The Red Shoes (#21)

In Aries Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Red Shoes" the color red plays the same role it does in Bette Davis's "Jezebel". To shock propriety, the heroine insists on wearing red dancing shoes to church, with dire consequences.

Aries Red #22 - Baby's first outfit - Descartes and Hobbes

 Aries remembers birth, emerging clothed in bloody viscera, in the seat of compulsion and pleasure/pain. Aries never gets over it and a marked ambivalence toward the Mother runs through the biography of the Ram.

The amniotic sac (gr. amnos, lamb) and the blood-laden placenta. Aries never fully recovers from the trauma of birth. They oscillate between the exhilaration of freedom and the unfairness of having no choice but to BE. They never give up their first lover/enemy, the Mother. The personal history of Aries often contains a flamboyancy in the mother-figuration, an dramatic engagement they can't pass up or let go of.

Aries tells us about beginnings: at the beginning of the modern mind Aries speaks through two philosophers, the contemporaneous Descartes (March 31, 1596 - 1650) and Hobbes ( April 5, 1588 - 1679). Philosophical argument deplores the ad hominem, but astrology adores it: both Descartes and Hobbes endured particularly vivid birth circumstances. Descartes, with cogito ergo sum, objectified the concept of the Self we continue to use and question. He experienced a complicated and politically dense infancy. Briefly, he lied about it; philosophers are not supposed to lie.

As for Hobbes, inventor of the rational materialist politics of power, his reputation rolls on the wheels of a few Arietic formulations, ("clear and distinct" as Descartes said thoughts should be) the "warre of each against all",  "nasty, brutish, and short". His birth took place during the bombardment of the English coast by the Spanish Armada. "His mother fell in labor with him upon the fright of the invasion of the Spaniards," Aubrey's Brief Lives puts it. A bachelor, Hobbes had no offspring but left an autobiography. He attributed his lifelong anxiety to his delivery: "And hereupon it was my Mother Dear/Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear."

Additional reading:

Bordo, Susan. Ed. Feminist Interpretations of Descartes (1999)

Hoffman, Piotr. The Quest for Power: Hobbes, Descartes, and the emergence of modernity (1996)

http://soysauced.blogspot.com/2008/10/marlon-brando-was-redhead.html

Amy Goodman, Aries in Red #23

Happy Birthday to "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman! Yet for all their outspokenness, we find very few Aries among the major names of the classical feminist movement. Gloria Steinem is just about the only one I can think of.

Red Aries #24 (Mothers)

Ann Miller, star of "Easter Parade", b. April 7, 1923

ARIES'S MOTHER PROBLEM

I hurry through these references in order to achieve a general impression of the harsh reality of the birth experience which Aries exposes.

Samuel Beckett (b. April 13, 1906): His parents made it clear that he was an unwanted pregnancy. He was obsessed with memories of suffocation in the womb, of an attempted wire hanger abortion on himself as a fetus, and with a nagging sensation of having been “incompletely born”.

Marguerite Duras (b. April 4, 1914) was obsessed by her demented mother, who favored her horrible eldest son. She was traumatized by her only pregnancy, which ended in stillbirth. She wrote, “I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”  

Cynthia Ozick (b. April 17, 1928): Her tale of Puttermesser and the Golem is an amazing meditation on the  mother/child dyad. So, for that matter, is her famous holocaust story, The Shawl.

Baudelaire (April 9, 1821) and his mother, the remarried Mme Aupick, a paradigmatic relationship acutely analyzed by J-P Sartre in his classic 'Baudelaire'. Baudelaire lived fatherless with his mother in a state of symbiotic, quasi-fetal bliss, until he was eight, when she abruptly married Aupick. The poet never recovered from the late loss of his paradise. 

The mother of the poet Paul Verlaine (b. March 30, 1844) “suffered three miscarriages before Paul’s birth in 1844; she preserved the fetuses in jars. When Paul came along he received the obsessive and indulgent mothering that such behavior portended. . . .In 1869 Verlaine made at least two violent attacks on his mother, threatening to kill her (how genuinely remains unclear), and on one occasion breaking the glass jars in which the three dead fetuses were kept.” (Bohemian Paris, by Jerrold E. Seigel)

Bette Davis, in the film Now, Voyager a self-proclaimed matricide and in her daughter's autobiography My Mother’s Keeper an abusive parent. Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, an abused mother, and in Mommy Dearest, an abusive mother. In Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, they abuse each other.

Among the psychoanalysts:
Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, two important post-Freudian theorists specializing in the child: Each of them criticized Freud for his over-emphasis of the oedipal phase and his neglect of the crucial and often traumatic mother/child bond.

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897): As a teenager he spied on his mother’s trysts, breathlessly reported them to his father, and thus precipitated her suicide. Then he had to discover her body. This parallels Aries Christopher Hitchens's mother's suicide, which he hints he might have prevented. He was summoned to Athens to fetch her body, and shockingly confronted the blood-soaked scene of her death.

Billie Holiday suffered this formative meta-maternal disaster. Her favorite family member was her greatgrandmother, her grandfather's mother:

She really loved me and I was crazy about her. She had been a slave on a big plantation in Virginia and she used to tell me about it. She had her own little house in the back of the plantation. Mr. Charles Fagan, the handsome Irish plantation owner, had his white wife and children in the big house. And he had my great grandmother out in back. She had sixteen children by him, and all of them were dead except Grandpop.

We used to talk about life. And she used to tell me how it felt to be a slave, to be owned body and soul by a white man who was the father of her children. She couldn't read or write, but she knew the Bible by heart from beginning to end and she was always ready to tell me a story from the Scriptures.

She was ninety-six or ninety-seven then and had dropsy. I used to take care of her every day after school. No one else paid any attention. I'd give her a bath sometimes. And I'd always bind her legs with fresh cloths and wash the smelly old ones.

She'd been sleeping in chairs for ten yearrs. The doctor told her she'd die if she ever laid down. But I didn't know. And once after I'd changed the cloths on her legs and she had told me a story, she begged me to let her lie down. She said she was tired. I didn't want to let her. But she kept begging and begging. It was pityful.

Finally I spred a blanket on the floor and helped her stretch out. Then she asked me to lie down with her because she wanted to tell me another story. I was tired too. I'd been up early that morning to scrub steps. So I laid down with her. I don't remember the story she told me because I fell asleep right away.

I woke up four or five hours later. Grandma's arm was still tight around my neck and I couldn't move it. I tried and tried and then I got scared. She was dead, and I began to scream. The neighbors came running. They had to break Grandma's arm to get me loose. Then they took me to a hospital. I was there for a month. Suffering from what they said was shock.

When I got home Cousin Ida started right in where she had left off, beating me. This time it was for letting Grandma out of her chair. The doctor tried to stop her. He said if she kept it up I'd grow up to be nervous. But she never stopped.

What a gruesome version of the birth trauma, the terrifying struggle of nascent being against negation and regression, that continually animates Aries, the sign of beginning.

Jesus Christ, Aries in Red #25

RaphaelRAPHAEL was born and died on Good Friday (1483-1520). Almost invariably, his Christs and Madonnas are robed in red. According to Matthew the soldiers put a scarlet robe on the bleeding Christ. Christ may well have been an Aries leader. ('I did not come to bring peace, but a sword'); the Christmas date is a late borrowing from an ancient Roman festival. He was, if not born, more importantly, reborn at the Passover/Easter time. The stark echo of womb and tomb, the perpetually tragic Mother and Son, the sacrificed lamb of God, the cult of sacred suffering and sacred Paschal blood, the barbaric cannibalism repeated in the Eucharist, are colors from the paint pot of Aries, the emblem of origins.

 Raphael

Anthony Van Dyck

Van Gogh, Red Aries #26

Vincent Van Gogh, classic Aries redhead. More Van Gogh self-portraits here.

"There is only a constantly being born again . . . . .  a constant going from darkness into light."

Exactly a year before his birth, [Van Gogh's] mother, Cornelia, gave birth to an infant, also named Vincent, who was stillborn, or dead upon birth. His grieving parents buried the child and set up a tombstone to mark the grave. As a result, Vincent Van Gogh grew up near the haunting sight of a grave with his own name and birthday on it.

Take a look at this Self-Portrait with Sunflower by Anthony Van Dyck, the other great redheaded Dutch painter. Any other major painter who featured sunflowers so importantly as him and Van Gogh? (Here for Van Gogh sunflowers.) Not that I know of. I guess the sunflower appealed to Aries, the first fire sign, as a down-to-earth blossoming of the solar fire, as a benign representation of the fiercely assertive individuation principle.

Van Dyck was pre-eminently a portraitist of others but found time to paint himself often, usually emphasizing his auburn hair. 

Anthony Van Dyck, Self-Portrait with Sunflower

James Watson, Red Aries #27

The dustjacket of The Double Helix is red because blood is the metaphor of hereditary transmission – bloodlines, blood relations, blood will tell. The Aries author told us (in his  third volume of memoirs, Avoid Boring People) that he was delighted by the jacket color. The 1953 book shocked with its demonstration that science is cutthroat and personal, and that scientists are primarily motivated to high achievement by the blind desire to get laid. Watson’s second memoir is called Genes, Girls and Gamow, reiterating the strain of crude sexual reductionism that infects the ‘selfish gene’ theorizing of the belligerent Aries Richard Dawkins as well. This Don Juanism, an inability to get beyond the domination of pubescent excitement, is Aries extroversion par excellence. In all three of his memoirs Watson comes across a puerile oogler.

On the cover of Avoid Boring People Watson put a picture of himself hammering his chair in childish glee.

Watson is a good read, with a brisk Aries writing style. (“Use snappy sentences to open your chapters,” he advises.) Obviously he enjoys ruffling feathers, but it comes as a shock to read sociobiologist E. O. Wilson say he was “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met.” After all, Wilson,  author of Consilience,  is a master at smoothing out differences. Watson notes with pleasure that Linus Pauling called The Double Helix “a disgraceful example of malevolence and egocentricity’. At the beginning of his career he “deeply offended several old-timers by giving lectures in unlaced tennis shoes and wearing my floppy hat at night as well as during the day.”  At the end (recently) he scandalized with reactionary remarks about race, intelligence,  sexuality,  ecology,  obesity,  and so forth,  as if compelled to hit the hot button.

Watson is not so much a great scientist as the most aggressive competitor in a race to complete a difficult puzzle. The word double (in The Double Helix) invokes the Gemini, so the astrologer is pleased to remark that Watson’s partner in the discovery of the double structure of the dna molecule, Francis Crick, was born under that collaborative sign.

Watson’s three volumes of memoirs have importantly contributed to an awareness of the subjectivity of science, a field whose emphasis on objectivity could only be pierced by an exhibitionistic Aries.

Marcel Marceau, Aries with a red flower (#28)

Marcel Marceau, carrot-topped French mime, born March 22, 1923, at the zero degree of Aries. His persona, Bip, was inseparable from his partner and alterego, the red flower.

Chaplin Red Flagged (#29)

In this memorable scene, he picks up a red warning flag that has fallen off the back of a wagon, and finds himself inadvertantly at the forefront of a revolutionalry riot. Red has been the color of revolution since the bloody Reign of Terror.

Robert Downey, Jr. also an Aries (4 April 1965) portryed him.

Warren Beatty has already been cited as an example of Aries priapism; recently the number of his "conquests"has been extimated at 13,000. His most important movie project was the epic film REDS, which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in, and for which he won the Best Director Oscar

Aries pairings in movies are fun: Beatty and Julie Christie, McQueen and Ali McGraw (especially when they both spontaneously jump into the pond after he's released from prison), Steven Seagal and Kelly LeBrock already mentioned, Crawford and Davis. Surely a good deal of the intensity of THE GODFATHER is attributable to the presence of a gaggle of Aries natives: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Richard Conte, Sterling Hayden, and Francis Coppola himself -- all Aries.

We could talk as long as we like about the Aries influence in Charlie Chaplin, the prototype of the 20c. Subject. Notice his perpetual parody of Aries masculinity. Soldier, cop, boxer, Casanova, caveman, strongman, hero. 

  I just ran across a rather different picture of the actor than we are used to, as a violent, tyrannical sociopath: ".....Chaplin is the lost twin of Adolf Hitler. Peter Ackroyd almost suggests as much. Both men first drew breath in April 1889. They had drunken fathers and nervous mothers. There were patterns of madness and illegitimacy in the family tree. They were short and sported an identical moustache. They had marked histrionic skills, each man ‘appealing to millions of people with an almost mesmeric magic’. They were despotic towards underlings — and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is less political satire than back-handed homage. Hitler watched it at a private screening — twice. 
….. Lenin said that ‘Chaplin is the only man in the world I want to meet.’ [Lenin and Hitleer, both Aries]
…..The theme of Ackroyd’s biography of Chaplin is the alarming contrast between the sweetness of the Little Tramp, the saviour of fallen women and lost children, and the monstrousness of Chaplin himself, who came across to every single person who ever met him as difficult, suspicious and angry. ….. Robert Florey, an assistant director, called him a ‘tyrannical, wounding, authoritative, mean, despotic man’. ….. ‘The violence of his anger was always so out of proportion to the object that had stirred him that I couldn’t help being frightened of it,’ said one of his sons.

Hannah, Chaplin’s mother….was certainly a lunatic. Records show she was incarcerated in various asylums, put in a padded cell and given shock treatments. ….. He survived, he said, by being suffused with ‘the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down in defeat.’ Hence, his demonic arrogance; ….. 

‘Charlie married me and then he forgot all about me,’ was a frequent complaint cited in divorce hearings. He was always off chasing fresher meat, painting his private parts with iodine to ward off the clap. Louise Brooks was terrified to see his ‘bright red erection’ coming at her in the dark. 

…..As a director he was a dictator: ‘Do this, do not do that, look this way, walk like this, now do it over.’ He’d shoot 36,000 feet of negative and print 1,800 feet of it. He ordered 342 takes over a two-year period of a single shot in City Lights — the blind flower-seller handing over a bunch of violets to the Little Tramp. Was this perfectionism? A manifestation of obsessive compulsive disorder? Or was he behaving like a simple power-crazed brute? 
….. His sexual scandals, as revealed in numerous paternity suits, upset morality……Monsieur Verdoux, about a dapper Edwardian-era serial killer. is based on Landru, the famous French Bluebeard, also an Aries (12 April 1869

Aries-Taurus cusp

The cuspsal regions at the borders of adjacent signs are controversial, invoking considerations of marginality, liminality, and plain old binarism. Although the word usually denotes a precise demarcation, I like to use it to describe the range of relationships, from antithesis to blending, which exist between adjacent zodiacal signs, a range that implicitly permeates even the purest expression of a unitary sign, in a mode of Hegelian negation. As the tropical and siderial zodiacs approach to complete overlap, many new and penetrating truths are cuspal in nature.

The tragic sacrificial splendor of the corrida ritualizes the zodiacal crisis of Self, where Aries encounters Taurus: freedom-craving spirit encounters material necessity, the armed hero against the obdurate World. The bull is color-blind, and it's the movement that he reacts to; it is the human participants in the corrida who react to the red color. More red even than the capote is the copious blood, the blood-soaked hide, that makes the point. The next, Taurus / Gemini, cusp is summond in the gesture of the stinging picadors and the banderillos, or the legend of the gadfly. The fixed earth principle provokes attack from both sides --

  
SEEING RED: A Study in Consciousness (2006) by Aries-born neuro-philosopher Nicholas Humphrey. Red is of course the color of Mars and Aries, blood etc, as covered at astrodreamer. squarespace.com/Ariess.

Taurus Art 1.0

Yves Klein (28 April 1928 - 1962). His "search . .  for the realization of matter" led to his fanciful commitment to a single color, the patented International Klein Blue, a mineral (lapis) pigment. Most of Klein's work is conceptual, abstract or geo-metric. Rarely, and only with tongue in cheek, did he descend to the mimetic or iterative, those being the province of the next sign, Gemini. His Globe reclaims Earth from history and language, and presents it as a mounted physical specimen, a planetary body. Venus is, of course, also a body, as well as the planetary ruler of Taurus, as fertility and the senses are bestirred out of the passive Earth.

Taurus Art 1.02

Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1845)

One of Turner's most popular paintings, it was never exhibited in his lifetime, and may be unfinished, yet is taken now to be one of his most characteristic works. The Taurean cows incorporate the elemental  massiveness of castle, sun, water and air.

 "Turner never lost his connection to reality. One of the last, semiabstract paintings in the show’s final gallery is a sunrise view of Norham Castle. . . . Amid its gorgeous smudges of blue castle, yellow sun and pale ochre shores are two cows, faint but definite, who have come for their morning drink.   New York Times

Taurus art 1.03

O Bull, return!

Taurus wants the concrete, the real. Here is one of the first substantive projects of astrological research to come out of digital data power.  Test Produces Significant Result for Astrology in World News Report. According to researcher Richard Schulz, the astrological outlook for the global economic situation is bleak.

But take heart: the nature of astrological prediction is to be incorrect. That's why it's such a delight when an astrological prediction comes true. It is the historical role of astrology to continually produce critique, challenge and failure. It is the Sisyphean science, to invoke another Taurean reference. Anyway, fixed earth Taurus is grounded in the unchanging. The Bull Tauruas always returns, or rather never really leaves;  the powerful energy of human productivity, labor, value, capital, all responses to natural, objective necessity--the World, all proceed and harness the subjective explosion of Aries.

Taurus art 1.04

"Jill" (1959) enamel on canvas, 7'6"x6'6" Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo

Frank Stella (b. 12 May 1936) took up large monochromatic canvases in the late fifties, around the same time as Yves Klein, but with the consistent organizing motif of the stripe, rather than the single Kleinian pigment  

" . . . binary, cruciform or concentric symmetries create an unworldly, hypnotic fixity, as of immutable, venerated emblems."

Taurus art 1.05

A Taurus bull-etin pre-empts my planned programming.

I was going to post a massive Buddha. Did you know He is said to have been born, and to have achieved Enlightenment under the sign of Taurus? More pertinently, no restless seeking for Him: He declared he would sit under this one banyan tree until Enlightenment came, and so He did, they say, for thirty years. Stubborn.

Aries/Taurus cusp

 Reflect that this Aries/Taurus cusp is the site of the great crisis of modern primitivism, modern solipsism, materialist despair: births of Hitler and Lenin. The two simplest, densest signs butt heads. Where the impetuous, irresistible force of Aries, fleeing the entrapping womb of Pisces, still filled with dreams, encounters the immovable reality of Taurus -- there can be much gnashing of teeth.

Taurus art 1.07

Jasper Johns, b. May 15, 1930: the homogenous Taurean physicality of the sculp-metal substance  negates the on-off binarism, the communicative Geminian essence of the light bulb. Always in Johns's work there is a reductive interplay of signal and substance, yet, despite the reduction, the stubborn physical integrity and sensuous materiality evokes multileveled reflective meaning.

Taurus Bull's Eye (1.08)

Jasper Johns, TargetAnecdote of two Tauruses: Mme de Stael, notorious conversational bulldozer, extorted four words from the famously taciturn Duke of Wellington ("who was scarcely known to speak"). 'Let me go away,' he cried, on hearing her announced. (in V. Woolf, Books and Portraits ) Illustrates the physical, Taurean principle that two material objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

cy twombly Taurus art 1.09

Like the Taurus artist Yves Klein, who restricted himself to working entirely with one stone -- lapis lazuli pigment,  Cy Twombly (b. 25 April 1928) obsessively explores essentially dumb material, now differentiated into two (Gemini) stones, slate and chalk, representing the possibility of communicative meaning (writing) as yet contentless. In the work below, he pays hommage to Taurus's tutelary deity, in numerous communication systems. 

Taurus art 1.10

Full-Figured Statuette, 35,000 Years Old, Provides New Clues to How Art Evolved. New York Times, May 12, 2009

Willem De Kooning (b. April 24, 1904)

Mother, mater, matter. Note the lack of feet, of locomotion, in the primitive female generative principal. My first dream in Jungian analysis was of a lady too fat to stand, in the parking lot of a supermarket, a group of us trying to help her up. My analyst, a sharp old thing now deceased named Greta van Fenema, (who knew Jung, gray hair in a bun, slacks), leaped to a high bookshelf and took down a volume with a large picture of the Willendorf Venus (11,000 years younger than the one pictured above). She explained my thralldom to the Great Mother archetype, and all the deplorable psychological and behavioral consequences ensuing.