creations—witness him. They do not offer pity. They tapdance around him, precisely and absurdly, in choreography that matches neither his sorrow nor his labor. But they see something: “You’re strangely slow.”

Hephaistos does not burn fast like Ares. He does not shimmer like Aphrodite. He’s slow, which is to say, he does not abandon form. He stays. He repeats. He shapes the ache.

Then comes his theory. Not in the language of metallurgy or revenge, but intimacy:

I could split my heart on the anvil / and put her inside / and weld it together again / then there she’d stay / till the end of time.

This is not a metaphor for mending—it’s a metaphysical engineering of memory. The heart is not broken by accident. It is opened on purpose. Welded not to heal, but to hold. She is sealed inside—not as possession, but as imprint. A private reliquary of longing. A sanctum no one else can enter, not even her.

He doesn’t say the heart would grow whole. He says:

Our love would grow / freer and brighter / with every stroke of the hammer.

This is brutal. There is no fantasy of reconciliation, no illusion of being seen back. There is only the hope that his memory can hold what the world could not. She will never return his love—but he can keep it. Not as desire, but as structure. As if grief itself, when given rhythm and ritual, becomes light. Becomes radiant. The forge doesn’t resolve pain, but clarifies it—lets it be visible without dispersing it.

And the chorus answers again. They admit:

Brittle failure theory may / in the end fail / to explain how true love can / ever avail / against forgery.

This is where the true intimacy of witnessing happens. The robots Hephaistos created with his own hands turn toward him—not to correct, but to attend. They don’t doubt his pain; they marvel at it. They cannot theorize its endurance any longer. They acknowledge that no structure of analysis can explain how real love falters in the presence of falseness. Hephaistos’ hurt is not scientific. It is metaphysical. Forged. Betrayed. Remembered. The strange light that comes from pain held with such devotion that it becomes luminous.

They reflect the same glow back to him—his grief in form. His clarity. His justice. The robots aren’t singing about him anymore—they are singing with him. Not in harmony, but in relation. And that, at last, is witness. Not explanation. Not absolution. But the glow of communion shaped by shared pain, singing anyway in harmony with one’s own artistic production.

And then Hephaistos speaks his truest line:

I don’t care anymore / about justice, injustice, / how they end, / how they start.

With the strength of his true voice reflected back in his robot’s song, Hephaistos’s grief flushes pure with release. He lets go of cosmic balance. He renounces the myth of fairness. What he wants now is form. Not resolution, but clarity. A structure that carries the wound without erasing it.

He rejects justice as outcome, as fairness, as logic. He chooses clarity instead:

I just want to be clear / to be more and more clear / until finally / all you see / is the line / left by the cutting tool / in the heart, / not even / the heart.

What is this if not a theory of art as justice? The goal is not wholeness, not healing, not even recognition. It is clarity so sharp it becomes undeniable. The line—the cut—is no longer hidden. It is honored. The damage becomes the art. The wound becomes the witness.

The heart itself disappears. What remains is the mark. The line. The artifact of attention. This is where we understand: justice is not retribution—it’s the cut made visible. Not the revenge, but the record. A form of love that doesn't require return to matter. Pure authentic life of creation.

And the robots are still dancing—slowly, ritually—around the broken trap. It’s liturgy with art as the ceremonial site of ethical witnessing. The poem doesn’t give us a courtroom; it gives us a forge. A tempo. A circle of movement around the remnants of desire.

In this model, art is what remembers you when the world has moved on. Not to restore you to wholeness, but to say: this happened. This mattered. This broke you, and you shaped the break. The chorus doesn’t fix him—but they don’t leave. They tapdance, slowly. They keep time.

And maybe that’s all justice ever was in this world of longing and delay: Not the reversal of pain, but the effort to mark it with care. To turn grief into rhythm. To make the cut visible. And to be seen by something that can stand with you, helping to hold the form.

Three of Wands - Why This Difference Matters

We live in a world that increasingly privileges Ares’ loop: speed over structure, sensation over form, performance over rhythm. The nightclub logic has gone viral—now it’s in our pockets, in our palms. Bleep, bleep. The scroll never ends. TikToks and Reels churn out the beat: don’t metabolize, don’t attune—just loop the hook, cut to climax, start again. Everything is eye, icon, image. Content engineered to consume and be consumed.

Instagram commodities the self. Music is made to go viral, not to endure. Feelings are stylized, filtered, exported—flattened into static. Art repeats itself not to deepen, but to dominate the algorithm. And in this loop, nothing transforms. Desire doesn’t stretch into time—it spins in place. Pleasure doesn’t arrive—it’s optimized. Aesthetic becomes anesthetic.

Easy sugar, not late metal.

And yet—something in us hungers for the forge. For an art that doesn’t collapse into spectacle. For a tempo that keeps time with our ache. For beauty that doesn’t perform its pain, but stays with it. Something that burns slow. Not for views, not for yield—but because it must. Because it listens. Because it remembers. Because it holds.

This is why the Three of Wands matters. Not as an aesthetic, but as a stance. A metaphysical refusal. A solar practice of holding fire without collapse. In a world that sells desire back to us as algorithm, the Three of Wands becomes a kind of resistance: the virtue of waiting without turning to ice. The choice to keep longing in motion—not as performance, but as vow.

But it’s not about endlessly bearing unreturned love. It’s not about exalting failure. The figure in the card may be still, but they are not stalled. They stand facing the horizon because they are ready. They are willing to try again. The Three of Wands doesn’t trap the past—it opens the future. Its stillness is preparation, not retreat. The forge cools, but only so it can be stoked anew.

This is the secret ethic of Aries II: not domination, not conquest, but devotion to form. A form that burns but does not rush. A form that waits, not for permission, but for right relation. A form that knows heat without rhythm is just destruction—but heat with rhythm is law.

Hephaistos shows us how to carry longing into craft—but also how to let go. His repetitions do not trap him; they transform him. He doesn’t stay in the forge forever. He exits the poem with clarity, with form, with rhythm intact. Not because he was chosen, but because he chose himself. Chose the rhythm of his own becoming. Chose to continue.

So when we speak of virtue here, we are not moralizing. We are naming a craft. A stance. A fidelity. An attunement to art that exalts both self and other. The Three of Wands doesn’t teach us how to win—it teaches us how to hold. And then, how to move. How to stay lit without burning out. How to begin again without erasing what came before.

This is why the forge matters. Why the cut must be seen. Why the slow tapdance of robots around a broken bed might be the most honest ritual we have left. Because art doesn’t just preserve the wound—it makes room for the next gesture.

Sometimes justice isn’t a verdict—it’s the trace.

Sometimes love isn’t returned—but it returns as rhythm.

And sometimes the only answer is to keep the fire lit,

not to prove you were right—

but because you are still becoming.

Even then.

Especially then.

The rhythm continues.

The next shape is already forming.

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Footnotes:

[1] Carson, Decreation, 187
[2] Carson, Decreation, 195-196
[3] Carson, Decreation, 201