John Pistelli of Grand Hotel Abyss has written an extensive, generous, extremely smart, and FUN TO READ review of my forthcoming novel, Vivienne. And if you read and feel any sort of way about Cosmic Edges, please preorder Vivienne HERE. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
“vast sublunar vault” — Paradise Lost
I think of Bellmer’s red embryo, shown above—which is mentioned in Vivienne, and which inspired some of the book. A pre-birth arena, primal sleep and almostness. But still, all there. Swarms and billows and bubbles—-blood-red, gray, hot, initiatory—-night trippily birthing day. In and on the moon, paradise remembers us. Images from the vault get projected. It spins on the threshold between earth and beyond, and so to learn about earth or heaven, it makes sense to study the moon and its only home, Cancer. As Pliny the Elder once wrote, she is “arguably the teacher of all that can be discerned in the sky.”
Today is the summer solstice—-most light, sun super high. Tomorrow is the full moon in Capricorn, illuminated by a sun newly in Cancer. Twin peaks of light, then—-the full moon and the summer solstice up against each other. First summer days like a fragrance, scent of post-school burn cruises or aura of primordial hot guys ashing out the window into long months of freedom.
Cancer is a cardinal water sign—-initial water, first water. Womby impossibly blue pool at the entrance to summer. Astrologer Per Henrik Gulfoss says the moon is our soul’s “remembrance of unity.” The moon, Cancer’s caretaker, comes before the sun in the astrological wheel (& alchemical process). Leo, Virgo, and the rest of the astrological crew get beamed into being in Cancer’s weird womb. Cancer, Leo, Virgo: beginning of summer, middle of summer, end of summer. Crab, lion, old-young virgin gurl. Cardinal, fixed, mutable.
The moon is the realm of fortune, flux, us. What we are given to read and misread inside the night where forms get undone and memories shoot up. Moon is the city or the village which houses and feeds the soul, the sun. It charges, changes us, a boundary between very earthy and not so much. Our emissary, multifarious and receptive, the silver vintage ashtray those ashes land on, making designs, messy and drugged on its reflective surface: us, smudged. Piles of visible heat we cull images from.
Tomorrow night, the moon is full in Cancer’s opposite sign—-Capricorn. This is the axis of death and birth, farness-nearness. In the Thema Mundi, a mythological birth chart for the cosmos and ancient teaching tool, Cancer is rising over the horizon and Capricorn is setting with the sun. In Cancer, we find form and in Capricorn, we lose it, enter the night we came from. In both: an elsewhere which is always already here.
The moon is our nearest celestial entity and Saturn is that distant ringed object, a visionary reminder of the limits of sight itself, remains and remainders. Saturn, Capricorn’s ruler and disseminator of tomorrow’s full moon, marks another threshold—-between what see and what we envision. On the full moon tomorrow night, those high lines align for a sec—-what we were before, what we’ll be way after.
We’ll be talking about some of the above, and astrology as ‘threshold knowledge,’ in July’s Cosmic Rigor class. More info and sign up here.
My astrology books are open for the summer.
A few 5-session art of astrology packages left.
xx
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Emmalea