“…I have my ‘exquisite points.’ The map of these points is known to me alone, and it is according to them that I make my way, avoiding or seeking this or that, depending on externally enigmatic counsel; I should like this map of moral acupuncture to be distributed preventatively to my new acquaintances (who, moreover, could also use it to make me suffer more).” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
I’ve just received an automated reminder: “your acupuncture appointment with ______ is at ____. See you soon Emmalea Russo.” In the aftermath of last week’s Leo solar eclipse, Mercury and Jupiter came together this weekend in the sign of the Lion. Good news, harmonious and generous….inside a hypercharged, recently eclipsed room. Or: what to do with the fine advice we’ve received? How to language the huge feelings? Heart flutters. Anxiety. Punctures, both irritating and healing. Today: Mars and Neptune are squaring one another. Dreams, passion, foggy notions. How to ACT?! To act or not to act? Is not acting a kind of acting? Desire transpiercing reveries, daily life, blood and light. Venus has just been communing with Jupiter and is on her way into an opposition with Saturn. Love makes us messengers, writers—pens and arrows and pins. Sting. Lately I’ve been thinking of this sting, the one Kruger depicts in that pic. I’ve had strange acupuncture dreams between eclipses. Needling violently secret/experimental points. Visceral and apparently “healing” but incredibly painful. (Me in the dreams: “are you sure?!!”) This is the final week of Leo season. Then: sun leaves home and enters the Maiden. Dane Rudhyar likens the place where Leo and Virgo meet, the place we’re now approaching, to the sphinx. That penetrating stare, the riddle of the lion-virgin. Thinking-loving: filled with divine and ordinary punctures. Two bodies in one. Derrida says, “no poem without accident.” A thing that’s always with me: Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, insisting that it’s the punctum (“that accident which pricks me but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” that makes the image stay. This trace, a kind of fate. The pictures, people, books, places which hold a charge and charge us—flood us with mystical errors (err: to go astray…eros, erotic….) again and again, sewing our exquisite points, which they seem to have always already known. We’re approaching a final lunar eclipse in Pisces (Aug 27-28) with its twin fishes swimming away from each other yet ever connected by that oceanic string. This eclipse season, the Leo and Pisces pieces of us get sewn together.
Screengrab horoscopes for the week ahead below. View for your sun, moon, and rising. Make a story…
