Gemini 23° (June 12)

 

I reconnected with an old grammar school friend who just read The Outermost House, so I decided to order it, never having read it myself, ironically. I got a page into the introduction while getting one of the cars inspected before they breezed me through that process—we then went to another garden center to get all the herbs and soil we needed for the new outdoor garden—and I had a feeling I sometimes have, though quite rarely, when cracking a new book: I immediately got this panic that I haven’t done enough, specifically, written something real or personal; it is not an unfamiliar feeling for most creative people. However, because I am so prolific in so many ways, the panicked, choking feeling a felt really took me by surprise. Happy was I that I had a car inspection and garden shopping to immediately distract me. As I’ve said since hitting year two of six, reading these Blagues back, five at a time each day, I have a great deal of material to re-post here each day. I have undertaken this task to, first, reaquaint myself with what I’ve said since beginning this Blague in 2015, and also as a way to “play re-runs” while I work on a new book which I only have a year to start and finish. That said I will write important things as they pop up. It has been a strange week wherein people are taking stances on the subject of sex and gender and battle lines are being drawn while larger ones rage outside combining police brutality, systemic racism, would-be fascism with the pandemic and faulty health-care and general government systems. Happy days. Yesterday ended with my completely wrenching my back and now I cannot walk. Like not at all. It is a familiar affliction and it will take at least a week, probably, to even begin to heal. Ah joy. Well, here you go…there is much to read below:

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 401-405 . I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

This was originally posted May 5, 2016:

Revelation tends to be funny. Our ah-ha moments are typically also ha-ha ones. What makes up our lives? Actions, sensation, situation, perception, feeling, intuition, wisdom, evolution, synchronicity, enlightenment, possible ascension? Have we missed anything?

Like you, we have been many things. This has resulted in clumps of accumulated story. Think of your funniest stories. Do they not also carry some revelation? Typically, so.

Then there’s new experience. Oy. That stuff keeps happening. You can’t get ahead of it. Being blessed (from the French blesser: to wound) with a sense of humor, we employ it in our experience, even our self-realization, such that our own enlightenment is, at the very least, amusing.

Our notion of Entertaining Enlightenment, a phrase from which you can infer more than double meaning has always extended to the perception of life as one big, long blague cosmique (cosmic joke). The All isn’t a jester but an expert comedic artist. Existence isn’t metaphysical mayhem, it’s a carefully crafted monologue, what we call life.

The trick is writing yourself into the story, riding it like a wave, surfing being a skill not unlike finding the humor in it All. And seeing that, it’s the funniest thing, what is is a seemingly ordered plan. We laugh even through tears.

So, above as below, all any of us can do is interpret that cosmic link. Starsky + Cox can’t help but; whether conducting clients to increase their own personal connection or through our witty-wise books or columns or lectures, or in live performance as cosmic comics, we see the humor in there being no real separation between you and the divine.

That we all tend to find the same things funny, universality being central to any joke—we share laughs, we relate to, or are let in on, them—this speaks to there also being no true separation between (the divinity within) you and (the divinity within) others. Thus, we glean cosmic truths, even, deconstructing the role and effect of humor itself in our lives.

 

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The was originally posted May 9, 2016:

So I’ve done the math and I have to write at least two Blagues a day for the next nine days in order to catch up. Fine. It’s my penance—for what I’m not sure—but being the middle class un-entitled under/over-achiever that I am, I simply assume punishment in any form.

I made a list of topics I could tackle but of course I’m not looking at them. Today is a beautiful Spring day and, not one to ever complain about the weather, I kind of like the fact we’ve had a chilly spring. The tulips and blossoms are still out and about in Boston, whereas in NYC they’ve been replaced by solid shades of green, for the most part. We were just in town to see Kiki & Herb. I saw town because I’m still a New Yorker in so many ways; and I’m so grateful I get to spend a good week a month there, for the most part. However I must say I’m also very pleased to make a, sometimes, hasty retreat, once the magic has worn off, back to our beloved Boston, which is very much its own city and yet a sort of bedroom community for us. After being in NYC, even for just a few days, returning to Boston seems like going to the country. I can stroll down the long avenues of the Back Bay for hours (or, if Stella is with me, she will tell me how many “steps” my stroll has translated to) without seeing or passing more than a relatively few other individuals, all of whom seem to have low blood pressure and a very open schedule.

New York on the other hand has become such a tourist city filled with people who walk out of buildings or stop in the middle of sidewalks or at street corners looking up, and not in an optimistic way because one suspects their posture is a recipe for getting hit by a bus. But New York has one thing over every other city and that is Synchronicity.

Things always “happen” to us there. We arrived at a hotel we found on hotels-tonight or whatever it’s called—I don’t arrange these things—not because I have a dutiful personal assistant mind you but because I have no technical acumen. I’m not even sure I have any apps on my phone. Anyway, we headed to the Dover Street Market named for the Dover Street Market in London which is actually on Dover Street. In NYC, it’s on 30th and Lex.

We entered and beelined to the Rose’s Bakery for coffee and polenta cake and our server, an adorable redhead with street-performing body language, came to take our order. There was a moment of recognition. “Are you Starsky + Cox?” You know the answer to that. And it turns out she’s this actress and aspiring astrologist who has been talking to our assistant expressing her want to meet us; meanwhile Stella has been watching her performance videos with interest and thinks she’s a great talent. Her name is Ruby. Which I thought funny because I was deep in thought and work, typing away as I am now, on the Limo Liner en route to NYC, and only really looked up once to see a sign and it said Ruby Road. Now I was listening to the Beatles and thought that was its own synchronicity, confusing in my pea brain lovely Rita with Ruby Tuesday. But never mind. Here was our first synch.

We strolled downtown. I had just shown Stella this picture I took in France of a grafitti which said L’Amour Est Un Art Martial” which means Love is a Martial Art, which I think is a great thought, and especially as a grafitti. As a resident of the planet that orbits between Venus and Mars, representing love and war respectively, I am, as should we all be, profoundly aware how one is a metaphor for the other and, I like the way this sentiment connected the two—martial art indeed. So, downtown, with ten minutes to kill before our dinner reservation, we popped into yet another new New York incarnation of a favorite shop found elsewhere, Resurrection, the vintage clothing store.

As you enter there is a large bookshelf with big art books. Within seconds a giant book jumped off the shelf and landed with a loud slap-thud. The freaked out sales girl was like this has never happened. The title of the book being some riff on Bowie’s Life On Mars. Fine. Book gets replaced. Half a minute later. It flies, not falls, off again. Whack-wham. And now other salespeople, who helped put the book up there, are all scratching their heads dumbfounded. Of course, we were a wee bit less surprised, explaining that we are familiar with planetary themes, and so forth, and stranger things have happened. But, as Cindy Adams says (once said…is she still alive?): “Only in New York Folks” does energy work in so specific, dramatic and synchronic a fashion. Then it turns on you quickly and you’ve got to get the fuck out of there.

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Oh wait, my intention in the previous Blague was to talk a bit about Kiki & Herb, whom we saw perform at Joe’s Pub on Friday. Now, there is a sort of embargo on talking about the show in social media and so forth but since three people are reading this I think it’s safe to say: we’re fine. Meanwhile I don’t plan on giving much, if anything away; other than the fact that I was so happy this show was what it was. I was a bit concerned about nostalgia—not so much the performers as my own—for a time when Kiki & Herb first hit the scene in New York, in the 90s, Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman arriving from San Francisco nearly a decade after we hit New York, and their being so very much older than we are.

That was a joke. Kenny is younger than we are and Justin Vivian and we are born the same year (v is still older though). Point is there was no nostalgia but for little lacings, enough to inspire knowing glances regarding bygone times; but mainly the act moved forward despite their eight year hiatus, the instigation of which I remember clear as day. In this new incarnation of K&H we have performers who, Time being what it is, look closer to the age of the characters, so while the visual joke of drawn lines on faces and depression-era antics still read, the marching on of that T-word does make a poignant play across the mind of a die-hard K&H fan.

So much has happened in Justin Vivian’s life in the past eight years—I don’t know much about Kenny’s trajectory (mainly because there was a time when being friendly with the H would have, and did, inspire the casual threat of wrath from the K. And to be fair, Justin Vivian is one of my dearest friends on the planet whilst I never really knew Kenny all that well. I do think that is mainly my fault and, well, it’s not really a point I want to hit that hard. I love them both. And Justin Vivian is unparalleled as an artist as well as a person of character; the very human moments we’ve shared as friends, though often smacking of the relationship between Margo and Karen in all about Eve, nonetheless only endears me to JV all the more.

But I was talking about v’s life experience and wanted to point out how she has litereally characterizes changes in v’s only life into fictional personages you don’t see, of course, but hear tell of. Such that, through the lens of Kiki, the octagenarian showgirl, we see various aspects of self, personified, as historical figures, friends and lovers and even grandchildren. It’s pretty brilliant. And the satire has become even more loosely warped over the years. The entire first bit of the show is a kitchen sink account of where K&H have been over the last near-decade. That bit of the show is all over the map in the truest and most brilliant sense of the word.

Anyway, I would suggest your’e going to see it but you can’t it’s sold out.

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I have to start work on our Gemini themed show for this coming Sunday, which is actually a bit early—shows are typically the third Sunday of the month but as May started on a Sunday the third one is the fifteenth, when we are still in Taurus for another five or so days. That said, these shows really are hinged on the transition from one sign to another.

Aries was the premier masculine, objective, active sign, ruled by Mars, the planet named for the uber macho war god whose sigil, the spear and shield, also recalls the male genatalia, arrow emerging from circle. It’s motto is the self evident I am. Then we had Taurus, the premier feminine, subjective, passive sign ruled by Venus, the planet named for the uber femme goddess of love whose sigil, which can be red as a flower with petals or a hand mirror, also recalls the circular womb led to by a canal crossed with a hymen. The Taurus motto is the possessive “I have”. Aries, cardinal fire, is creation, the big bang the spark of life, Taurus is, fixed earth, the garden, Eden, which led to certain temptation.

Gemini, the third and a mutable sign, is a combination of these opposite signs that come before, the magical child, the literal offspring of male and female, the fertilized egg. Picking up from the Taurus flower, Gemini is the winged birds and bees, mutable air, buzzing about, picking up bits and pieces, cross-pollenating the planet with information. A combination of masculine and feminine forces, ruled by planet Mercury, named for the aptly winged god of communication, Greek Hermes from whom we derive the word Hermaphrodite, in that god’s coupling with the goddess of love. Mercury’s sigil, depicts winged capped head of Mercury on a cross, thoughts having wings, while it also recalls a an insect with antennaes attuned to both sending and receiving messages—active and passive; objective and subjective—at once. Gemini’s motto is I Think. Mercury is the mentally manipulative messenger god of communication and all such related words as community and committees, specifically the immediate sort. Immediacy being a commodity of both time and space—Mercury is, well, mercurial and can be nearly everywhere at once, in an instant—he is also the god of immediate surroundings, of brotherhoods, guilds, bands, the market place, the word merchant deriving from his name.

Robin Hood, named for a bird, flitting from tree to tree, and his merry men, is a legendary incarnation of Mercury; as is Robin Goodfellow, Shakespeare’s Puck, the messenger of King Oberon, as Mercury/Hermes is the messenger of Zeus/Jupiter. Peter Pan and his island of lost boys—boon companions. Jack Sparrow, Batman’s Robin, on and on we see this boyish character echoed through our consciousness.

In biblical terms, where as Aries is Genesis and Taurus is the garden of Eden, Gemini is the gift-curse of consciousness as resulted from biting into that forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil—duality!—the twins of Gemini. Good bad, clothed naked, mortal immortal. In biting into that apple we at once were elevated to god consciousness and yet fell from grace being doomed to live a mortal existence. I say why put a tree of forbidden fruit in the first place unless you want we mere humans to trip, stumble and fall from this grace. I’m just saying. It’s like the most obvious foreshadowing.

The Gemini of which we speak of course are the classic Greek Twins Castor and Pollux, one mortal the other divine, of course, same themology as the Judeo-Christian story. And more bird imagery, flight being symbolic of the immortal aspect of our nature, our soul forever taking flight. For you see these so-called twins, who weren’t actually twins with each other at all, were born, hatched from two separate fertilized eggs their mother Leda laid, after she was laid by Zeus in the guise of a swan. They each had twin sisters that hatched along with them however, Clytemnestra and Helen, ultimately, of Troy fame.

Castor and Clytemnestra were mortal and Pollux and Helen were immortal, one egg being fertilized by Leda’s mortal husband, the other by divine Zeus. Okay pin in that.

Myth. Greek myth. Bible myth. It’s all allegory. It’s all archetype. The stories being told are being told right here within us. And the Zodiac brings those stories down to us. The Zodiac, with its myriad mythic associations per sign, point to realities that live within all of us.

It’s not foremost about what Sun sign you are—you’re a Pisces, I’m a Libra—that’s the nitty gritty that we can get into with you on a personal level, but first, there is something, more sweeping, but most essential, about which the Zodiac teaches us about everybody—the underlying truths of all human existence, collective and individual.

Aries and the first house teaches us all, and this is each of us speaking, that: I am a spiritual warrior (for what is up to you); Taurus teaches us that: I have a garden of delights—talents, abilities, innate qualities (which we all have to cultivate); and Gemini teaches us that: I think a full range of thoughts, from the divine to the earthly to, potentially, something lower still, and that my ability to think is my divine power and/or potentially my diabolical undoing. Mercury’s winged cap shows that my thoughts, as an expression of my soul, have wings; but that these can also be devilish horns that can lead to our downfall, if not our damnation.

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Mothers, mothers, mothers. They seem to either be the best in the world or warrant breaking up with them, if you read the gospel truths of Facebook. Mine was a Pisces, which means she was the best and the worst. I grew up in a time when you’d send your 9 year old son to get your packs or cartons of cigarettes, especially if you were borderline agoraphobic, which also meant you had to hide if the doorbell rang at the wrong time even if it was the paperboy just trying to collect some money…again. You might also be alcoholic and pass out at friends’ houses, and when I say friends I mean mine since agoraphobic mothers seem to like to only make friends with the drinky parents of their kid’s friends, even if said actually stopped being friends with them. You might still have to skateboard over and pour your poor mother into her big black Buick and teach yourself how to drive (her) home by simply trying to remember how you’ve seen adults drive in the past—thank goodness for all those 1970s car chases on TV. And then you put her to bed. That was even more terrifying than the driving. Then again you might appreciate the fact that she was sensitive, smart, highly tuned, psychic, spiritual, deeply empathetic and powerful and fancied herself a silver screen starlet, morphing before your eyes in Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Polly Bergen and Gena Rowlands in the course of a single sentence. Or that when asked “whom do you love most in the world?” she would reply “me” unironically. Or that she mainly watched PBS, but for Donahue and 60 Minutes or the occasional mini-series of the Thornbirds derivative. Or that, when I first went to France at nineteen, her bon voyage present to me was a hardcopy of James Joyce’s Ullysses which she inscribed, “From One Irishman to Another In France”. That she knew things. That her PIsces eyes pointed inward toward a soul and even when she was staring right at you, you got the feeling she was staring right at her. The true her. The one that didn’t smoke or drink or even go to AA meetings for twenty-five years or pretend to care about the banalties of life beyond her books and the ubiquitous Snickers bars on which she chewed, on one side of her mouth, the same side from whence she spoke, as Pisces often do, or laughed that huh-huh-huh laugh as if she were simultaneouly still exhaling one of her Salem 100s. The one that loved her familiar—her twenty-five lb. Persian Blue mix, Kerry, who followed her everywhere and mimicked her every move as it lay with her in bed, in the air-conditioning, summers, as she polished off yet another Maeve Binchy, her teeth Snicker sticking together. I would suspect that after herself and Kerry, I might have been a close third. (With father and barkeep: Peggy Leone née Margaret Anna Mary McDonough.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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