MIDSUMMER DREAMS
Adorno's California dreams, the sun in Leo and Mercury in Virgo, Leo season, lions and maidens, creative force and language, parties and buzzkills
SOME NEWS
Vivienne was reviewed this week in Artnet: "Fiction About the Art World Is Trending. Here Are 8 New Novels to Read This Summer. The uncanny art world is a fertile ground for enthralling fiction. Here are the new books we could not put down.” Preorder Viv HERE.
Starting in August, I’m holding Tarot Office Hours 2 days per month. Sessions are quick and deep 25-minute image dives into tarot imagery. They are donation-based. “The tarot will teach you how to create a soul,” said Alejandro Jodorowsky. Reserve your spot.
Below, a long sunburned high summer post for subscribers on Theodor Adorno’s California dreaming, Leo and its relationship with Virgo, parties, big wild cats and maidens, and more.
*At the bottom of this post, for paid subscribers, a secret (discounted) link to a class I’m teaching next year on psychoanalysis and the cosmos.
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“At the moment of death, I awoke.” — Adorno, Dream Notes
Last week, the sun came home. It entered Leo, where it finds familiarity: bestial, hot, central, famous. And Mercury, planet of language, communication, and messages, entered Virgo, where it finds both its home and place of exaltation. Oddly, I’ve been reading Adorno all weekend, a Virgo who delights and frustrates me. I return to him though he often leaves me cold. In particular, I’ve been reading Adorno’s Dream Notes, a collection of transcriptions of the dreams he dreamed after fleeing Nazi Germany. He dreamed in Oxford, New York, and LA, and it’s the California dreams that evoke Leo season for me, with its high animality and dayglow delights.
While I read the strange screens of his dreams, I see Los Angeles as a solar, leonine entity and Adorno as its traumatized, persnickety interpreter. Or, the city as the mythic lion, sun, entertainment center and Adorno, a strange maiden, both suspicious of and taken by centers, entertainment, bedazzlement. There is a long history of images where women are shown to be stroking big dangerous cats, from medieval manuscripts to the tarot to Manhunter. Who is taming, naming, dreaming whom?