Aftermath of full moon. And after weeks in retrograde in Aries and Pisces, Mercury and Venus are now direct. In their post-retro shadow, they’ll move forward over the ground they just appeared to move over backward. Reflective, what just happened? Neptune sits at zero degrees Aries, and in the coming week, Mercury will cross over, then Venus, conjoining Neptune as they remember.
Beginning again and again—fragments of dreams and memories getting coughed up then dissolving into Neptune. The inner planets prepare to be inhabited by a distance suddenly achingly close, a word or phrase on the tip of one’s tongue or flashing in the far corner of an eye. Then, pushed out. An abyss, to sit with the dream logic and its broken language and images. But this sitting seems to be the thing. Sitting at zero degrees. No recipe, no formula.
Neptune at degree zero—opening moment of Aries, of spring—like an inviting-horrifying mouth. A scream, a gap, a mad laugh, the zero of the fool beginning his trip through the tarot, about to ask a question, to fall off the cliff into living and oblivion, or the full moon that’s just reached its peak like a too-open eye seeing everything, or the open mouth that Freud stares into in his famous dream of Irma’s injection. The mouth of the labyrinth which becomes odd, almost mystical fodder for an entire way of interpreting, reading. Dreams.
Dreams. And Irma’s reply, in Freud’s dream, is visceral, haunting: “If you only knew what pains I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it's choking me.” Down, down. The unconscious, cavernous, no cameras allowed. Mouth, throat, stomach, abdomen. Aries, Taurus, Cancer, Virgo. Soon, light on the subject, on the darkness of the little zodiacal animals which preside over our parts, corresponding to some invisible kingdom all around and up above. As Freud recalls: “I took her to the window and looked down her throat…”
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2 new offerings to mark Neptune’s move:
1. A 4-session exploration of Neptune in your natal chart, transiting Neptune, dreams, art. Details / fill out the application here.
2. & for those who side eye 4 whole weeks with Neptune, I’ve also got a handful of one-session deep dives during the last week of April only.
Space is limited, and when the sessions are gone, they’re...gone.
I’m sending poems from a book I’ve been working on for some years, The Flowing Light of the Film’s End, to paying subscribers every Sunday. This is the 9th installment. I’ll do almost the whole book, plus process notes and random thoughts. More on the book’s genesis here. Today, two poems I first wrote in Los Angeles about two years ago. Odes to false and true paradises—