in praise of an open reading

Ok I'm just thinking out loud so I'm not sure how coherent/eloquent this will be or how to best structure it. I wanted to write about open readings (just laying cards out without assigned spread positions), how they're better than spreads, and how I often see people do them in a way that's taking the worst of both worlds... An open reading allows the cards to exactly describe their relationship to each other just by their geometry, the images, the movement of the symbols between the cards. People moving, reaching, looking away. The suit symbols lying on the ground, flying through the air, transforming into other symbols and creatures. Let's imagine a simpler cartomantic system and say you pulled the cards "man", "apple", and "knife". Looking at the images, assuming it's a scenic deck like most of the tarot out there, it becomes quickly apparent whether the man is chopping up the apple for a recipe, cutting off slices and eating it for lunch somewhere on the road, or perhaps having a…