THE FLOWING LIGHT OF THE FILM'S END 5
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Our next Psycho-Cosmos class is Sunday March 30. You can still join and get the recordings from the first two classes. Next class, we’ll discuss the natal chart and the (un)conscious.
I’ve got a few more eclipse season readings this month, and a couple more openings for 5-session packages. (*discount codes at the bottom of this newsletter for paying subscribers :))
It’s Sunday. So, a poem. 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 fifth installment. I’ll do almost the whole book, plus process notes and random thoughts. More on the book’s genesis here.
The poem today is long, and still inside the first zone of the book, the humid Floridian part. Editing and rereading it, it’s like a demented encyclopedia, or like a bunch of novels got dunked in a pool, their words blurring, then sat out in the sun, then got eaten and digested by birds. There are lots of twinnings, twos, doubles, opposites. Perhaps this is how the sun-poisoned speaker tries to orient herself. Walter Ong wrote “twinning is at the heart of all human operations.” This twinning, maybe, becomes most evident in poetry and astrology—both ruled by the planet Mercury—who is double—nocturnal and diurnal, presiding over the twins (and over our recent eclipse) and who tricks and tests Wisdom, pokes fun at self-serious folks, upright postures, the Great American Novel.
Mercury is little with winged feet. A nimble planet who slips into crevices, and Jupiter (Mercury’s sometimes counterpart) is vast, large, and affirming. Wisdom, philosophy, religion. Big Books, how we are taught that big dense things are important, and short airy things superfluous. Is this Mercury’s ultimate trick? Nothing to see here.
Jupiter is what calls itself law, priests and priestesses and cult leaders. Mercury is a mimic and a thief. Mercury repeats. Jupiter makes big. Both of these operations can prove enlightening or boring, dangerous. Always, it’s about dosage and method of administration. Lacan said that we go to poetry not for wisdom but for the dismantling of wisdom. This is what astrology has held fast to all along: