LIGHT'S DELIRIOUS HEIGHTS
FULL MOON: SILENCE, NAUSEA, EXCESS, REFRIGERATORS, POETRY
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HAPPY FULL MOON.
“One can speak of a writing sickness.” — Marguerite Duras
In the Thema Mundi, a trippy mythological natal chart for the birth of the cosmos that was also used as a Hellenistic astrological teaching tool, Cancer is rising and Capricorn is setting. See below. Put differently: Cancer is the primordial beginning (of the day, world, whirl…) the moment the sun makes forms of what the night blended. And Capricorn is sunset, day’s weird end, wherein we begin to live and see nocturnally. Cancer is the body-mind’s summer and Capricorn, its winter. Today, a full moon in Capricorn along the axis of birth and death, sunrise and sunset, moon and Saturn: how forms get born and dissolve again and again. How we store our information and food in clouds and refrigerators, how our machines get fully loaded with intel, clicks, and pictures both thrilling and nauseating. How they melt.
This full moon is a culmination of light preceding its gradual release after weeks of cosmic and earthly turmoil. A breaking point. Light reaches its delirious limit as frenzied animals run blurred across frames and past crowded refrigerators in frenetic hometown images. All July, the sky’s been so seasick. I spoke about this whirlpool of planetary transits last time. The ancient astrologer-astronomers were keen to refer to the birth chart as a ship, with the rising sign, sunrise, being the helm.
The whole thing swells, just as the moon gets fat with sun each month then deflates. Lately, and often, I am sick of the noise—-nauseated by posts, alerts, hot takes, hipness, bitching and moaning and promoting, my own included. Food and information gone bad, a broken fridge. Too much hot air. Like the full moon, nausea is a limit. It lets us know we have consumed enough. Enough, it says, or you’ll heave, throw up whatever you’ve taken in. At the heights/limits of desire, disgust. Today, the edge of light, the most the moon can hold of the sun before popping. Every month this drama of sun-moon cyclical relation plays out above our heads and inside.
Nausea’s root is sea sickness. Well, more accurately, ship sickness. And a ship is a vessel for transporting goods, for braving the ungovernable sea. A natal chart is a ship attempting to hold and navigate these skywaters. There is always something that glitches smooth navigation—wave, an excess, a repetition, a mess, silence, lack. The remainder of what Dane Rudhyar called the planetarization of consciousness—-those leftovers we stick in the fridge, can’t finish, or what I’ve been calling cosmic edges, are the most interesting parts of astrology or any system. Like the sun, they beg to be approached obliquely. Like the moon, they don’t have bulbs of their own yet are contaminated by all wandering stars. Like Saturn, they are situated on cosmic and cultural thresholds. The cure for ship-sicknesses might be the lunar silence of inactivity.
An impossible word, SILENCE—-not necessarily a lack of speech or words, but a different sound, one that breaks up clusters of bullshit and malaise, makes us stop in our tracks, double back. The fridge when closed, alone. The moon when dark, unlit. But still. It sits in the zodiacal icebox. Like porn or poetry, we know it when we see it. From its illegible blur shoots queasy truth.
There are silent writers, writers who make us read words differently. One of them is Marguerite Duras. In the summer of 2020, during the last phase of the Cancer-Capricorn eclipse cycle, I taught a class called MOON WRITING: MARGUERITE DURAS. The idea was to read her hardcore yet fragile text called “Writing” while thinking about the lit Cancer and Capricorn axis, form and formlessness, the writing process.
Georges Bataille appears in that Duras text. I have long been obsessed with Bataille’s ideas about SILENCE, have taken copious, delirious notes on the topic. Silence and eroticism and poetry as metonyms. Silence is the most perverse and most poetic word for Bataille because, says Derrida, “it makes us slide towards other words.” Silence is a word for an un-word. For Rudolph Gasch, Bataille’s work offers the “delirium of un-reading.”
In her notebooks, Simone Weil, another silent writer, said this about nausea-inducing modernity: “Modern life is given over to excess. Everything is steeped in it--thought as well as action, private life as well as public. (Sport: championships--pleasure to the point of intoxication and nausea--fatigue to the point of passing out--etc., etc., etc.).” Strangely, this extremism can be deadening. Or: the overload and speed of modernity tends to deaden the senses and so we give ourselves over to this excess of action.
Nausea, ship-sickness. When to de-board, un-read, un-say? When to endure? Undone is not not done, said the great Lyn Hejinian. There is a section title in Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality that I’ve long been drawn to: “Nausea and its General Field.” Silence, nausea, eroticism, limit, refrigerator, leftover, full moon. At light’s delirious height, the moon/icebox/body/mind teems with solar information to be read and un-read deliriously, rinse and repeat.