NEPTUNE'S PHARMACY
Madame Bovary, Neptune, drugs, love
UPCOMING:
Apply by end of day tomorrow, May 3:
NEPTUNE: DREAM SESSIONS: 4-sessions, pay-what-you-want generative deep-dive into Neptune in your natal chart, transiting Neptune, dreams, your art.
May 10:
DREAMS AS ART: a 3-hour workshop co-taught with the psychoanalyst Vanessa Sinclair. We’ll be talking about the dream images and descriptions of Freud, Lacan, and Jung, and discussing our own dream/writing practices. NOT TO BE MISSED!!
“She wished she could escape like a bird, go recapture her youth somewhere far, far away, in the immaculate reaches of space.” — Flaubert, Madame Bovary
This is part of a series on Neptune for paid subscribers. Find more here and here and here.
Neptune is associated with druggy states—trances, mirages, and dreams by turns cloudy, mad, revelatory. Although Mercury is the astrological entity most associated with the pharmacy and the pharmakon—poison and cure, place and energy, clarifying potion and sublimely dangerous enchantment, Neptune has its pharmacy, too. Addiction, glamour, escapism: Neptune’s territory. Mercury and Venus raised to their most operatic, freakiest heights. Saint Anthony in the desert—tempted, given to endless visions. Tomorrow Neptune conjoins Venus: those distant immaculate reaches brought closer to us via the planet of love and art.
This transit reminds me of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where love, art, pleasure are the drugs—luminous, intoxicating, almost too much. And then, everything becomes drugs: landscapes and words getting ever-injected by some weird minister of liquid glitter. Too much. Too real, even. Always escaping and tricking even Mercury, the pharmacist, the trickster. It is enough, as Flaubert once wrote in a letter, to make an honest soul vomit. (!) Yeah, Emma Bovary is always altered.
In Crack Wars, Avital Ronell likens the drug addict to the (female) writer, versions of each other. Emma Bovary, she says, exists in the space between these. She writes: “In his more restrained estimations, Freud has characterized the addict as evoking the charm of cats and birds of prey with their inaccessibility, their apparent libidinal autonomy. This is not very far from his description, in another context, of women. (The place where the addict meets the feminine is carefully marked in Madame Bovary.)” Flaubert began working on Madame Bovary five years after Neptune was discovered, and there is something of the drug of the feminine, or feminine drugginess, the intoxicants of paper and ink, in the planet Neptune—in where it lands in our natal charts, where it marks us, the energy of the time in which it was discovered….
In her amazing book on the subject, Liz Greene says the planet should have been named for a sea goddess, not sea god. A mistake of naming, an error, erotic and perfect for Neptune. Whoever rules the sea abducts, captures—traps-seduces with visions rocked into stillness. Like Emma Bovary, Neptune/Poseidon is not from around here: “‘She’s very nice! he was saying to himself, ‘she’s very nice, that doctor’s wife! Lovely teeth, dark eyes, a trim little foot, and a figure like a Parisian. Where the devil did she come from? Where did he find her…?”
Waves of euphoria followed by harsh come-downs, she’s always on something, not quite here. Like the writer when fully immersed in the world she’s creating, while also living here. Worlds and words get mixed up, conflated. (“So it was decided that Emma would be prevented from reading novels.”) Eventually, she’s totally captured. Poison, which sounds a little like Poseidon. Emma’s mother-in-law thinks she needs to come down to earth, to be forced to work with her hands. But Poseidon is the god of the sea and of earthquakes. He makes solid land and bodies tremble. Both Poseidon and Neptune are depicted as being pulled by horses. So many horses in Madame Bovary! And all is Neptune-Mercury, toxin and panacea: “…there’s bad literature just as there’s bad pharmacy!”