Dear Friend and Reader:
Okay we’ve had our five replies…more actually…the first five will get their one year subscription, an extension or a free pass to refer a friend. Everyone else who replied by 2:30 pm EDT will get a three-month sub or extension. If you don’t hear from me or Chelsea by Monday afternoon, please resend your original message. Thank you for your help with our marketing research project…thanks for being one of our amazing responsive readers…lovingly, ee
This weekend, Astrology.com has launched a new blog by me called Astrology for Artists. In honor of this, I’m offering one-year gift subscriptions to Planet Waves Astrology News to the first five people who contact me from the email address associated with that blog. All you need to do is go to Astrology.com, find the Astrology for Artists section, and email me stating how long it took you to get there. So look at your computer’s clock before you begin and…good luck!
Yours & truly,
Tachikata… was that with or without the Gallic shrug?
(I can *almost* make you out, baby… I travel by rubylight.)
Yeah, about that Grotto… I passed it along to the proper authorities. You freak.
{{Okay. . . you *are* laughing now, right?}}
But seriously… how lovely to know that you are retrieving and recycling (without all of that silly intrajaculae practiced by the cuntophobic). And I know something about moment of recoil and breakthrough – back at the political: there is no transforming systemic horror without passing through it directly.
And rounding back to pleasure: I live in a city that circulates the most divine cum-green scent for about 2 months in the Spring. It is like walking through the Enchanted Ejaculate. It’s not ‘intoxicating,’ it’s intelligizing.
Lately I’ve been talking about pleasure out loud – and in public. Usually around well-appointed and gentle men (as the abductee frees himself). Their amusement borders on relief as they listen into *how* I am speaking as well as what. It has been an interesting experiment for someone who is presently only fucking with her voice.
Correct, love one another and die. Without love, though, it’s as if we’re living a thousand deaths that are not transformations; with love, we stand a chance of transforming ourselves through our smaller acts and encounters of surrender.
Recently I posted two essays to Book of Blue that I think aspire to art, and they feel so very Pisces to me. The first began as a broadsheet print given to a select few friends, which I transposed to the Internet. I originally posted it on the eve of the 8/1 total solar eclipse. The title is, “If I can do this, I can live my life.” Having shared this with the universe, I sometimes think to myself: okay, get on with it! Live!
http://bookofblue.com/txp/if-i-can-do-this-i-can-live-my-life
The continuation is called Grotto of the Grotesque. I am partial to the photo, which looks really nice on Museo Portfolio Rag paper at 17 inches wide. I consider it my second fine art print, after The Celibacy Goddess (I’ll be coming back to her another time).
http://bookofblue.com/txp/grotto-of-the-grotesque
If I can do this I CAN live my life, and I can die, and I can love, and I am free.
On the Pisces Full Moon,
e
Auden wrote. . .
“We must love one another or die.” It’s actually love *and* die.
Politics are just the skin on the cat, Tachi. The *real* movement is down by the bone, and there are people on this planet who are fully committed to doing sometimes- wonderful and often-dreadful things at that level. [Eric… for what it’s worth: I don’t think Higgs is one of the latter.] Art is learning how to run the table when they wander into your realm. But you can’t use power as it is conceived under the Death Merchants. It *has* to be something that resembles love – the ‘I-want-you-to-Be’ energy. What we call ‘art’ is, after all, ‘tekne’ – skill, precision, insight. You learn to want your adversary to Be, then slip hot-handed just far enough into that space to loosen her/his karmic knots. Art’s mimesis instructs precisely how to be Other. This is indispensable.
Though it is the full moon, I am seeing Emptiness all around.
In response to Tachikata – a poem by W. H. Auden
September 1st, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
When we ask ourselves what actually moves energy, shifts awareness and reaches people, the answer is art. Politics is boring and neurotic. It’s not going to reach many people. Music, photography, painting, dance, etc. reach people and help both the artist and the listener/viewer feel alive. The fairly simple reason that conservative or fascist political movements gain such popularity is because so many people feel so dead inside. That deadness is all about a lack of energy in the 5th house: creativity, play, sex, taking emotional risks…instead we get bogged down in the 8th house — money, jealousy, lust, power, powertrips, struggles over resources. Speaking as a lifelong political activist and artist, I feel deeply that art is the answer, and it leaves the door open for political consciousness in context.
Tachi(kata), Yes and no. Meditating this morning yielded the words: “Soft Surprise” in big, white, translucent letters. The Piscean Full coupled with Uranus’ wide-up attention indicates that our ‘solution’ is literally a ‘solvent.’
Creativity is big part of generating this ‘solvent,’ i.e, a reducing, emptying, clarifying energy. There may be a certain appearance of insularity as people go on about their projects, but trust me, there is something bigger, MUCH bigger being wrought from the tesserae of loving attention(s).
It was the photo for me as well.
Enjoy the site so much, but could we hold a fundraiser to get Judith Gayle a new computer?
I miss her input.
Fern
Dear Eric
You should check out Lauren Lesko’s blog
http://laurenlesko.com/
Astrology: The Art of Awareness
I think you both , have a certain sympatico
Best
chrysanne
Hi e,
I found you in about 10 seconds, only by your photo at astrology.com.
Debbie