Aries Botero, Valentino and Red

Fernando Botero, (b. April 19, 1932): Femme habillee par Valentino. Aries painter Botero is not afeard of red, for sure, tho I wouldn't say it plays a special role in his work. But he was attracted by fashion designer Valentino's great romance with the color. Valentino is a Taurus, but the Sun is his sole Taurus planet, while his chart's outstanding element is a powerful triple conjunction in Aries of Mars, Mercury and Uranus (all trine Jupiter), which he shares with Botero, who was born only three weeks before him.

Aquarius and the Rainbow

Stellar spectra

Color associations to the signs and  planets are not rigidly assigned, and are based on subjective psychological affinities. Some are no-brainers, like red being associated with the planet Mars and the sign Aries (which is “ruled” by Mars)  -- the war god evokes blood, anger (seeing red), the red planet, even the iron (oxide) of weaponry, which is also the source of blood’s color. Then the Moon and its associated sign, Cancer the Crab, suggests silver or white, also the moonlike pearl and nacre, esthetic essence of the crustacean.

Some signs have less definite color associations, but sun-ruled Leo, the Lion, one of the 3 PRISM I, Gerhard Richterfiresigns, is obviously related to gold, yellow, orange, and  to sunlight itself, if that can be called a color. Aquarius is the sign directly opposite Leo in the zodiac and the two signs are poles of a larger  system. Hence, as Leo is sunlight, Aquarius is the spectrum of frequencies of which sunlight is composed, i. e. the rainbow. As Leo speaks of the Sun complacently imagining itselfPIXEL, Gerhard Richter, b. Feb. 9, 1932 the center of its universe, Aquarius reminds that each of the infinite stars is itself a sun. (And each star has its unique spectral analysis, or rainbow variant.)

This metaphor generates a whole rainbow of antinomies. Leo is the autocrat, Aquarius the anti-authoritarian rebel, democrat or collectivist; Leo the individual, Aquarius the species; Leo the Self, Aquarius the group; Leo egoistic subjectivity, Aquarius detached, scientific objectivity. Leo is the heart/sun/nucleus, Aquarius the circulatory system/orbiting planets/electronic current. Aquarius is a political sign, the rainbow a joyous symbol of the coalition of minorities, yet Aquarius can also be conservative in characteristic ways,  embracing a libertarianism in revolt against an oppressive consensus. Norman Rockwell, 2/3/94; Jackson Pollock, 1/28/12 
Altho an air sign, Aquarius, in ruling circulation, is associated with rivers and streams (whence the flowing symbol of the waterbearer), and more abstractly, with the cycle of ocean, vapors, winds, clouds, rain, river, ocean.  The rainbow (an unexpected element of that cycle) is associated with promise and hope, and Aquarius is associated with futurity: the first 10 signs cover the known past and present, Aquarius, the 11th, the airy, insubstantial future, or a cuclical concept of time and eternity, the Eternal Now, “modernism”, the epiphanic Instant, the electrical zap, the accident, the gratuitous, the lightning strike,  etc.) With respect to the future, both utopia (for instance the neotribalism of “Age of Aquarius” hippiedom) and super-rational distopia are offered. Aquarius is thus particularly associated with both the threat and promise of ever-increasing scientific objectivity, the very concept a transcendent abstraction called Knowledge, Truth or Mind.

Freud: Taurus or Pisces?

For some time I’ve been pursuing the idea that Freud’s correct birthday was March 6, not May 6. The almost universally accepted May 6, 1856 date (6:30 pm, Freiberg, Moravia, now Pribor, Czech Republic) appears authoritatively in the first sentence of Freud’s official biography, written by his close associate and disciple, Ernest Jones. Yet that very sentence bears a footnote (deleted from the abridged edition) joking that the actual birth may have taken place two months earlier, seven months after the wedding of Freud’s parents.

Freud wrote a book called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, yet this blatant, jocular slur against his mother has been ignored by most biographers, even though he himself exposed suspicions that he was sired by his half-brother.

To my mind, given all that we now know about Freud, the March 6 horoscope is the more apt of the two. I will not repeat here the biographical and astrological material supporting my opinion, which was published in an article in the Astrological Journal (March/April 2000). I have only recently, however, come across Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home by Emanuel Rice, M. D., who reports that one of the most compelling documents supporting the May 6 birthdate, the so-called “inscription” in the Family Bible, is not an inscription at all, but merely sheets of paper found in the rebound book, which is otherwise empty of any family records.

The carefully transcribed birth data include the (alleged) date of the month and the day of the week for the birth and the circumcision, in the gentile and the Jewish calendars, eight dates in all. But it is followed by a charmingly spontaneous (and ungrammatical) sentence that is marred by a slip of the pen: “On the fourth of [illegible], [1]856, my son mentioned above, long may he live, got three teeth. Freud himself insisted, “most mistakes in writing dates are motivated”. Is it possible that the slip reveals the fear that the true date of the first dentition might undermine the carefully wrought falsification above it? The sentence has a tender charm that throws into question the veridicality of the formal sentences above; which also include the solemn record of Sigmund's grandfather's death. Does one put death and baby teeth on the same page?

Granted, other documentary obstacles remain in the way of the March birthdate. However, the reverential attitude towards and legendary status of some of these documents suggest they may not have been examined interrogatively. Several poor photo copies are contradicted by earlier reported descriptions. Many biographies elide the fact that Freud's two uncles were professional forgers.  One of the uncles was imprisoned, much to Freud's shame, and the Manchester branch of the Freud family was implicated; Manchester was the manufacturing  source of counterfeit rubles that flooded eastern Europe via Vienna prior to WW 1 and we know surprisingly little, given the glut of biographical research, about the Manchester Freuds.

The circumstances around Freud's birthrecords therefore are far from transparent. He was not born in the orthodox shtetl where no one could keep a secret, but in a small enclave of suspiciously foreign Ostjuden, stigmatized and transient, hardly to be distinguished from gypsies, the piety of some family members notwithstanding. At the time of his birth, the family was crowded into one room above the shop of a gentile locksmith.

It is worth pointing out that the March birthdate has numerous supporters, including some distinguished Freudian scholars and theorists: Marie Balmary made the most extensive argument in Psychoanalysing Psychoanalysis (1979); Wladimir Granoff assents in the published 1975 lectures Filiations, philosopher Andrea Nye; and Jay and Jean Harris, both MDs about whom I can learn nothing, in The One-Eyed Doctor Sigismund Freud (1984). (Although the Harrises are not apparently astrological they also indicate the role of ichthyologic (i. e. Piscean) imagery in Freud's story.) The issue is even raised in some psychology textbooks. Though unproven, it is far from inplausible.

It is hard to read (for instance) the last chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and not feel that Freud was, at times, massively daft, in a way best described by the amazing close conjunction of Sun, Moon, Neptune and Jupiter, all square Saturn, which took place on March 6, 1856. There is a gradually assembling consensus that the vast influence of Freud on the mind of the twentieth century was in some way delusional. As formers markers of personal identity are slowly eroded under the influence of psychopharmacology, the digitalization of communication and the archive, assisted reproductive technologies, etc., we look back on the Freudian mythos with the newly-liberated cultist’s stunned sense of incomprehension and wonder. At any rate, nothing seems more dated than Freud’s desperate insistence on the orthogonality of the rational and the irrational. That's the Saturn square Pisces in the March 6 chart; that’s why I’m glad I always kept up my astrology.

Conglomeration of Gemini nonsense.

After long absence, and to dispel the heavy atmosphere I’ve breathed, something a little silly perhaps, arbitrary and unchronological, entirely consequent on the vagaries of TCM programming. This goes back to Gemini, the Hands, and the Taurus cusp. Remember the beloved, underutilized Robert Montgomery? Born exactly on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini (Sun was at 29d30’ Taurus at noon on his time-unknown birthday), this is arguably his best film. On the poster his dense, puzzled face contemplates his murderous digits, detached, vaguely disturbed,  with a glimmer of dawning understanding and horror. What a perfect summary of the relationship of safe, premental Taurean fixity  to the adjacent restlessness and dangerous manipulations of Gemini. As Montgomery’s Mars is conjunct the Sun at 2 Gemini, the fingers particularly  signify violence, rather than, say, intelligence, or creativity. Interestingly, co-star Rosalind Russell is also a Gemini, and her hand is also expressively emphasized in the poster art. Russell ends the film with a line that is bizarre, but aptly Geminian: “You not only saved my life, you saved my reason!”

The great, and now rather unfashionable, novelist Thomas Mann, an exemplary Gemini, noted in his diary on April 14, 1937: ". . . Night Must Fall, an excellent film with Robert Montgomery, who represents a good psychological type and has distinctly Joseph-like moments. Quite interested." Since Joseph was Mann's deeply felt alter-ego, with whom he shared his own horoscopic placements in his massive novel, Joseph and His Brothers, this response to Montgomery's character, a not exactly "good", silver-tongued, criminal charmer, is clearly a bit of astrological self-recognition.Thomas Mann and friends

Incidentally, the third co-star of this film, Dame May Whitty, was also a Gemini, and what a Geminian name. While I'm drivelling on, to make another mad point, the late great Beatrice Lillie (aka Lady Peel) was a Gemini (and in talking of Gemini, do enjoy finding double letters in the name) and the Gemini poet Theodore Roethke (b. May 25, 1908) was once compelled to pen these immortal lines:

Bees and lilies there were,

Bees and lilies there were, 

Either to other,--

Which would you rather?

Bees and lilies were there.

Donald Evans, Virgo artist #9

DONALD EVANS (b. 28 August 1945, Morristown NJ, 6:40 am) was another artist born under Virgo whose work is organized by the Grid. The postage stamp and its perforated sheets provided the rectilinear, regulated containment for Evans’s fantasy. He created the postal art for scores of imaginary nations;  peculiarly distinctive, whimsical, exotic or banal, as philatelic images tend to be, executed with microscopic precision and tongue in cheek.  Virgonian imagery predominates: catalogues of flora and fauna, natural landscapes, textiles, crafts, alphanumerics, and daily minutiae.

More of his work is here.

What to make of his premature death at the age of thirty-one, as enigmatic and abrupt as one of his postage stamps? His contained wanderlust led him to expatriate to the distinctly unexotic and safe Amsterdam, where he was ironically trapped in a fire in his neat apartment/studio (on 29 April 1977).

I have two fine copies of THE WORLD OF DONALD EVANS by Willy Eisenhart (1980, paperback, 173 pages, numerous plates) at the store.         $22.00

Order one here: wkkbooks@localnet.com

David McKirdy: Virgo Grid Artist #7

I met an amazing artist from Tampa named David McKirdy. He told me he was a Virgo. His work is almost entirely grid-based. He punches holes or burns them into his medium with an etching tool. Needless to say, digital reproduction hardly captures the delicacy and devotion in each of his pieces. In a 2007 interview he said, "I'm not doing it for the excitement. There's not a thrill of spontaneity. ... It's about going to work and doing something that I believe in. I really like the field when it's finished, even though it is in some cases very grueling."

Virgo Grid Artist #8: Will Shortz

Will Shortz, born 26 August 1952, is the crossword puzzle editor of the New York Times. However, with both Moon and Mars in Scorpio, his interests go beyond crosswords, to puzzles in general; he styles himself an enigmatologist.

Samaras more Virgo Grids(6)

Bit of a hurry today. More Virgo artists with the grid habit.

2 above by Lucas Samaras (b. Sept. 14, 1936)

the gemini cancer cusp

Casting about for a thought or two of value in this morass of self-pity and “avoidance of self-expenditure” . . . I return to the subject of the cusps, with certain searchers in mind.
I come to the simple question asked where Gemini becomes Cancer: Is language magic?

Out of the prelinguistic strength of Taurus the Stone, in Gemini the dual echo emergifests. The frantic conundrum of terrified split Being that self-experienced in Aries, that gradually troubled the cud-chewing mountainous Taurus,  darted forth a mere mouse, a tiny stinging gadfly, finally a single, external, visible, definable, iterable signal. Gemini. A message, a peep, a poke. Aries offered a subjective Hereness. Taurus thought it over. Gemini triumphantly declared  an objective Thereness.  Cancer, the fourth sign, is Water.

Each fourth sign is Water. Water is Mystery. Cancer turns the empty binarism of Gemini into an infinitude of possibilities, for which the pair of unpredictable pincers is a comedic symbol. Cancer turns the rational geometry of Gemini’s parallel into the double helix of DNA. One can run with this metaphor. For instance: Gemini rules the pair, the male and female gametes, Cancer the resultant pregnancy and birth. Gemini is the pure information of letters and digit; Cancer is the fertile imaginative capacity that transforms that information into human meaning;  the book vs. someone to read it.  Each fourth sign in the zodiac is a water sign, following an air sign. Air is rational intellect, water irrational emotion. Thus the zodiac proclaims that rationalism is invariably superceded by something mysterious, involving love and death. But these ruminations add nothing really to what’s already in the literature. For instance, in C. E. O Carter’s classic:

“To those who are chiefly developed on the mental side, as is so often the case in the modern world, the passage from Gemini to Cancer seems a retrogression. After attaining the keen if limited mentality of Gemini, what a fall it seems to pass back to a sign that is largely instinctive and has the reputation of wallowing in emotion, especially of the gloomier kind!”
                     Essays on the Foundations of Astrology, 1947

Virgo 26 degrees: A boy with a censer

The occasion of the new moon taking place precisely at this moment in exact conjunction with the planet Saturn, opposing Uranus, suggests a turbulent month to come for many people. It would seem as good a time as any to contemplate the Sabian symbol and Marc Edmund Jones's profound interpretation for the 26th degree of Virgo:

"A boy with a censer. This is a symbol of individual initiative as a basic dynamic in the universal scheme of things, and it reveals itself most simply in our positive and necessarily self-seeking outreach to the world we would claim for ourselves. We make our conscious appeal to God , since it is a divine being which provides the over-all unity we recognize and enlist for our aspiration. Our motive is spiritual because we know we must share any reality we would care to possess. The keyword is rapture. When positive the degree is completeness of self-dedication and an achievement grounded in a consistent worthiness of living, and when negative, a resort to empty motions in order to avoid any appreciable self-expenditure."

And what exactly does it mean to contemplate this material, and to what end? Is the gesture perhaps a grand fatuity? I still wonder, and fling it out amongst us to see if it will fly. I personally am aware of the operation of the negative alternative at this very moment.

Warhol a Leo, but the grid is Virgo's

An incorrect Scorpio birthdate for Andy Warhol is in circulation. Its erroneous origin is discussed at AstroDataBank. The coyly secretive artist offered several different dates for his birth. The accepted birthdate of August 6, 1928, is therefore dubious.  The birth certificate, not registered till 1945, was concocted, probably by Warhol himself, to satisfy a college registration requirement and is derived from a lost affidavit. Warhol was just the sort of person to shave some time off his age at the first possible opportunity. (“Oh God! Eighteen years old and still not famous!”). I find it hard to believe that this dark Leo had seven planets in fire, including an Aries moon, and few serious afflictions, as was the case on August 6, 1928.

One year earlier, however, we find a precise and powerful conjunction at the Venus/Pluto midpoint, of Jupiter and Uranus at 3 Aries, a degree whose Sabian symbol reveals “an utterly naïve assimilation of self into its world and a complete flow of all effort  toward some proper end,” which is consonant with both his gee whiz manner and his remarkable productivity and accomplishment. A late Scorpio moon, conjunct Saturn and square Neptune, also seems appropriate to his mysterious, dead-pan persona, not to mention his frequently morbid subject matter: dead movie stars, electric chairs, auto crashes, disasters, criminals, skulls, shadows, Jackies,  etc. That configuration was under the direct pressure of transiting Neptune when Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968. (Solanas, born April 9th, is a nice manifestation of the Aries woman’s murderous penis envy, especially towards complacently privileged Leos.)

I also expected to see some Virgo in this Leo’s chart, since he employed the grid device continuously throughout his career, virtually his trademark mode of presentation. As Virgo is adjacent to Leo the absence of Virgo planets in the 1928 chart is conspicuous, but in the 1927 both Venus and Mars are in Virgo. 

Virgo Grid Art 4

 

Minimalist Virgo artist Carl Andre (b. 16 September 1935) restricts himself to repetitive rectilinear arrangements.

more on Virgo here

Gemini artists & writers here

Aries in Red Dresses here

Virgo Grid Art 3

Virgo conceptual artist Robert Irwin (b. 12 September 1928; one day after Robert Indiana) employs the grid as metaphor and plan. His use of both high-tech and horticultural materials unites the mechanical and and natural poles of the Virgo temper.  (Above: Nine Spaces, Nine Trees 1983; below, Light and Space, 2007)

Virgo Grid Art 2

Virgo artist Robert Indiana, b. 13 September 1928.

Virgo and the Grid

Modular cube, Sol LeWitt (b. 9 September 1928 - 2007).

Virgo is the concept of the grid: as armature, as classification system, and ultimately, as the woven fabric of human reality itself -- woof of matter and warp of consciousness. Virgo is the natural process of unfoldment along determinative patterns, the interplay of timeless abstraction (logic, mathematics) and temporal developments (organism, culture). The grid of Virgo quietly underlies  the wildest tendrils of nature as under the statistician’s strict bell curve teeming reality flourishes .

Virgo Astrology Data

* The painting, Wheelbarrow, is by Morris Graves (b. 28 August 1910 - 2001), a Zen Buddhist and gardener from the Pacific Northwest, much influenced by oriental attitudes toward art and nature.

* Graves named all his dogs and cats Edith, after the Virgo poet Edith Sitwell (born 7 September 1887 - 1964), herself an acolyte and biographer of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth the First (also born 7 September, but 1533 - 1603).

More of his work here.

*

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

* Word for word, given its brevity, The Red Wheelbarrow is one of the most scrutinized poems in the English language.

* The author, William Carlos Williams (born in the Garden State of New Jersey on 17 September 1883,  d. 1961), was a pediatrician as well as a poet.

* The poem, essentially a Japanese haiku, enters American literary space spelling out the ellipsis implicit in all haiku: so much depends upon . . . The remainder of the poem contains the traditional seventeen syllables, if "glaz'ed" is read poetically.

 * Virgo rules gardening, farming, pets, flowers and livestock.

Virgo and Soap

,`I was surprised in the shower the other day by a large fresh cake of Ivory Soap, which happenstance, coinciding with the beginning Virgo, led me to abloggin’.

The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, a Virgo (b. 15 September 1834 - 1896) is mostly known merely for three words: CIVILIZATION IS SOAP. (What he actually said was quite a different thing: that the English believe that civilization is soap.)

Still, the well-known connection of astrological Virgo to soap, cleanliness and purity pretty much holds water. William Lever of Lever Brothers, for instance, the inventor of the soap manufacturing process . . a Virgo, and indeed responsible for the proliferation of washing-up in the British Isles, which drew forth Treitschke’s memorable observation. 

Surely, cosmetics falling under the succeeding sign of Libra, depilatory processes (including the famous Brazillian) come under the previous and adjacent sign of the Virgin. Tho Mr. Clean is not a real person and Bruckner shaved his head daily.hasn’t got a sign, Michael Chiklis of The Shield, classical composer Anton Bruckner, and vegan musician Moby: 3 Virgos!

Arn. Schoenberg, b. THIRTEEN September 1874
I mention Moby's veganism as Virgo is inevitably preoccupied with orthorexic notions of health and nutrition. Boringly precise, endearingly fussy, or pathologically obsessive-compulsive, thus Anton Bruckner's numeromania, also the similar numeromania (triskaidecaphobia) at the root of composer Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. Virgos may be highly sensible or highly strung, there's always a pitch of refinement.

99 - 44/100% PURE! (reg.) The depth and brilliance of this advertising slogan is the recognition that perfection is unattainable, that the profound fate of measurement and knowledge is to strive and fail and strive again. The very concept of purity "invokes" desecration and frantic defenses. Hence Virgo's urgency and  stubborness.

"I live like a monk: with one toothbrush, one cake of soap, and a pot of cream."The three great screen beauties born under Virgo, Greta Garbo, Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch, are all known for their obsessive beauty ahd health rituals. Vera Stravinsky,  recording her impressions of Greta Garbo,  wrote that Garbo was  uninterested in the conversation around her until someone mentioned discovering a new soap. "Is it good for stockings?" was Garbo's only memorable remark of the evening.


"Cameron Diaz (b. 30 August 1972) is arguably Hollywood's most compulsive celeb. Not only does she open doors with her elbows to avoid touching germ-infested knobs - doorknobs, that is - she also admits to scrubbing her Hollywood home scrupulously and washing her hands 'many times' each day."

Leo and the Self

When I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself:  What must it be to be someone else?) nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained . . .  But searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.
                        Gerard Manley Hopkins
                        b.  August 20, 1880

"I go on and on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped."
                        Percy Bysshe Shelley
                        b. August 4, 1792

“I am not a man like other men. The laws of morality and of society are not applicable to me. I have the right to answer all of your objections with an eternal I.”

            Napoleon Bonaparte, b. 15 August 1769

Gemini: I am writing millions of letters a year . .

                                        . . .  I correspond with hopeful

          messengers in Detroit, I am taking drugs

and leap at my postman for more correspondence, Man is leaving

          the earth in a rocket ship,

there is a mutation of the race, we are no longer human beings,

          we are one being, we are being connected to itself,

it makes me crosseyed to think how, the mass media assemble

          themselves like congolese Ants for a purpose

                                                                      Allen Ginsberg

Geminiana

MrsRaptor, the Open Salon blogger born May 22 whom I wrote about yesterday, adds that she is a twin,  mother of two sets of twins, and grandmother of twins. I suspect that genetics supplements the astrology in her family. She's also typically communicative: not only a blogger but a ham radio operator, and her English (not her native language) is impeccable. Geminis pick up languages easily because of their need to communicate. (My father was a G and spoke 5 languages. Whenever we traveled he would pull out the local phonebook, even in some podunk motel that we stayed in for one night, and find someone in it who was related to someone from his home town in Eastern Eurpoe, call them and invite them over for a drink.) MrsRaptor also make teddy bears, which is neither here nor there.

Also, check out Neeti Ray's lovely appreciation of Gemini here.