Leo 26° (August 15)

Having turned a corner I am now officially writing a new book and, in so doing, unless I have something really pertinent to say in the present, which today I do not, then I will refer you to the below:

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 706-710. 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.  

Two years ago, I began this Cosmic Blague project of writing here daily for an entire year, after which I began a second year, only to throw in the towel not quite halfway through another turn around the whell. The thrust of year one was to meditate and muse upon the Sabian Symbols which are images, divined by a blind seer, that illumine the cosmic energy of the day slash astrological degree of the Zodiac. I can’t do that again—and yet I probably won’t completely avoid doing so. As with the aborted seconed year of this project I provided a link to the corresponding day. Here is that original post entitled “I’m A Homo Sabian Too”  (there is an introductory one that precedes corresponding to the Equinox.)

Yesterday morning we hit zero degrees of the Zodiac, the Spring Equinox, a time for new beginnings, but I wasn’t feeling very beginnerish. The first degree of the Zodiac’s Sabian symbol is “A Woman Just Risen from The Sea; A Seal is Embracing Her”. And, like Aphrodite/Venus, we all emerged fromt he Sea sign of Pisces into the birth sign of Aries—the Seal is a symobl and totem of dreams and imagination. We emerge from the misty dreams of Pisces with those reveries clinging to us still. Sometimes nightmares cling, too. Which is why I was rather reluctant to start this project once again: Because I haven’t been feeling all that optimistic as a result of universal external influences. But I’ve come to realize in the last twenty-four hours that this is all the more reason to commit again to this enterprise. We don’t always reenter into our experience suffused with dreamy inspiration—sometimes we have nightmares to shake and, yes, from which to learn.

I’m tempted to say that I won’t be mentioning certain people, or rather a specific person, in this Blague. He who must not be named indeed. But that would be unrealistic and counterproductive. We have to name the nightmare and that name is Trump. It’s a terrible name which is fitting. I think it’s important to name him because he is perhaps the last gasp of the patriarchy diminished to an orange mass of spoiled brattiness. He has done terrible things and we have only begun to learn the extent of them. But what struck me most sharply was his refusal to shake Angela Merkel’s hand. He will shake any man’s hand, even if he has made enemies with said man. But he won’t acknowledge a powerful woman. Trump, I’ve come to infer, has mother issues.

The woman rising from the Sea, each year, with the first tick of the Wheel, is a reminder that Nature, both Earthy and Cosmic, is Female. She is the source of life. She is the dream from which we all emerge. The dream that is existence. We are figments of her imagination. We are details of her reveries. And some of us are terrors—tangerine dreams—errant emanations who have turned their back on the dreamer, whistling in the fleeting graveyard of a lifetime, imposing futile will, investing in their eternal retirement in hell. Ultimately powerless, such terrors must be checked, our recurring nightmares cured once and for all. We don’t do this by any other means than by examinine and excavating our own psychology, the traumas that give rise to ingrained patterns, repeating and repeating. That is not renewal. That is self abuse, self inflicted.

How can Trump be president you ask? Because that nightmare—a haunting, of the our collective negative behaviors that now torment our conscience—this is the demon of our own cultural creation. This is what we get for not being unerringly kind and kindred. Every time we turned a blind eye to racism, to sexism, to oppression, to greed, we had a hand in creating this coral hobgoblin. This is the slimy seal with which we have emerged this time around the Wheel and its best not to ignore it but to shine the brightest light upon its salmon skin. In full glare of loving and compassionate activism It will dissolve like Capn Crunch in the milky environment of true Mother Love, the witholding thereof being the ultimate culprit for this sleazy condition in which we uneasily, temporarily find ourselves.

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My mother used to tell me how she had to fight and, I think, ultimately, drink to silence her “impressions”, empathetic Pisces that she was. Sometimes I would catch her unawares sitting in a kitchen chair staring unblinkingly, only her gaze seemed to direct inward not out. I didn’t experience what she experienced as a child.

I do remember moving objects when I was very small, something I never repeated, though I’ve tried. And surely I did enter the fairy world, for lack of a better term, through duvet covers and sometimes even the odd pillow case. But there was nothing in my youth or teens of the psychic about my experience except so far as my mother was concerned. I would get a flash that she was about to phone me and I would suprise and entertain friends and roommates by saying the phone is about to ring and it would be my mother which it was. I chalked that up to her not me.

In Rome in 1984 Stella and I met an old man who spoke in tongues whom we “understood” on a transmissionary level; in our Hoboken apartment in 1988 we saw plasmic scenes of partygoers from the 1920s superimposed upon the visual landscape of our interior. We had a ghost cat that visitors would also see and almost trip over. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s, living in New York’s West Village, where we did for a good long time, that my so-called gift emerge.

In clubs and in bars with a good buzz on was how it began. Inevitably the struck-up conversations with acquaintances or veritable strangers, I would start getting messages. People wouldn’t think I was crazy because I was eerily accurate in my verbalizations; in the moment I didn’t judge, while, next day, I chalked it up to quasi drunken stupidity. Now I know that drinks would relax the veil between me and it. I wasn’t a professional astrologer then, never mindsome form of metaphysician. These little episodes were foreshadowing. But, slowly, over time, I did begin to trust these impressions which  were being received increasingly in sober moments. I simply thought: cool, I have inherited something of my Celtic mother’s gift which might amount to a tiny party trick perhaps. No further expectation.

Year’s later as we began doing astrological readings for people, the sharp focus of doing so seemed to have the same effect as the fuzzying out that drinking enabled. Impressions were coming to me through the very opposite end of my mental spectrum—that of a concentrated openness to the symbolic patterning on a individual’s astrological chart. We were (and are) continually trained to read people’s charts, the result of which is already forever astonishing—the accuracy of a technical astrological reading will always remain inexplicable as to the why it works. But, more and more, there was something extra available to me. Training my mind technically, consciously, intellectually via the complexities and intricasies of one’s chart at hand seemed also to open a window somewhere in the back (or, to be accurate upper-left side) of said consciousness where these flashes, impressions, or rather, imperatives were asking to be articulated.

I pick a Tarot card every morning. Doing so is never the same twice. Our minds are never exactly in the same state when we do some ritual behavior—they state always varies at least by tiny degrees. This morning I was shuffling absent-mindingly to the point that I forgot what I was doing, lost in some early morning daydream, the to-dos of the day yet to creep their way in. Suddenly I “heard” a pick me from one of the cards I remembered I was fondling. I did. It was the Magician. And its appearance immediately inspired the theme of today’s installment. In a way my so-called psychic ability, as transient as it can be, is the Universe’s ultimate Blage on me.

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Aries is the sign of the Self. But this is not to be confused with selfishness. It’s more like putting the oxygen mask on first before you can help others. But help others you might.

As I watch the mostly older white men on the right shuffling in and out of meetings in D.C. all I can think is that they couldn’t be more divorced from the concept of helping or serving others. They don’t even pretend anymore like they might have done forty years ago. Reporters are seen as an annoyance. It’s like these lawmakers are part of some royal family. Meanwhile, the British royal family, for instance, is suffused with the understanding that they are born to serve the people, despite their trappings of wealth—and really they’re not ostentatious.

I was reading Edmund White’s  The Flaneur recently, one of a thousand books Stella has put in front of me knowing I half-jokingly admit “I don’t read.” But it was a thin book and it was about Paris and I could knock it off in a morning. There is a bit about a loyalist bar on the rue de Rivoli. And how the crowd there wants to bring back the French royal family, such as it is. The notion seems absurd at first. Until you realize that the royalists’ argument is that a royal family would do more for the people than those elected. It’s starting to make more sense to me.

Just because the people in power didn’t get there by divine right doesn’t mean they don’t act like it.  Perhaps its not a divine right endowed upon them by a god but rather a lobby but they still act like they are appointed as if on by high. And they tolerate the rest of us whom they seek to oppress. Noblesse oblige now seems more modern a concept than what is passing these days for democracy wherein those who have don’t feel obliged to provide to those less fortunate. No. Even the income-based Affordable Care Act (that’s the name of it) where the rich pay a little more to cover those who have not is too much to ask from these entitled assholes.

Not that Britain is any great shakes these days but, despite the fact they have a royal family, they are way more (social-)democratic than we are—their health care and education system is a testament to that. Remember the Age of Enlightenment? The Social Contract? Reason? (All Apollonian/Libran terms in my astrological view). How about the Declaration of Independence? The founding fathers took a page from the royalists’ book: They were going to play the role of father to the nation and thus take care of and provide for others as an outcropping of their own inalienable fullfillment of selfhood.

Now we have to look at Paul Ryan’s smug mug. Or that giant orange pig face which, I’m sorry, shows signs of constant drug abuse. We have to stomach the chinless droolings of Mitch McConnell, the ignoramity of Rick Perry, the impatient, “tolerating”, violent insouciance of pretty much the entire GOP. We’re sorry to bother you we’re just trying not to starve, be enslaved and die. Sorry. We know you’re busy being paid healthcare on our taxes and getting lobbyist kickbacks and book deals and industrial contracts. Our mistake. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

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!
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