Aries 1° (March 21)

Needless to say I have never flown on a private jet as such. I have been on private jets, arranged by the same angelic friends who arranged our flight yesterday, just to get some short distance. But I think I just experienced a once in a lifetime thing: S. and I flying across the Atlantic on a plane that can seat twelve, with just a pilot, a first officer and a flight attendant. It was the smoothest flight I’ve ever taken and I didn’t have a single moment of anxiety as I have had on tinier jets and, certain, on jumbo ones, packed in like sardines. I cannot fathom the extent of the generosity with which this gift was given except to say that, would the circumstances have been reversed, I/we would have done the same for these very good friends of ours. Still it is gobsmacking to say the least. The terminal at Stanstead was Harrods Aviation. Like Harrods, with items for sale in the lounge from the shop. Even the tickets put on our luggage say Harrods. It was surreal. The captain came into the lounge to apologize. He was American and later said he was an army brat who grew up all over, which is exactly what Kirby, our flight attendant, said. Kirby was a trip. A gay silver fox who seems to be a devout Episcopalian, and we know this because, in discussing the corona virus, which we are trying to escape, he recounted going to church recently and taking the body of Christ. S. thought that made him Catholic but I was like uh-uh, he’s from the deep South, his name is Kirby, he is in no way a Catholic, which proved correct. I was on super light Bloody Mary’s until I was brought one I couldn’t drink as it tasted like Jet Fuel not Greygoose, and switched to a little wine to accompany lunch which for S. was chicken Saltimbocca and for me a Shepherd’s Pie. Kirby made up a bed for her and she went to lie down in back, though apparently didn’t sleep at all, as I watched Rocketman and then Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both were pretty good, the latter being less enjoyable ironically.

And before you knew it there we were landing in Boston. It was almost hard to say goodbye to these people who personified our return. We were shocked at how hot and crowded the airport was and a bit guilty that we were being ushered by border patrol agents through passport control and then through a CDC checkpoint. They took S.’s temperature which was lowish and didn’t even take mine at all which was totally random. Meanwhile, leaving London, they had swabbed me randomly for traces of explosive. We felt a bit guilty getting special treatment but sometimes in life you just have to take the favors given you. The pilot then revealed that he could have actually flown us all the way to Provincetown if we wanted that—indeed we could hop right back on the plane now that we were cleared and do that. But we had a driver waiting, Jean-Paul who has chauffeured us before and Nançoise had had him stop at her house first to give us some groceries so we wouldn’t be left in a pantry lurch. There was nobody on the road from Boston and it was very strange indeed to arrive back on Cape to our usual reality. Unnerving really. I could only slightly unpack before eating a corn muffin G. had made us and climbing into bed. We forgot we had turned of the cable and were annoyed to find that the company had also turned off our wifi; so after some tetchy waiting on the phone to speak to a human we finally got everything turned on. We awoke at two in the morning and have been up ever since. We had some coffee and decided to do a major food shop as the stores opened in Orleans, opting for a smaller market, not a super one. There was plenty of food and we did a giant shop, not in a panicky way at all, but the kind of shop you do when you return back to the Cape after being away for three months. We then came back and did some more unpacking, of groceries and luggage, then went out again, back to Orleans, to get some fish and other things from shops that weren’t open the first time. We really thought we had to get a jump this morning and were at the shops, originally, at seven, way before anything else opened up. We are going to have one last hoorah of gluten—some linguine and clam sauce—and then get into bed and call it a day. It is already about eight o’clock at night for us.

 I wrote the following blocks of text in Blagues 6-10

Uta used to say: Obstacles should only make your objective stronger. And that is as true in life as it is on the stage, the latter being a metaphor for the former. The more we come up against in life, the more compelled we should be to take to that proscenium, or pulpit or soap box, tearing down that (fourth) wall in an awakening of self, and others, to the Light that needs to be shined into this box or that we find ourselves in. We all feel imprisoned in various ways, by outside influence or inner fears and insecurities. We can hide in the dark corners of society or in the repressed recesses of our minds, or we can run toward that Light and boldly let loose sounds, vibrations, that would shake those walls behind us to their foundations. They will crumble under our jokes, they will melt from the heat of our debate, they will disintegrate and turn to dust, blowing in the wind at the sound of the folk song. There will always be walls, in every epoch. There are walls every day in our individual lives. Feel them, bang your head against them, claw at them and consume what they stand for because they are the confines which to scale; and the containment they are designed to provide should send you over the top in your expression, be it creative, intellectual, spiritual, nurturing, enlightening or all of the above.

Whether we are speaking of the world of our imagination, or some spiritual, energetic realm that we can “psychically” visit if not fully inhabit, we are on about the same thing. Back in the late 1980s, right before I had an extraordinary “event” happened to me whereby I was triggered into an altered state—I will try to write more fully about this for you at a later date, though Stella and I have told this story a number of times, live on stage—I had a dream. The dream centered on this giant black book from which I was privileged to read; the book was titled, in giant silver letters: I Magi Nation. Now of course it spells imagination; but it also points to the notion that perhaps I was a Magi and that I wasn’t alone, but part of a larger body, community, nation of them. Within days after this dream the weird event occurred—it may’ve been triggered by a stranger slipping something into my drink—I will never know—but it resulted in my being endowed for a night with super human thought and strength that involved my “seeing the math in my head in blueprint form” for successfully dive-rolling out of a car going 40 miles an hour, landing on my feet and then sprinting faster than a gazelle as well as my “seeing the math” to launch myself into the air and scale an eight-foot fence without touching it; “seeing the math” as well to “find the sweet-spot” in a chain-link gate, embedded in cement, where I could hit it with my vintage Columbia bicycle so that the fence/gate would be knocked over, out of its cement foundation, allowing me to ride my bike over that fence without so much as taking my feet off the pedals—I remember that was important to me—to stay balanced on my bike without putting a foot down. This and more all actually happened on the eve of the Harmonic Convergence, August 16, 1987. I won’t bore you with the rest of this story now; but the upshot was that I learned the hard way, and in a manner I did not invite, that I was capable of perceiving (an) other realm(s) that had heretofore been closed to me. It was violent and forced upon me, and at the time I did not see any good in this having happened. In time, though, I came to understand that, whether welcomed or not, this event provided a breakthrough.

Funnily enough I’ve owned a crystal ball. And the story surrounding it does touch on the shadow side of gazing into it, for real, or metaphorically speaking. It was given to me by someone who, it just so happens, was a master of subtext and subterfuge, which can characterize the shadow side of a Scorpio personality. The sign’s ruler Pluto is named for the god of the underworld, a metaphor for a deeply profound personality who is miner for meaning and hearts of gold, on the positive side; while expressing an undermining nature on the negative. We see this in fearful, insecure and un-evolved people of the sign. There were always two conversations going on simultaneously with this individual in question. The one he had with people —in person, by phone or by text—and the one he had about them, via, shall we say, subtext. With people of a character such as this, one is naturally leery, and should never get too close until they hopefully develop out of this behavior, which most shadowy Scorpios actually do. Meanwhile, ironically, it is the sense that people don’t want to warm up to them that fuels their detrimental scheming below the surface. Although this person’s put downs of others were barely subliminal, I assumed them to be isolated and petty, and didn’t give them any power. Until I saw the subtextual web this individual was capable of weaving. The scorpion is an arachnid lest we forget; and the kiss-kiss of some spiders, man or woman, as well as their idle surface chatter, can be designed to mask—Pluto wore a helm of invisibility—the stealthy time-released character assassinations they make against those they target.

When I was twenty-one I toyed with calling myself Pan and moving to Paris to be an androgynous cabaret artist. Well I did move to Paris but I have never been that androgynous due to hairy Italian genes; and it took me another twenty years to attempt cabaret. But it didn’t not happen. I had the symbol, the form in my mind, way back when. And as most do, I took on a new name when I began working as a professional astrologer-metaphysician. Granted, we had invented the His & Her Horoscope column for Teen People and I didn’t want my New York Times editors to know that it was me writing it, but still there was a tradition of doing this. Alan Leo. Athena Starwoman. Linda Goodman. Dane Rudhyar. The name happened first and then I sort of grew into it. I think that’s how it works. We change our attitude and we mark it with some word or picture, if only in our mind, and then we grow in that direction. Esso just sounds so mid-twentieth century—but Exxon, now that’s a name that could travel into the new millenium.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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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