Mind the Gap
astrology of the week ahead 📞
UPCOMING:
DREAM SCHOOL: ONGOING. Next up: Jung’s dreams.
May 13: The 90s Craze: An astrological and cultural trip through the decade, co-teaching with Dani Beinstein.
June 7: Repetition, Return, Rebirth: On the psychoanalytic poetry of Cynthia Cruz and the Summer Solstice. Part of an ongoing POETRY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS series I’m teaching seasonally at the RU Center for Psychoanalysis. The last one, in March, was on H.D. and was astonishingly fun. Upcoming later in the year: D.H. Lawrence and Louise Bourgeois.
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There is a soul in me
It is asking
to be given its body
Louise Glück, “Gemini”
I last wrote to you on May 1, on the full moon. So far, the month has felt muggy, foggy—a little silent, in recovery from April’s metallic hardness. The moon’s been waning. Slow earthy release. Uranus is sitting at zero degrees Gemini—so that first portion of Gemini is, in our charts, extra electric, and will be for a while. Mercury and the Sun will soon leave Taurus and enter Gemini’s twinning air—-but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Now: the Sun and Mercury are both in Taurus, mid-springtime earth, and moving towards each other. Mercury tumbles into a rebirth—a meeting with the sun, wherein she will be treated as a queen for a hot minute. Now, Mercury is covered—blinded by the light, shrouded in our central star’s immensity, the last dark days before a split second of wholeness, bright new idea, lightbulb. Something about faith, beauty, trust, slow and steady winning a race. Patience. By Thursday, Mercury and the Sun meet in the final decan of Taurus, solar rays cleansing the planet of words, freeing her of old habits, making her brand new, if only for an astrological instant. What wordstuff can we let go of?
Two days later, on Saturday the 16th: a new moon in Taurus—with Mercury there, whispering what new language it’s received. In 36 Faces, Austin Coppock calls this final zone of the bull “a string of prayer beads.” Ruin, humility, penance, meditation. I think of it as a place of waiting for language, for the body to fall into language, as it does in the first moments of Gemini—where Uranus sits, and where Mercury and the Sun will soon touch down. The rosaries that lead to the garden of eden—where we eat the apple and get the gift-curse of words. Where we split into twins and see the thrilling and frightening gap between the world and the word, where we work with our hands—knitting, sewing, typing, writing. The head and the body coming together and splitting, again and again….
The division that creates art, the Gemini twinning (doubling and splitting) that enables a certain kind of creation. (On Sunday the 17th, Mercury comes home: enters Gemini and gets a little electrocuted by Uranus, waiting there at degree zero, a freaky welcoming committee). The head spins, goes in several directions, then moves back, breathing, to those prayer beads. Counting, noticing, meditating, praying.
I’ve read a few books lately that deal with this question of splitting—-the self split, and the disquieting and sometimes revelatory visions that come from that division: Find Him! by Elaine Kraf, Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke, and Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes—all written in the 60s or 70s, and all narrated by entities that seem both within the main character and without. Angels, demons, messengers, disembodied or cut off, or so close we cannot see-hear them—cast out of the physical zone and so moving around like a camera operator finding secret shots.
In Dinah Brooke’s novel, the narrator is sometimes “I” and sometimes a foreign eye, referring to the “I” by name—disassociating, distancing, or gaining clarity. In Lament for Julia, the narrator refers to himself as a kind of fallen angel. I couldn’t help but think of this first area of Gemini, which this week leads us into—a zone of splitting, of numbers, of technical capability, but also of potential madness—the madness of info, of voices, of ethereal internets neath our skin.
After we take a bite, words fall out of the apple of Eden. And we are not one self but many. And where is the messenger who communes between our selves? Gemini. In classes, I’ve often shown Gordon Matta-Clark’s work Splitting (1974) when trying to talk about Mercury. He sliced a home in New Jersey that was slated for demolition in half vertically. A simple gesture that allowed another kind of light into the home: vision, rooms, space—and also ruined it, in a sense. This image quietly reveals the problem of language, knowledge, speaking. Split: “to cleave or rend lengthwise…” We move back and forth between the final degrees of earthy Taurus with its smooth beads for silent prayer and the first degrees of windy, language-lit Gemini.
Dinah Brooke, sometime after writing Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady (and 3 other novels), moved to an ashram and became a follower of Osho. She told Osho that he stole her creativity, saying “My life there replaced in me the need to write.” She said it “felt wonderful.” The split self—writing and seeking knowledge, minding and mining the gaps, vs. the apparently whole or “enlightened” one, under the guidance of a “master.” Do the soul and the body ever perfectly match up? What happens in the space? When the soul, or extra soul, asks to be “given its body” — the poem happens. Or madness, when Mercury (medium) attaches itself to what flows through her, mistaking it for her own. Mercury holds the sun and the moon—soul and body—and, like all technologies, holds them together and keeps them apart:
This is the tension between Mercury and Jupiter and their astrological homes: Gemini and Virgo (Mercury) and Pisces and Sagittarius (Jupiter). This tension between wholeness (cosmos) and splitting (chaos) is what enlivens the astrological wheel and offers zodiacal talk for what ails us.
Mercury, angel-demon, defies the master by refusing the allure of enlightenment while still chasing it, naming it—playing and making mischief in the gap between world and word, self and self, sun and moon, showing us their and our edges and chasms.
DREAM SCHOOL: ONGOING. Next up: Jung’s dreams.
May 13: The 90s Craze: An astrological and cultural trip through the decade, co-teaching with Dani Beinstein.
June 7: Repetition, Return, Rebirth: On the psychoanalytic poetry of Cynthia Cruz and the Summer Solstice. Part of an ongoing POETRY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS series I’m teaching seasonally at the RU Center for Psychoanalysis. The last one, in March, was on H.D. and was astonishingly fun. Upcoming later in the year: D.H. Lawrence and Louise Bourgeois.