Magic Guidebooks

happy Gemini Season 📖

Come to me There is something
I have got to tell you and I can’t tell
Something taking shape
Something that has a new name
A new dimension

—Mina Loy

Tobias and the Angel, Andrea del Verrocchio, 1470-5.

We’ve crossed over into Gemini season. The sky is airy and mad mercurial—urging us to consider the mediums through which we communicate, and how we may serve as mediums ourselves, and that thing McLuhan told us, that the medium IS the message. In this spirit, I’ve been revisiting my lecture notes from a course I taught in 2022 called

MEDIUM AND MESSENGER: ANGELS, DEMONS, AND PHILOSOPHY.

The recordings, slide shows, and readings are on sale for half off ($77) while Mercury is in Gemini (now through June 1st) if you want to join me in considering all things messenger, medium, angelic-demonic, in-between this spring. Possibly the strangest class I’ve taught, and possibly my favorite. We thought about angels, demons, and Mercury as original technologies, as well as the act of transmission….

Lately, I’ve been moved to return to Mina Loy’s (1882-1966) book of poetry, The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Lunar Baedeker: a sort of guidebook to the moon, to what’s loony and lunar and impossible to tour. It’s the perfect book for Gemini season—Gemini is the wordsmith ruled by Mercury, queen of impossibles, and Mercury presides over poetry, playfulness, experiments of soul and intellect. The word as world, as act. Abracadabra. The magic of word. Loy’s poems are weird and transporting, and she was sort of forgotten for a while, shoved to the side, and she often shoved herself to the side—romancing obscurity. I’m always drawn to the way Roger L. Conover describes her in his introduction to the book:

“Mina Loy’s goal was quite simply to become the most original woman of her generation. To this end, but sometimes to our confusion, she refused identification with many groups and causes that seemed natural for her to adopt. She affiliated herself, instead, with those considered the ‘enemy’ by the more ‘ideologically correct’ of her generation. Rather than allowing herself to be fixed by an identity, she interloped….”

I relate to this kind of refusal, and there’s something quite mercurial about it. Mercury, the messenger, is the interloper—and refuses identification with groups. Is keen to hang with those whom the ‘ideologically correct’ deem irredeemable. Mercury (and perhaps we can look to Mercury as a guide writing deranged guidebooks for how to live in the world as a poet…) doesn’t have a sky-team. The ancients gave it the distinguishing characteristic of being the only planet to belong neither to the daytime nor the night. Travels, instead, between. Poets are travelers, and messengers and poets/writers are distrusted by philosophy, all the way back to Plato and his Republic. No poets in his ideal society. They know not what they say. (There are very few poems I distinctly remember drafting, but these two, I remember scribbling down, caffeinated and sunned, at a coffee shop in Venice Beach several years ago…they came quick and fierce, like something foreign-familiar was making its way through…)

In her brilliant book Medium, Messenger, Transmission (which features in the angels and demons class), Sybille Kramer writes that to philosophy, there is something “repulsive” about the messenger and her mode of communication. She goes on: “He speaks not on his own behalf but on behalf of foreigners. He does not think and mean what he says.” Some other force moves through the poet-messenger, famously irritating and mind-altering. Jupiter is the closest thing Mercury has to a counterpart and opposite, and Jupiter is king of gods, ruler of philosophy and religion and ideology. The poet travels to these countries but can’t stay. Kramer again: “he is not even permitted to understand what he says.” And: “whenever divine messages are delivered, their mediators remain dependent and ignorant.” Poet as medium. Messenger as medium. The third space, the third body—occupying the between. Between the Gemini twins, between.

Mina Loy’s poems are often satirical, musical, filled with curious punctuation, and it feels like there is another force moving through her. A sense of humor and style and levity in darkness. The messenger/poet must be porous and have thick skin. The messenger is writing guidebooks for the lunar-solar edges of consciousness. The messenger/poet must not be afraid to be associated with the enemy. “Behind God’s eyes,” writes Loy, “There might / Be other lights.” Those other lights—the lights of poetry, are not to do with knowledge…but its transmission. She writes of rivers and trickles of saliva and “suspect places.” She writes of “mercurial doomsdays” and “chandelier souls” and the “zodiacal carousel.” And this, in “The Starry Sky”:

The nerves of Heaven
flinching
from the antennae
of the intellect.

Mina Loy, messenger-poet-refuser-of-teams, just like all messengers, flinches the cosmos. She writes:

The celestial conservatories
blooming with light
are all blown out

MEDIUM AND MESSENGER: ANGELS, DEMONS, AND PHILOSOPHY: on sale thru June 1

xx

happy gemini season

E