Beauty, Bulls, and Bullshit
Taurus season
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“And if the paroxysm returns, so does the peace which follows it.” — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
“Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.” — Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
Picasso, Minotauromachy (La Minotauromachie), 1935
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On the heels of the full moon in Scorpio—a waning, apparently calmer sky. The peace following paroxysmal eclipse, stammer, terror. What are our limits? What makes us get silent—either awe-struck or just plain cold, done? With the astrology less loaded, the sun crawls through the first third of Taurus—fixed earth—where Jupiter and Uranus slowly separate after earthquakes. Taurus is a nonverbal sign. The bizarre beauty of the bull is and is not of this world. We have to find other words.
In Aries, Mercury is out of retrograde. Where Aries starts, Taurus perseveres. Thanks the Ram for its beginnings, those first fiery seeds, and also calls bullshit by laboring, plowing, staying—so slow as to appear motionless. From such a mad concentration of energy: the universe, etcetera. Taurus shows the spirit and shit in matter: whether muscle, truck bed, or Gucci loafer. And the crucial difference between stamina and stagnation. Desire and duty. Our creatureliness.
Taurus, a Venus-ruled earth sign whose symbol is the bull, with its strong beauty, dangers, reluctance to be tamed, and feminine-masculine muscularity, has something to teach us about the joys of the body and of ‘touching grass’ and the dangers of being enslaved by matter and desire. Nourishment and empty calories. Beauty and bullshit. At best: not easy words but the silence of resilience attuned to the beauty of obligation and duty. From there, Venusian joy and mid-spring wildness. As we burncruise through what Simone Weil calls the ‘infinite thickness of time and space,’ what are we carrying?