Red Aries #38

Bette Davis, 5 April 1908

Marc Jacobs, 9 April 1963

Red Aries #37: Lips

James Franco, 19 April 1978

Tim Curry, 19 April 1946

Heath Ledger, 4 April 1979

Marcel Marceau, 22 March 1923

Red Aries #36: Francisco Goya

Another great court portraitist, (like Anthony VanDyck, Red Aries #18), Francisco Goya, born on March 30, 1746, had a penchant for bright red, especially as an accent: red cape, red ribbon, red collar, red corsage, red boutonniere, red cuff, feather, box, flag, flame, hat, pants, ember, blood. He painted the Duchess of Alba twice, once in a white dress and once in a black one, each with a red sash. The painting above, Goya's most beloved, unites the color with his favorite theme, childhood. At the lower left, his frequent touch of the macabre, the three cats ready to pounce on the bird.

Here he equates the Aries bodypart, the head, and the Aries color.

The haunting portrait of Count Floridablanca is profound meditation on identity. The ostensible Subject is the central figure in bold red, but his existence is diffused, appearing also in his oval portrait dimly looming above him. There is also a self-portrait of the artist, humbly dressed on the left, whose profile is 'fortuitously' highlighted, while the individuality of an insignificant secretary seems to have struck the artist as more interesting than the Count, who is comparing his painted image with his image in a mirror. So there are at least six self-images present or implicit. Other important Aries images in Goya's work: Boy on a Ram, The Disasters of War series, The Massacre, and the hacked and bloody butcher's still life, "Head and Quarters":

Red Aries #35: Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry (born 24 March 1960), provocative English artist /perfomer, here in male costume -- note: the Aries sign is a phallus!

 

Red bow!

Red shoes! (c.f. Aries in Red #21: Hans Christian Andersen)

"Himself"

Red Aries #34: Brenda Starr

Brenda Starr, flaming red-head reporter, created by cartoonist Dale Messick, born April 11, 1906.

Red Aries #33: Cynthia Nixon

Taking a page from Lady Gaga's (#32) playbook, Cynthia Nixon (April 9, 1966) in a red leather dress!

astonishing Whole Earth //vimeo.com/32001208

Have you seen this yet?

http://vimeo.com/32001208

A ramble with Aries philosophers

 

 1. Aries, the first sign, the pioneer, the warrior, the bully, Miles Gloriosus, the planet Mars, the color red.

         The first thing I bring forth about Descartes is his Mars quality. He carries a silver sword, unenlisted he attends battlefields, he philosophizes in the barracks, he contributes to the science of ballistics, the technology of munitions. On the Orleans road he disarms a rival lover.  Famously, on a ferry in the Lowlands he disarmed brigands who were plotting his murder. As De Quincey put it in his immortal essay On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts: ". . . if ever one could say of a man that he was all but murdered—murdered within an inch—one must say it of [Descartes]. . . "

      Frans Hals paints him as a dashing swashbuckler,  his simian brow concealed in bangs, a veritable D'Artagnan with blazing eyes, a confident sneering smile and intimidating eyebrows. He has contempt for the past, the intellectual authority of the scolia, Aristotle, dead languages, books in general.

[....Not that I really give a shit about the horoscope crap but I did notice that all of the coolest MFers on this site are Aries. All of you Aries people come in here and show yourselves and the board will see what I mean.   http://www.boxingscene.com ]

         In the Discourse, Descartes uses the metaphor of battle: "Or perhaps we should make the comparison with army chieftains.... for to try to conquer all the difficulties and errors which stand in our way when we try to reach the truth is really to engage in battle; and to reach a false conclusion on an important issue is to lose the battle."

         To facilitate the goal "to make ourselves masters and possessors of nature" he calls for this, perhaps his most tangible forecast of modernity, the organized campaign of science:

 "Truth can be discovered only little by little . . . . It is true that as far as the related experiments are concerned, one man is not enough to do them all; but he could not usefully employ other hands than his own, unless those of workers or other persons whom he could pay. Such people would do, in the hope of gain, which is a very effective motive, precisely what they were told."

          In other words, he calls for a mercenary army of researchers. He rejects volunteers, whose assistance would be "at a net loss" for among other reasons "they would infallibly expect to be paid . .  in compliments and useless conversation which would necessarily consume much of the time needed for investigation."

         There is a touch of testy impatience; it's also the Generalissimo barking Do it now! He feels pressure to see the practical results that will alleviate and transform Humanity. He's particularly concerned to expand human lifespan "as much as a thousand years," if not "prevented by the brevity of life." Descartes's contemporary, Aries Andrew Marvell gives a vivid glimpse of this side of the Aries temperament: "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near."

         Blood flows around him. For a time, he purposely lives near a slaughterhouse. "I have spent much time on dissection during the last eleven years, and I doubt whether there is a doctor who has made more detailed observations than I." He is joined in this pursuit by several other Aries natives of genius and energy excited to pioneer in studying the mechanism and vitality of the physical body. Sanctorius, the widely published physician born 35 years before Descartes, proposed that the body is a machine, and measures its temperature, rejects scholasticism. William Harvey, 18 years Descartes's senior establishes the circulation of the blood. Descartes, disagreeing with Harvey about the heart's activity, cuts out part of the heart of a live dog and measures the pulsations along the aorta with this bare hand. He vigorously defends vivisection. He is credited with writing the first textbook of physiology but it follows on Sanctorius and Harvey; a team of Aries invade the body.

         He frightens his neighbors and is thought to be an atheist. Pascal seems to takes him for such (for practical purposes) in his well-known remark:

"I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God."

2. Cogito ergo SUM

         Descartes himself admits that the Cogito is not a piece of reasoning. Paul Valery calls it "a fist coming down on a table . . . . the explosion of an act, a shattering blow . . . If the cogito turns up so often in Descartes work, if it is found again and again in the Discourse, the Meditations, the Principles, it is because it is an appeal to his essential egotism. He takes it up as the theme of the lucid Self; it is the clarion call to his pride and the resources of his being. . . . . I say that the real method of Descartes ought to be called egotism: the expansion of consciousness for the purposes of knowledge."

          Aries comes infant naked and with the passionate energy of newly discovered self-hood it must clothe itself in individuality, and defend its unique, unshareable position in space-time, and its creativity is born of that need. Aries is urgent and distinct, never bland, often noisy.

I shall never be silent. Never.   Samuel Beckett

I am here to live aloud.    Emile Zola

         It is a truism that Descartes introduces the Subject to philosophy. Aries invokes the immediacy of the nascent I, the human being-as-subject, im-mediately in agonic relations with both the source-of-being, Nothing, and the context-of-being, the World, striding frantically forth with a cry in a state of emergency (and usually picking up the nearest weapon).

         Astrology does not presuppose a simplicity of origin, but recognizes in birth the agony and terror, as well as the miracle. In choosing a point representing the start on a circle or cycle, the necessary arbitrariness is a violence which provokes or uncovers a crisis-state. Descartes's I AM immediately confronts the Other, (or does he defer the encounter by creating this) Doubt, the all-powerful Demon, and then opens a Pandora's box of dualisms, which are dealt with for centuries: mind/body, subject/object, self/other, conscious/unconscious, certainty/doubt.  Not the least of them is progress/regress. The terror of regression, back into an imprisoning non-being, fuels Aries pre-emptive aggression with pre-rational force.

         This first-person singular Descartes, this "I" that was born and thinks, that dissects eyeballs and fetuses (competing, again with Harvey, for a "father of embryology" award), who dreamed of living a thousand years and determining the "cause of the position of every fixed star" is the hero figure of intellectual modernity. Or the villain: overreaching, insecure, power-mad fantast, imperialist colonizer of infinity, self-declared origin. At any rate, for the next 250 years after Descartes's birth, there was no need for another Aries in the philosophical sphere.

         Not until Edmund Husserl, who explicitly embarks on a new Cartesian-style beginning (and is similarly forced to deal with solipsism). That Husserl’s philosophy goes straight back to Descartes is widely accepted. Descartes is "the original founding genius of all modern philosophy," he wrote. (See The Cogito in Husserl’s Philosophy, Gaston Berger, 1972. And Paul MacDonald, in Descartes and Husserl: The Philosophical Project of Radical Beginnings, refers to “Husserl’s repeated insistence on the importance of the Cartesian point of departure” and “the abundance, even superfluity, of commentaries on this avowed influence." 

         The next Aries of highest regard is J. L. Austin: Is the Cogito not par excellence the speech-act, or performative utterance, inaugural of European thought for 300 years . . . sort of?  (A cadre of language philosophers and logical positivists exist in the Taurus/Scorpio polarity. Austin is the only one who wanders into neighboring Aries territory. In a list of the 40 most important philosophers of the last 200 years, compiled from 600 contributors Husserl and Austin are the only Aries.)

         On the other hand, outside philosophy, Descartes's researches into the mathematical physics of motion, force, energy, heat, light were extended rapidly by crucial figures born under Aries: Huygens, Euler, Laplace, and Fourier. I doubt that four names of equal importance to the development of theories of physical energy can be found together under any other zodiacal sign, certainly not within 200 years of Descartes's birth.

         There is, however, one other canonical philosopher born under Aries, and contemporary with Descartes, namely the "menacingly terse" Thomas Hobbes, whose long life encompassed Descartes birth and death. If Descartes originates the philosophical Subject, Hobbes does so for the political Subject. Hobbes is the man of two clear and distinct . . . not even sentences, clauses only: "And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" and "the warre of each against all".  At the same time that Descartes is devising methodical doubt in the Meditations, Hobbes assumes the same strategy in his Human Nature: "intending not to take any principle upon trust, but only to put men in mind what they know already, or may know by their own experience." They each dissect primitive concepts of physical extension, motion and force. Hobbes regrets coming too late to a familiarity with geometry. Extended discussions of similarities between these two figures that reinforce the Aries theme occur in Hoffman, Piotr, The Quest for Power: Hobbes, Descartes, and the Emergence of Modernity and Farrell, John, Paranoia and Modernity, Chapter 7: "The Demons of Descartes and Hobbes".  From Farrell I would quote this about Hobbes: "Hobbes is one of the style-setters of paranoid modernity . . .  His ironic empiricism and satirically reductive materialism were to become central instruments in the arsenal of the modern, perennially available for deployment against idealistic opponents whenever they might emerge."

         I think of Hobbes as Descartes's henchman. De Quincey's quintessential essay examines a list of major philosophers on the point of their 'murderability'; Hobbes he calls "a man who was always dreaming of murder."

"Hobbes, but why, or on what principle, I never could understand, was not murdered. This was a capital oversight of the professional men in the seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject for murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny; for I can prove that he had money, and (what is very funny,) he had no right to make the least resistance; for, according to himself, irresistible power creates the very highest species of right, so that it is rebellion of the blackest die to refuse to be murdered, when a competent force appears to murder you. However, gentlemen, though he was not murdered, I am happy to assure you that (by his own account) he was three times very near being murdered. . . . . "

3. Aries and atheism

         It can hardly be denied that Cartesian, mathematical, scientific materialism is atheistic, if not necessarily insistently so. Aries Laplace famously remarked to Napoleon of God, "I have no need of that hypothesis." Laplace, like Descartes, is accompanied by his Demon, and the demonic is one version of atheism, in its most simplistic form. The Demon is lively; Aries atheism is not so much a logical position as an expression of rebellion, contrariety, anti-authoritarianism, pugnacity, and can have an underlying streak of vitalism or animism.

Like Descartes, and with even more justification is Hobbes pursued for atheism, called "the monster of Malmsbury". (". . . the K. hath at length banisht from his court that father of Atheists, Mr Hobbes".)

         Aries pugnacity produces a unique style of hard-line atheism.  Three of the four so-called Horsemen of the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett are Aries and notably belligerent. Dawkins with his selfish gene theory promotes a Hobbesian position, and as Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science, he carries the sword of Descartes and the cudgel of Hobbes into the battle for the hegemony of science. At the same time his attitude towards DNA is distinctly animistic and even mystical.

         Aries atheists seem to clump together like clotting red-blood cells. Hitchens biographizes Thomas Jefferson, atheist author of a secular Bible (supernaturalism removed).  Another Aries, British philosopher John Grayling recently gave us his own secular Bible, and is himself biographer of the pugnacious Aries atheist William Hazlitt (best known for his classic essay "On Boxing"), as well of Rene Descartes himself. Another Aries philosopher I've noticed is John N. Gray, with much in common with Hobbes. Certainly, being of one particular sign does not force one to a particular side of any issue. That said, Gray's evisceration of Grayling was clear, distinct, nasty, and not too long.

         The fourth Horseman, Sam Harris, is  not an Aries; he's a Gemini and expressing his sign's inherent dualism, like Emerson and Whitman he triumphs over inconsistency, and is now a Buddhist. A series of videos on Youtube brings the four of them together, where you can see the qualitative Zodiacal difference. Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett assert, preen, threaten and pontificate while Harris, the zodiacal odd man out, gradually assumes the  interlocutory roles of the Twins, an interviewer and a student, relating to and eliciting the positions of each of the others with stimulating curiosity. I propose ousting Harris from the quadrivium, and, to add to the spectrality of the image, resuscitating the murdered Madalyn Murray O'Hair,  a fourth Aries, disowned by her movement, redoubtable fury and victim.

4. Aries and parturition

         I've noticed that Aries often has something to say or hide about the circumstances of her birth that is formative of her concept of herself.  We know quite a bit about the earliest days of both Hobbes and Descartes.  Hobbes told Aubrey that  "His mother fell in labour with him upon the fright of the invasion of the Spaniards." He told it himself in Latin verses (here is a contemporary anonymous translation):

In Fifteen hundred eighty-eight, Old Style,

When that Armada did invade our Isle,

Call'd the Invincible; whose Freight was then,

Nothing but Murd'ring Steel, and Murd'ring Men;

Most of which Navy was disperst, or lost,

And had the Fate to Perish on our Coast,

April the Fifth (though now with Age outworn)

I'th' early Spring, I, a poor worm, was born.             (l. 1-8)

 . . . .  For Fame had rumour'd, that a Fleet at Sea,

Wou'd cause our Nations Catastrophe;

And hereupon it was my Mother Dear

Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear.   (l. 25-8)

( . . .  geminos, metque metumque simul.)

         Hobbes clearly situates his emergent self with the scene of murder, drowning, catastrophe, and the great early modern spiritual rift of Catholic vs. Protestant forces. Early maternal symbolizations arise in any psychological parsing of Aries. The neofreudian discourse of the role of the pre-Oedipal mother  (the good-enough mother, the good breast/bad breast mother, the dismembering, cannibalistic mother), in the formation of the Self, derives from two Aries head-shrinkers,  Melanie Klein, and D. S. Winnicott.

         Descartes's birth circumstances present parallels: his father, a Protestant of Poitou, his mother a Catholic of neighboring Touraine, the two families separated by the often crossed river Creuse. Descartes reported that his mother died at his birth. He seemed to have forgotten that she died when he was fourteen months old, after giving birth to a short-lived brother. A forgetting as good as a remembering, poignantly evoking  a distressing infancy of unutterable loss and fratricidal fantasy. At any rate, there is a suggestion of some emotional wreckage around the Cartesian womb. Attention is drawn to the re-enacted birth experience, the enigmatic episode of the visionary dreams in the "stove". Even his life-long idiosyncrasy, the inability to get out of bed in the morning, has been traced by psychoanalytic students of Descartes to a mother-fixation.

         The greatness then of both Descartes and Hobbes derives in part from  their opportunity and ability to be shaped by the alignment of the purely personal agony of birth (from which Aries never entirely dissociates), with the geo-political agon of his time: Protestant vs. Catholic

         Of course, the philosophy of mind is rooted in Descartes's Aries self-discovery or assertion. Consciousness, self, mind-body dualism, etc. I'll try not to get in over my head, but observe that, to a layman, the top-seeded players on this court are Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. Stepping back a bit, the first scientist to programmatically measure subjective processes? Aries Gustav Fechner. (cf. the first to measure processes inside the human body, Aries Sanctorius). Fechner was a vitalist, and so in a way are Chalmers and Dennett with their various approaches to "emergence" and the Will, some sort of unceasing birthing or creation "to emerge" etym: to come out of mother or ocean). I would sidestep neurophilosophical tangles here and give some Aries illustrative of emergence:

Vincent Van Gogh, an inexhaustible self-portraitist, writes: "There is only a constantly being born again . .  a constant going from darkness into light."

Harry Houdini  with his compulsion to repeat the act of escape, especially from water (along with an abnormal attachment to his aged mother).

Lady Gaga, flamboyantly re-enacting her birth from a gigantic egg.

         Touching on the present, we must now call a spade a spade, a sword a phallus, thanks in part to the most prominent neo-neo Cartesian, Jacques Lacan, solipsistically absorbed in the subject of the Subject that is always already split, defective, in conflict, dismembered, yet-to-have-been mirrored, and so forth. He and his Aries acolyte Slavoj Zizek interrogate the Subject with maddening techniques, Zizek bringing the violence of Hobbes back into the picture. It will be easy to cull their texts for references to the cogito, and redefinitions of the Subject. Casting a backward glance on the portrait of  Descartes as a swashbucking swordsman, from the viewpoint of Lacan's panphallicism, I am reminded of a string of record-breaking Aries rakes: Aretino, Casanova, John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, Lacan himself Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Hugh Hefner

5. Aries the macabre.

         If Descartes set walking the powerful illusion of the unified ego, Lacan sets out to ambush it in any way possible, for instance with the shadow concept of the fragmented body.  "The infant perceives its own body, which lacks motor coordination, as divided and fragmented. His anticipation of a synthetic ego is constantly threatened by the memory of this sense of fragmentation which manifests itself in images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body which haunt the human imagination.” (An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Dylan Evans, pg. 67)

         Among David Chalmers many colorful maneuvers is his philosophizing about zombies, repeating the idea of the mechanical body of Descartes and Sanctorius, not to mention the spooky legend of Descartes's mechanical daughter. There is a creepy, ghoulish vitality to Aries, in its affiliation with demons, zombies, automata, self-replicating DNA, selfish genes, ceaselessly activity and strife. It sometimes manifests in the separate  career of severed body-parts: Van Gogh’s ear (in the mail), Gogol’s nose. Charlie Chaplin’s body (robbed from its grave), the memorial bust on Houdini’s tomb (stolen).  Pieces of the body of the outspoken 17th century Aries Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, spread throughout the catholic world immediately after her death and now reside in  reliquaries all over Europe and South America. The skulls of both Haydn and Raphael were stolen and became peripatetic momenti mori. Philoprogenitive J. S. Bach’s skeleton disappeared. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was dismembered, along with her son and granddaughter.

         Christ’s traditional birthdate coincides with pre-Christian winter solstice festivals; but some evidence (a well-worked out theory about the Star of Bethlehem being a close conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn that took place in April 3 BC)  points to an Aries birthdate for Jesus Christ, whose resurrection (and missing body) is the ultimate great escape. Descartes himself was virtually canonized in the 18th century, a sort of rationalist saint, and, like Teresa's, his skeleton and skull were circulated, moved several times in Sweden shortly after his death there, divvied up and carted around northern Europe and France, ideologically freighted, and finally cherished as relics of the new religion of rationalism. (See Descartes' Bones, by Russell Shorto.)

Some Gemini poets, especially Joseph Brodsky

" I believe in the fable that the Fates fell in love with Hermes. "

" Mediator. Mediation. There is nothing else; there is no Immediate known to us. "    

" A good symbol is the best argument. . .  The value of a trope is that the hearer is one; and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are trope ... All thinking is analogizing, and 'tis the use of life to learn metonymy. "  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  "O please don't start in on the Zodiac."  Joseph Brodsky, Gorbunov and Gorchakov

         Writers born under the Twins, the first sign of the air element associated with the messenger of the GodsMercury/Hermes, usually note the rightness of the fit.

         The symbol of the Twins defines the Set of Copula, its functions and  accoutrements,  from the intimate to-and-fro of personal interaction, to any generalized form of mediation, transition, representation, specularity, imitation, iteration or multiplication. Hieroglyph, stylus and pen, typeface, word, the mirror neuron, metaphor, language, dialogue, translation, figuration, all spring from the Twin's mutual address. Gemini, the third sign, looks back and sees only two things, the majestic parental binary of Aries and Taurus, and channels all its creativity through the revelation of AND.

         Dante Alighieri  in Paradise honored the "glorious Twins" thus:

                                          . . . .  o stars
   

                           impregnate with great strength,

                  to whom I owe whatever genius

                  I possess, with you the sun
   

                           arose and set when first

                  I 
breathed sweet air of Tuscany.

          Each of the three books of the Divine Comedy ends with the word "stelle." Dante taxes us to experience pre-Copernican astronomy and astrology when they were uncomfortable Siamese twins, not yet fully separated.  In Dante's comprehensive vision anything believed of the heavens, mythological or geometrical, signifies spiritually.

          Ralph Waldo Emerson, a translator of Dante, reaches for the stars continually:

         "Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century,  remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography."                                                                (The Conduct of Life: Beauty)

         "Every astronomical fact interested him," Emerson's nephew recalled, but his perspective was entirely symbolic. "I think," he wrote, " I could have helped the monks to belabor Galileo for saying the everlasting earth moved." According to a friend: "The majesty of planets and suns and systems, in their ordered courses, especially appealed to Emerson from youth. . . .  In the years between 1835 and 1845 his journals, and the scattered fragments of "The Poet" show how constantly he sought "the sweet influence of the Pleiades" and "Arcturus and his sons."

                                    Divine inviters, I accept

                           The courtesy ye have shown and kept

                           From ancient ages for the bard.

                           .     . .     . .     . .     . .     . .     .

                           I watch your course,

                           Who never break your lawful dance

                           By error or intemperance.

                           O birds of ether without wings!

                           O heavenly ships without a sail!

                           O fire of fire! O best of things!

                           O mariners who never fail!

                           Sail swiftly through your amber vault,

                           An animated law, a presence to exalt.

 "I am part of the solar system. Let the brain alone, and it will keep time with that, as the shell with the sea-tide." Emerson  looks to the stars with a philosophical yearning and a poetical mood and a downright belief in sympathetic influence that have little to do with astronomy.

         W. B. Yeats casts horoscopes obsessively. His Geminian Sun murmurs "Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show." He was enamored by the idea of the antithetical self, as unreachable as the image in the mirror, yet promising of a transcending union.

        Gay Gemini poet Walt Whitman reaches out to "Poets to come!" Gay Gemini poets reply in echo: Pessoa (Salutacion a Walt Whitman), Garcia Lorca (Ode to Walt Whitman), Allen Ginsberg ("What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman . . ")

         Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, a business translator by profession, who left trunkloads of unpublished astrological papers, pleads (in English):

          With the higher trifling let us world our wit

         Conscious that, if we do it, that was the lot

                  The regular stars bound us to, when they stood

                  Godfathers to our birth and to our blood.

          Somehow Gemini Joyce Carol Oates added a name, or two, to the list of Pessoa's hundred-odd heteronyms. In a Yeatsian trance, a "real or imagined 'possession'", she "translated" fully 22 stories (a satisfying Gemini number) by an imaginary Portuguese author, Fernandes de Briao, collected in the volume "A Poisoned Kiss". In explanation Oates invokes Yeatsian antitheses.   "Everything about her had two sides to it," Oates once wrote, and in her natus the Gemini itself is one side balanced against another, an equally powerful Persephone archetype).

         Allen Ginsburg relished his birthstars, as here:

          This universe a thing of dream
               

                  substance naught & Keystone void
                                                              

vibrations of symmetry  Yes   No
                                              

                  . . . . all the way down to the first Wave
               

                  making opposite Nothing a mirror

         which begat a wave of Ladies marrying

         waves of Gentlemen till I was born in 1926
 

                  in Newark, New Jersey under the sign

                                                               sweet Gemini ---

         As promised by its title, Joseph Brodsky's "To Urania: Collected Poems 1965-1985" inclines to astrology. The title poem responds to the 1960 "Homage to Clio" of Brodsky's mentor, W. H. Auden (n. b. not a Gemini). Late Auden is permeated with this discouraging shibboleth: 'poetry makes nothing happen'. In "Homage to Clio" Auden submits to the realpolitic  of history (whose Muse is Clio), to rationalization and disenchantment.  He rejects Zodiacal illusions for good: "We may dream as we wish / Of phallic pillar or navel stone // With twelve nymphs twirling about it, but pictures / Are no help".

         In Brodsky's youthfully Geminian, optimistic counterview the very ubiquity of limitation and division in the world privileges Urania's  transcendental exploration over Clio's scrolled archive. Gemini is ever the gadfly to the realist. Urania's profounder Self ("the/body's absence") is a spiritual giant who strides the upper atmospheres like Dante ascending (or a passenger in an airplane), observing Earth's majestic shifts from above.

To Urania

          Everything has its limit, including sorrow.

A windowpane stalls a stare. Nor does a grill abandon

a leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgle down a swallow.

Loneliness cubes a man at random.

A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril;

a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even.

And what is space anyway if not the

body's absence at every given

point? That's why Urania's older than sister Clio!

In daylight or with the soot-rich lantern,

you see the globe's pate free of any bio,

you see she hides nothing, unlike the latter.

There they are, blueberry-laden forests,

rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon

or the towns in whose soggy phone books

you are starring no longer; farther eastward surge on

brown mountain ranges; wild mares carousing

in tall sedge; the cheekbones get yellower

as they turn numerous. And still farther east, steam

dreadnoughts or cruisers,

and the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.

         So Brodsky rejects Auden's dispiriting obeisance to necessity. Having known prison he is not one to chip away at the possible meanings of freedom, but will keep faith even if narrowed to a twinkling point.

         Auden doesn't think Clio reads his poems, or should, while Urania leans over Brodsky's shoulder as he writes. She pops up often, indirectly in the collection's first poem, May 24, 1980, which is the poet's fortieth birthday -- and two days before Pushkin's birthdate. (Urania is implicit at birthdays.) The brotherhood of Brodsky and Pushkin is common critical currency. They are the Castor and Pollux of Russian literature, as Emerson and Whitman are of American, and May 24, 1980 is a compendium of Pushkin/Brodsky resemblances, in tone, meter, rhyme scheme and incident. The Dantesque enters as well: "From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly / width."

          In Lithuanian Nocturne Brodsky plunges into the most obvious Gemini terrain. In a teleported visitation, with allusion to Girenas and Darius, a legendary pair of doomed Lithuanian pilots, Brodsky address the poet his friend Thomas Venclova on the subject of their shared literariness: "Our inkpot alliance! It's splurge!/ . .  Our imprints!" Then a full outcry of the Twin's need to pair:

  Thomas, we are alike;

We are, frankly, a double:

. . . We're a mutual threat,

Castor looming through Pollux,

We're a stalemate, no-score,

Draw, . .

Echoes tracing in vain the original cry . . .

In Stanza XV Urania appears in her glory (and to the disadvantage of Clio). Brodsky's thoughts of Venclova, evading political boundaries, unite with Venclova's thoughts of Brodsky to become 

  A specter . . .

simply note in this faint apparition a kin

or an aspect of air--like these words, with their fear of the morning,         

Scattered thinly at midnight by some slurring voice --

. . . . but in which

ever-naked Urania is to rejoice!

In Stanza XVII, Brodsky addresses Urania  again: "Muse of dots lost in space! Muse of things one makes out / Through a telescope only!") and sings her a "little aria," actually four dithyrambic stanzas on the subject of Air, Breath and Speech, which resounds with the elemental afflatus at the roots of astrological imagery.

  In the kingdom of air!

In its equality of

gulps of oxygen to our syllables! . . .

. . . our O's

shape the vault of the palate,

where a star gets its shine from the vat

of the throat! That's how the universe

breathes.

          Twice in his youth, he revealed to an interviewer in 1988, Brodsky experienced special revelations while gazing at the stars, ("astronomical illuminations", he called them) and he regretted that they had never recurred. In The Fifth Anniversary, a dejection ode, the poet tries to talk himself out of silly beliefs. It opens:

                   A falling star, or worse, a planet (true or bogus)

                  Might thrill your idle eye with its quick hocus-pocus.

                  . . .  there are no enigmas, signs in heavens."

Yet Gemini is compelled optimistically to his Penmanship: "Scratch on, my clawlike pen, my pilgrim staff, my salvage!" Again, in one of his Christmas poems he is disillusioned with the stars: "well after hours, blinking . . . and a thoughtful gaze can be rested on none of these." 

         Astrology is confrontational in Gorbunov and Gorchakov, Brodsky's important novel-in-verse, a poetic genre which few but Geminis attempt. (I name Pushkin, of course, Pope, Thomas Moore, more recently Vikram Seth, Anne Carson.) The most extended of Brodsky's several conversation poems, it contains the astonishing Canto V of "He said"s (A Song in the Third Person), an x-ray of dialogue. The subject of Canto X is the primacy of language:

                           "And so it's not the sea that surges in-

                           to shore, but words are overlapping words."

                           "And words are sort of holy relics." "Yes."

The two protagonists are political prisoners in a mental ward. Gorchakov is Brodsky, an intellectual, Gorbunov, his antithetical self, a peasant. Gorbunov consults the stars, Gorchakov mocks them. Gorbunov describes himself in astrological terms, then asks

                                             "And you, What is

                           your sign?" "Well, I belong to Gemini.

                           Born under Gemini, in May."  "I guess

                           that makes you warm."  "I guess." . . .

  Our normally garrulous and provocative Gorchakov is suddenly laconic, unresponsive. His obvious resemblance to the conventional Gemini belies his contempt for astrology. He knows Gemini fits him to a T, a final blow, it  stops his words. The antithetical Gorbunov tries to restore his faith in Urania:

                                                               "You're

                           forgetting that, although the radius

                           is scorned in life, the compass will endure

                           forever, Gorchakov."

          Of course, as is usually the case with Brodsky, one assumes that the poem is better in Russian, the arguments more convincing. Nothing perishes faster in translation than the sheen of an intricate rhyme scheme, also the delicate conversational gradations of Slavic irony and mood. The notorious "untranslatability" of Brodsky (echoing that of Pushkin) is a fitting part of his Geminian literariness, and added to his labors and his substance as a personage.  He was not only his own translator, but editor and collaborator with a stable of colleagues. Brodsky is a hero of border-crossing, so charmingly grateful for the freedom offered by the West that we English reader generously excuse the inevitable awkwardness. We lean forward to understand -- what communicator could ask for more? 

                           "Indeed, a star that climbs above the field

                           seeks out a brighter interlocutor."

                                                               --- Mark Shulgasser

                                                      astrodreamer.squarespace.com

                                                               wkkbooks@localnet.com

Notes:

.

         Swift Mercury (known to the Greeks as Hermes, to the Egyptians as Thoth) is the tutelary planet/deity of the Gemini sector of existence. Messenger of the gods and inventor of writing, his identity with the split figure of the Twins is revealed by their shared  proclivity for stealing cattle. The Gemini twins (in Greek the Dioskouri, god-boys), stole cattle. In the case of the constellation it is said, perhaps because of proximity to the Milky Way, but that seems far-fetched. As for Hermes/Mercury, the first thing he did as a mere babe was to steal cattle (Taurus) from his uncle Apollo (Aries, a sun-god, why not?)  

         Gemini Alexander Pope, translator of Homer and master of the couplet asked (with the intuition that literariness is inborn):

                           Why did I write? What sin unknown

                           Dip't me in ink, my parents or my own?

         Thomas Hardy's "vespering bird"  "knows somehow" of "the belting Zodiac".

Aquarian poet Elizabeth Bishop

            Born on February 8, 1911, a hundred years ago last week, Elizabeth Bishop wrote about her sudden, sickening childhood identifications with the sky-permeating female scream, and the dizzying awareness of her unavoidable fate: being human, "one of them," accompanied by "the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space." Of this never forgotten inward trauma, her cosmic fall into identity and time, she solemnly notes the date in these lines from her poem "In the Waiting Room":  "I said to myself: three days / and you'll be seven years old. . . ./ And it was still the fifth of February, 1918."             

          The poet's first conscious creative act, then, was to establish the birthdate as synecdoche of origin, identity and fate. This fetishistic attitude toward the birthdate is in a sense universal and unavoidable, and a source of both the attraction and the antipathy to astrology.

          Thirty years later Bishop commemorated her orphan's birthday with a stoical dejection ode, pivoting hopefully only on the very last word.

          Some readers take Bishop’s prized, meticulous objectivity for the obverse of confessionalism, a betraying concealment of the authorial self in shambles. Her fingerprints: geographical dislocation, abrupt changes of scale and perspective, eccentrically perched vision and spiraling irony, any-and-all adduced to an adrift identity.

          I did a quick search for qualifiers to the term "Self" in some recent books about Elizabeth Bishop, and came across "dismantled,"  "disunified,"  "shipwrecked,"  "fluid and unfixed,"  "unstable,"  "only arbitrarily bounded,"  "denied,"  "questioned,"  "lost,"  "obfuscated," "decentered,"  "abnegated," and  "fractured".

           The poet's famous attentive objectivity originates in self-effacement. The motives for effacement are well-known: female, homosexual, alcoholic, chronically ill, the American gothic childhood. Fortunately, directly opposite confident, sun-ruled Leo, Aquarius deplores egotism. Not so much a self as a constellation of problems, Bishop dedicated herself at whatever cost to a true poet's life of "no regular hours, so many temptations," reading, writing (mostly letters), affections, drinking, and travel.

          Bishop's cold-blooded menagerie, her semi-alive lichen and moss, her wraith-like atmospherics, measure alienation from a solid core of solar identity. With Aquarian Hugo Hofmannsthal she would agree "We are no more than dove-cotes." Her multi-hued mineral grains, the iridescences, her attention to every color playing no favorites, and the triple rainbow epiphany which is central to her reputation, are shining peripheries of hope, the refraction of unendurable singularity.

                   *                 *                 *

        Aquarius, centrifugal of the autocratic heart, circulates democratically, directs the oxygenation of the blood, and identifies with all aspects of the atmospheric cycle  Thus Bishop's asthma , which chronically threatened her life, but stimulated her highest identification. Her work is crafted in a death struggle and is as necessary as cortisone. She breathes easiest when uncrowded before the detailed panorama. Continents, rivers, waterfalls, harbors, mists, moonlight, cities are seen from the slopes.

--- Mark Shulgasser, The Blue Zenith

From Best American Poetry blog.

See Astrological Profiles there for my pieces on Sagittarian and Capricorn poets as well.

Poet James Dickey, 2/2/23: He moves among stars.

Here are some excerpts from James Dickey's wonderful long poem The Zodiac, published in 1976.

He moves among stars.

                                    Sure.      We all do, but he is star-crazed, mad

            With Einfuehling, with connecting and joining things that lay their meanings

                        Over billions of light years

                                                            Eons of time--Ah,

                        Years of light:   billions of them:   they are pictures

                        Of some sort of meaning.   He thinks the secret

                        Can be read.   But human faces swim through

            Cancer   Scorpio   Leo   through all the stupefying design,

And all he can add to it or make of it, living or dead:

                        *                        *                        *

                                                            Only one way beyond

The room.

                        The Zodiac.

                                    He must solve it   must believe it   learn to read it

                        No, wallow in it

As poetry.

                        *                        *                        *

            He has to hold on to the chair: the room is pitching and rolling--

                        He's sick   seasick with his own stars,

                        Seasick and airsick   sick

            With the Zodiac.  .  .  . 

                        He knows he's not fooling himself    he knows

                                    Not a damn thing of stars   of God   of space

Of time   love night death sex fire numbers signs words,

Not much of poetry.   But by God, we've got a universe

Here

                        Those designs of time are saying something

                        Or maybe something or other.

                                                                        Night--

                        Night tells us.   It's coming--

            Venus shades it and breaks it.    Will the animals come back

            Gently, creatively open,

            Like they were?

                                                            Yes.

            The great, burning Beings             melt into place

            A few billion-lighted inept beasts

            Of God--

                        What else is there?   What other signs   what other symbols

                        Are anything beside these?   If the thing hasn't been said

            This way,   then God can't say it.

                        *                        *                        *

                        What animal's getting outlined?

                        All space is being bolted

            Together:   eternal blackness

                                                            Studded with creatures.

            Stars.

                        Beasts.   Nothing left but the void

                                    Deep-hammering its creatures with light-years.

            Years made of light.

                                                            Only light.

                                                                                    Yes.

                        *                        *                        *

            Look, stupid, get your nose out of the sky for once.

There're things that are close to you, too. Look at that!

                        Don't cringe: look right out over town.

Real birds. There they are in their curves, moving in their great element

            That causes our planet to be blue and causes us all

                        To breathe.  Ah, long ghostly drift

            Of wings.

                                                Well, son of a bitch,

                                                                        He sits and writes,

                        And the paper begins to run

                                                                        With signs.

                                                But he can't get rid of himself enough

                        To write poetry.   He keeps thinking Goddamn

                                    I've misused myself   I've fucked up   I haven't worked--

I've traveled and screwed too much,

                                                But   but by dawn, now    NOW

            Something   coming   through-coming   down-coming   up

To me   ME!

                        His hand reaches, dazzling with drink   half alive,

            For the half-dead vision.   That room and its pages come in and

                                                                                                            Out

Of being.   You talk about looking:  would you look at that

Electric page!  What the hell did I say?   Did I say that?

                        You bastard, you. Why didn't you know that before?

            Where the hell have you been with your head?

You and the paper should have known it, you and the ink:   you write

                                                Everybody writes

With blackness. Night. Why has it taken you all this time?

                                    All this travel, all those lives

                        You've fucked up? All those books read

            Not deep enough? It's staring you right in the face.    The

                                                                                                            secret--

            Is whiteness.   You can do anything with that.   But no--

                        The secret is that on whiteness you can release

                        The blackness,

                                                The night sky.  Whiteness is death   is dying

                        For human words to raise it from purity   from the grave

                                    Of too much light.   Words must come to it

                        Words from anywhere   from   from

Swamps  mountains  mud  shit  hospitals  wars  travels  from

                                    Stars

From the Zodiac.

            You son of a bitch, you! Don't try to get away from yourself!

I won't have it! You know God-damn well I mean you! And you too,

            Pythagoras! Put down that guitar, lyre, whatever it is!

You've driven me nuts enough with your music of the spheres!

                        *                        *                        *

                                    You know that from the black death,

                                                            The forest of beast-

            Symbols, the stars are beaten down by drunks

Into the page.

                                    By GOD the poem is in there   out there

                        Somewhere    the lines that will change

                        Everything, like your squares and square roots

                                    Creating the heavenly music.

                        *                        *                        *

                                    the stars are gasping

                        For understanding.  They've had Ptolemy,

                        They've had Babylon

                                                            But now they want Hubbell

            They want Fred Hoyle and the steady-state.

                                                            But what they really want   need

                                                            Is a poet   and

            I'm going to have to be it . . . .

                                                                        WHEN?

                        In all this immensity, all this telescope-country,

                        Why this microscopic searching

                                                Of the useless human heart?

Goodbye Sagittarius

Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and trembling, endured as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?  For staying is nowhere.  Rainer Maria Rilke, b. Dec 4, 1875

Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic and her partner Ulay were both born on November 30, three years apart. This coincidence played an acknowledged role in their collaborations. The audio in the performance piece “Rest-Energy” is their amplified heart-beat and respiration. Reminds me of a poem by Sagittarius James Tate, “A Sunday Drive”:

“What am I supposed to do?” I said. “I think you’d

have to put an arrow through me,” she replied.

“I don’t have an arrow,” I said, “and besides I

could never do that. I love you!” "I think the

flying disease is for life,” she said, gliding

over me. Then she was gone in a blur of light.

More on Sagittarian poet James Tate here.

Aquarians question Identity

Broken Obelisk, Barnett Newman (Jan 29, 1912)
de nobis ipsis silemus (Of ourselves we are silent.) Francis Bacon 22 Jan 1561


"Subjective, objective -- what's the difference? William Burroughs February 5, 1914


“WHAT AM I? NOTHING.” Lord Byron 22 January 1788


"Who in the world am I?" asked Alice. "Ah! That's the great Puzzle."
Lewis Carroll 27 January 1832


Thus the famous theory of the *I* is essentially without a scientific object, since it is destined to represent a purely fictitious state.

Individualism is the disease of the Western World. Auguste Comte 19 January 1798


Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Bernard de Fontenelle 11 February 1657


None of us possesses his own self: it is wafted at us from without,

escapes us for long periods and returns to us in a breath.

We are no more than dove-cotes.

And self indeed! The word is very little more than a metaphor.

 Hugo von Hofmannsthal February 1, 1874

The first-person singular is my favorite figure of speech.

               Charles Lamb   February 10, 1775


"I" is the true shibboleth of humanity. Stendhal January 23, 1783


Is me her was you dreamed before?
Was then she him you us since knew?
Am all them and same now we?

Whence it is a sloperish matter, given the wet and low visibility, to
indentifine the individuone . . " James Joyce 2 February 1882


Ego! It is the great word of the twentieth century. . . Everything we
have done in this century, from monumental feats to nightmare of human
destruction, has been a function of that extraordinary state of the
psyche which gives us authority to declare we are sure of ourselves when
we are not. Norman Mailer January 31, 1923


It was when I read the first of the books I found in my house that I saw
the word "I." And when I understood this word, the book fell from my
hands, and I wept, I who had never known tears. I wept in deliverance
and in pity for all mankind. Ayn Rand February 2 1905 from her novel Anthem, which portrays a dystopian future where the first person singular has been abolished)


WE, a 1924 novel by the soviet writer Evgeny Zamyatin February 20, 1884, about a dystopian future where the first person singular has been abolished)

WE, the autobiography of Charles Lindbergh February 4, 1902


I, etcetera. a book of short stories by Susan Sontag January 29, 1933


And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. The minute you or anyone else knows what you are you are not it. You are what you or anybody else knows that you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

I am me because my little dog knows me. Gertrude Stein February 3, 1874


She would make him stand with her in front of the looking glass and ask him why he barked and trembled. Was not the little brown dog opposite himself? But what is “oneself”? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is? So Flush pondered that question, too . . . Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882): Flush, a Dog

Before her death Virginia Woolf planned a next novel to be called
"Anon."


"In revising his youthful poems, Georg Trakl (3 February 1887) substitutes everywhere for the
lyrical and personal "I" metaphoric disguises such as "the stranger," "a
thing putrified," "a dead thing," "the murderer." .. . . the poet has
abstracted everything unesssential, including the personal pronoun "I"
from his existence . .


The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God—and I take this shadow for a being. Simone Weil 3 February 1909

Lady Gaga Red Aries #32

Aries Lady Gaga looks great in red.  Wearing blood, for instance, is one of her fashion statements, and she has just associated herself with a headphone-accessory named (Red). The most interesting thing about her chart is the action of transformative Pluto as the cutting, or high focus, planet of her bowl configuration,conjunct the Moon in Scorpio, bolstered by a strong trine to Jupiter in Pisces (exalted).  Mars is in 0 Capricorn (also exalted).   She's an extreme Plutonian, obsessively personating chthonic goddess figures, flagrantly displaying the exalted menses of a hellish dominatrix, with a beat and a sense of humor -- her rapid success marks something, it's hard to tell what -- related perhaps to the Large Hadron Collider's start-up.

More Lady Gaga in red here.

Pattinson, Buddhism and Taurus

 

The Buddha was exceptionally handsome. “The Brahmin Sonadanda described him as handsome, good-looking, and pleasing to the eye, with a most beautiful complexion. He has a godlike form and countenance, he is by no means unattractive.” 

"It is wonderful, truly marvelous, the good Gotama's appearance . . just as the golden jujube in autumn is clear and radiant, just as a palm-tree fruit just loosened from the stalk is clear and radiant, just as an adornment of red gold wrought in a crucible by a skilled goldsmith, deftly beaten and laid on a yellow-cloth shines, blazes and glitters, even so . . . his complexion is clear and radiant."

“A disciple named Vakkali . . . was so obsessed by Buddha's physical presence that Buddha had to tell him to stop and reminded Vakkali to know Buddha through the Dhamma and not physical appearances.” (quotes from Wikipedia)

Buddha was a Taurus, and after years of restless seeking, with Taurean stubbornness he decided to sit under a tree until Enlightenment came, which it did after 49 days, at the Taurus full moon. So it’s interesting that Taurus Rob Pattinson had this profound Buddha experience – note the Taurean, fixed-earth emphasis on the vision’s concreteness, duration and practicality.

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.

see more Aries in Red here.

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.

          " . . . R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance. . . . Winnie, Olive and Beatrice, Nelly and Ida, Amy and Rue. Here they come, all the gay pack . . ."                    The 7 Rainbow Girls, a cavorting daisy-chain of colored                                                           scarves and flowers, in Finnegans Wake (Ch. 9)                                                                     by James Joyce (b. 2 Feb. 1882)

The Birthdate of Sigmund Freud

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, only seven months after the wedding of Freud’s parents.

Freud wrote a book called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, yet this jocular slur against his mother remains relatively unanalyzed by biographers, even though Freud himself raised suspicions that he was sired by one of his own half-brothers, that his official father was actually his grandfather.

To my mind, given all that we now know about Freud, the March 6 horoscope is the more apt of the two. There is much in the early years of Freud's biography to support this idea. (I have published a comparative analysis of the competing birthcharts in the Astrological Journal of March/April 2000). Only recently, however, have I come across Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home by Emanuel Rice, MD., where it is reported 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 a sheet of paper tucked inside a Bible which itself contains no family records at all. Yet in Peter Gay's authoritative biography, again the issue is relegated to a complacent and jocular footnote: "But the documents, amply supported by the Freuds' family Bible, shows that Freud [Sr.] and his bride seem to have obeyed the proprieties: the conventional date of the biographies, May 6th, is correct."

  The sheet of paper in question is headed with a solemnly phrased record of Sigmund's grandfather's death, which took place after the wedding of Sigmund's parents but before his birth. There is of course something touching about this record of the grandson who attended his grandfather's funeral as a fetus. But the unique elaborations of this record may indicate that the deceased was not Sigmund's grandfather, but his great-grandfather. 

On this sheet of paper the May 6 birthdate appears or is implied no fewer than eight times: as the date of the month and day of the week for both the birth and the circumcision (mandated to take place one week after a Jewish birth), in both the Jewish and the Christian calendars; the insistent reiteration seems overdone and anomalous. We find nothing like it, in fact nothing at all, about the birth of Freud's five surviving siblings, or the brother born just a year after Sigmund who died in early childhood. Why does the so-called family bible only contain a record of this one child's birth? Freud biographers all seem to take it as a matter of course. 

The list of dates is followed by a spontaneous sentence which is marred by a Freudian slip of the pen: “On the fourth of [illegible], [1]856, my son mentioned above, long may he live, got three teeth." The change in tone chides the solemnity of the formal sentences above it and undermines trust, and the illegible slip may reveal the writer's embarrassment over the true date of the first dentition. (Born with a full head of hair, Freud's baby teeth would probably also have appeared precociously, and impossibly early if he was born in May.) The document perplexes; does one record the death of the grandfather and baby teeth on the same page?

The page also contains a list of the names of eight officiants at the circumcision. Just as the page has been presented as a sacred inscription in the "family Bible" while it is merely a piece of paper placed into a Bible, so this list of names has been taken as a list of signatures attesting to the correctness of the date. A mere list of names is taken for a list of dated signatures, which it is not. In short the so-called family bible evidence strikes one as having been over-elaborately written in order to securely corroborate the wrong date for future readers.

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 the 9-year-old 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. We know surprisingly little about the Manchester Freuds, or Freud's father's source of income.]

The circumstances around Freud's birth records are clouded. He was not born, as has been stated, in an Jewish shtetl where no one could keep a secret, but in a small enclave of suspiciously foreign Ostjuden, hardly distinguished from gypsies by the local population, stigmatized, secretive itinerants, possibly petty criminals. At the time of his birth, the largish family was crowded into one room above the shop of a gentile locksmith (not blacksmith). 

It is worth pointing out that the March 6 birthdate is not without support among Freudians: Marie Balmary made the most extensive argument in Psychoanalysing Psychoanalysis (1979); Wladimir Granoff assented in the published 1975 lectures Filiations; as does philosopher Andrea Nye in her Feminist Theories and Philosophies of Man (p. 156); as do Jay and Jean Harris, MDs , in The One-Eyed Doctor Sigismund Freud (1984). The issue is even raised in some psychology textbooks. Though unproven, it is far from implausible.

It is hard to read 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 and intense conjunction in Pisces of Sun, Moon, Neptune and Jupiter, all square Saturn, which took place on March 6, 1856. Pisces, the last Zodiacal sign, is traditionally associated with nescience and void, ergo, the Unconscious; while the quadrature of Saturn evokes pathology and pessimism.

    There is a gradually assembling consensus that the vast influence of Freud on the mind of the twentieth century was in some way delusional, rhetorical, pseudo-scientific. I relish the paradox that another pseudo-science, astrology can offer insight here. As former markers of personal identity erode under the influence of psychopharmacology, assisted reproductive technologies, globalization, the internet, etc., we look back on the Freudian mythos with the newly-liberated cultist’s stunned sense of incomprehension and wonder. 

Conglomeration of Gemini nonsense.

Something a little silly perhaps, arbitrary and unchronological, entirely consequent on the vagaries of TurnerClassicMovies programming. This goes back to Gemini, the Hands, and the Taurus cusp. Remember wonderful 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 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