10/17: The Zodiac Clinic
10/17: The Zodiac Clinic
FULL MOON IN ARIES / sale
ARIES FULL MOON SALE, ONE DAY ONLY, 25% off subscriptions to Cosmic Edges. Redeem here!!! (A new series on Pluto, among other things, for subscribers only, begins this weekend).
Also: I have 3 astrology dates left in 2024! Reserve your spot here.
CLASSES: Psycho-Cosmos pre-sale (monthly, starting January 2025)
Supernatural Knowledge: A Simone Weil Weekend Workshop (December 28+29)
“We could imagine a zodiac surgery where you could have a sign sculpted in your image! An institute that would homogenize your needs, your desires, your lifestyle and your sign. Zodiac signs are fatal in the sense that they escape you. In principle, a sign is something that you cannot change, something unpredictable, incompatible, almost the minimum destiny that remains for us in this life.” — Jean Baudrillard, Radical Alterity
I’ve long been taken with Baudrillard’s take on zodiac signs as the minimum destiny that remains for us in this life. He worries about/prophecies a future where a Zodiac Clinic can remake your astrology “in your image” if you are uncomfortable with whatever star sign has befallen you. Baudrillard, a Leo with an Aries Moon, was obsessed by fate, the fatal, signs, seduction—what cannot be altered, and what he calls our surgical compulsion to excise negativity. That zodiac statement, which you might picture him tossing off while blowing smoke in your face, is the kind of funny, apocalyptic, fiery lingo I adore him for.
Today the moon is full in Aries. Baudrillard’s moon. Our group moon. Unpredictable. Maddening, bold, bright, hard-edged. It is and is not in our heads. Aries rules the head. How we go headfirst into the word, world. Then rest.
Last night in the yard, the moon looked clearer and brighter than ever. It seemed to clock me as I squinted, the flowers and grass lit neon. Both deranging and purifying. As I write this—the sun rises over rural Pennsylvania and the full moon is peaking. 7:37 am ET. Moments ago, when all was dark and fuzzy, I felt as though I was out of frame in the photograph above, to the side of a head-printed blue pillow in a foreign room. Paris, 1985. Like today’s full moon: an atmosphere of both aftermath and anticipation.
The sun is in Libra, the opposite/counterpart of Aries: this axis fully lit, tensions apparent: “radical alterity.” Energizing and uncomfortable, like all polarities. Libra, ever the peace-keeping night consciousness, encourages Aries to rest her head—which goes hard all day long, gets bumped, fucks up. Aries urges Libra to be bold, not to worry so much about stirring things up. Libra, who presides over the kidneys and lower back, seeks to keep the peace, find balance, and dissolve into the other.
The rigorous madness of a full moon, of the Aries-Libra dance. There is madness in beginnings, in the risk and leap of not yet knowing how to do the dance, keep the habit. And Aries is all new beginnings. The brazenness of youth and the magnetic aliveness of not focusing on one’s own image. For this full moon, and the Aries-Libra axis, I think of one of my favorite Simone Weil statements from Gravity and Grace: “We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest).”
In Aries-Libra land, we learn that the world will not see us as we see ourselves. It’s a negotiation, relation. Interferences: what do we do with the negative, Other, night consciousness, our zodiacal pieces we cannot make sense of or identify with? Return to the Aries-Libra axis—where the sun and the moon shine opposite each other, charged by a great distance. Yearning and bold, whose bonkers details feel totally unassimilable, inevitable, but there—-brighter than ever.
Baudrillard, with his Aries moon, writes: “Do we now ever describe a mad person as ‘mad?’” I’m writing this Aries-style, a little rushed. Aries: the riches we gain and the price we pay for full throated boldness, for feeling the rush of the rush. B was kind of prophet, most known for the fact that The Matrix was based on his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation. Apparently he hated it, never spoke of it. Finally in 2004: “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”
Ha. Our signs befall us, scull and crossbones and flowers. Aries is “I” “identity” “selfhood” “me.” The Aries-Libra axis teaches, with Martian swords and Venusian hospitality, with fire and air, cutting shit talk and generous acknowledgements, that the Other is all there is, that we are Other to ourselves even after we visit the Zodiac Clinic. And from this alterity: suffering, creation, vitality.