Synchronicity & 2023
+ horoscopes for the week of January 1, 2024
January things:
*LAST & FINAL call for ALCHEMY OF THE WORD, a generative, chill, and cosmically rigorous workshop to kick off 2024—details/sign up here. doors close tonight at midnight. alchemy is astrology’s sister science/art. to study its images and lingo is get to get groovier—-a weirdly wired way into our own souls. come live or listen to the recordings.
*i’m doing year ahead readings in January only! then my books close until April. a few slots left.
The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. (Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy)
Well, I see your light's still on, so I guess you must be out there. It's okay if you don't want to talk, you know. I don't want to talk either, sometimes. I just like to stay silent. (Paris, Texas, 1984)
I have been a single instant of darkness in which a horse galloped and a gun crashed. (William Faulkner, Light in August)
i took the above photo while rewatching Paris, Texas the other night. as reunited dad and son search for vanished mother and wife—-they peer into the back of her little red Chevy—-
Dr. Pepper, faux flower, fast food, high heel, Faulkner’s Light in August
my year started with Light in August: in January 2023 someone recommended it to me. it was the day after i gave a talk on Dante’s purgatory in LA. i listened—-but i didn’t do it. read the book, i mean.
still—i saw and heard the words LIGHT IN AUGUST blink and reverb
this was the first time i noticed that book in the messy contents of Jane’s car in Paris, Texas: it’s a split second. still, a portrait in some ways more intimate than the scenes she’s in. her little son says, “looks like a girl’s car to me”
maybe a year, like astrology/alchemy, operates like this: what’s present at the start (energy of a birth chart, dark saturnine night of a heaving soul, light in august, pile of decrepit notes)—-is there throughout
moments, planets, people move through the tint of the beginning as we see and unsee its energy, blatant and subtle, subtitled
star chart
light in avgvst
in Paris, Texas, during that brief shot of her car’s innards: she’s not made of someone else’s fantasy—released from being an image of an image of…a nymph or dream seed
in February, i read Faulkner’s The Wild Palms in Florida on the gulf coast—-thawing—as i’d found it outside, falling apart. i clocked an old gorgeous hardcover edition of Light in August at a bookstore in Sarasota. did not purchase
happened upon Light in August again: this time in October, shortly after someone else recommended it—-and i devoured it, along with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury—-
they worked on me
triplicity
synchronicity
wind and wine dark sea!
alchemically
in April, i read Carl Jung’s writing on alchemy and while i was back in LA teaching a class on the subject (ALCHEMY OF THE WORD’s first iteration) i obtained all 20 volumes of Jung’s collected works by bizarre or mystical circumstance—-what the man himself might call synchronicity—-
i used to assign myself books and movies but this year, like last, i read and watched mostly via synchronicity
it’s more peaceful
laughter! silence!
trick mirrors and telephones
i was studying alchemical texts, Jung’s included, when my own book of poetry, Magenta, was canceled by the publisher in May 2023—-in retrospect, a good thing—-i released it in June, as a free PDF—-maybe alchemy, its images of mental laboratories and dragons and queens, cut-up and put together again, along with new and old friends, kind of saved me
synchronicity, which Jung defined as “meaningful coincidences,” has to do with relating
»the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection
»[i.e. planetary configurations and the events in our lives]
to books, planets, metals, each other
better ///
tomorrow, Mercury, our telephone, earth & sky, stations direct—-
HOROSCOPES for all 12 signs below——HAPPY NEW YEAR——-