Solid Air

Aquarius full moon 🌕

1. If you order THE MOON PAPERS online from my wonderful local bookstore, Asbury Book Cooperative, you’ll get 10 percent off using the coupon code Moon10 at checkout. [That code, I’m told, will be good for your entire order….so you can order lots of books and get a sweet discount.]

2. BEGINNING AUGUST 3rd: HIGH SUMMER: ECLIPSE SEASON CREATIVE SESSIONS // 3 slots left. DETAILS & APPLICATION HERE. DEADLINE: FRIDAY JULY 31

3. September 6th: POETRY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS SERIES: D.H Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, and the Autumn Equinox

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“Every aerial image is essentially a future with a vector for breaking into flight.” — Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams

Tereza Zelenkova, The Unseen, 2015. Source: https://terezazelenkova.com/A-Snake-That-Disappeared-Through-a-Hole-in-The-Wall-2015-present

A ball of cool-electric and airy light shaped from high summer sun. This oddly hot-cold bulb is the full moon in Aquarius. Today. Today. Electric moon. I can’t, lately, tell the sun from the moon from the. Startlingly bright, voltaic, and alike. Our sun is home: the lion, Leo, and our moon, stuffed with the sun’s rays, is full in the fixed air sign of Aquarius. There’s a heavy levity about this Aquarian moon. A paradox. And what the mystical heretic Marguerite Porete called the “far-near.” In her book The Mirror of Simple Souls, she speaks of His (God’s) “farness” as “greater nearness.” Her book is an obliquely practical guidebook for union with the divine. I was thinking a little of this far-nearness while writing The Moon Papers—specifically within the long distance affair between Vesta and Dean. A mysterious charge—both technological and mystical, to their connection—mostly carried on via video calls from across the country. Distant union. Aquarius rules the individual. The solitude. The outsider. But also groups, communities, large gatherings. Abstraction, a zoomed-out view of the scene and its peculiar specificities.

The ancients described Aquarius as “very cold.” Also: “masculine, diurnal, solid, wintry, airy.” Another seeming paradox. SOLID AIR. Seen and unseen. A hit of deep freeze in high summer. Some revelatory burst of cold air, both refreshing and reality-checking. Kierkegaard: “The sky was clear and pure, only a single light cloud glided unnoticed across it, best seen by fixing one’s eyes on the pond, beyond whose smooth surface it vanished from sight.” Aquarius is the water bearer, the innovator. That force, for better or worse, which pours liquid over the past to clear space for futures. Aquarius breaks. And breaks into flight. Dreams air. Liz Greene reminds us: “In traditional astrology the sun is in ‘detriment’ in the sign of Aquarius, and this is said to indicate that the principle of self-expression and self-confidence is hampered by Aquarius’ perpetual concern with the power and viewpoint of the group.”

In her novel The Group, Mary McCarthy writes: “To be curious about someone opened you to contamination from them.” The air signs, especially Aquarius, teach this curiosity and contagion. Show the electric risk of inquiring further, leaning in. That this kind of curiosity is the beginning of thinking and love. That relating to the group can be erotic/thoughtful and catastrophic/soul-crushing. Always the Aquarian danger of disappearing into groups and groupthink. But hid in this burst of midwinter shot from summer’s sticky sun: possibilities of mystical union, a sweet-scary forgetting of the self that takes us somewhere else, new language cracking open from paradox’s solid air. Shocks of levitation from Saturn’s heavyweight melancholy.

Who or what are we yearning to unite with? What groups are we leaning into or recoiling from? How are we levitating in our lives and writing? What are we clearing space for? How is love lighting up our thinking? Who or what is on our minds? Can we see, from this cool airy distance, some weird nearness—our hearts—the lion parts of our charts—brave, beating, hot?

xx

ER

1. If you order THE MOON PAPERS online from my wonderful local bookstore, Asbury Book Cooperative, you’ll get 10 percent off using the coupon code Moon10 at checkout. [That code, I’m told, will be good for your entire order….so you can order lots of books and get a sweet discount.]

2. HIGH SUMMER: ECLIPSE SEASON CREATIVE SESSIONS // 3 slots left. DETAILS & APPLICATION HERE. DEADLINE: FRIDAY JULY 31

3. September 6th: POETRY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS SERIES: D.H Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, and the Autumn Equinox