Saturday, December 13, 2008 at 04:00PM Any announcement of future events is an infringement of the rule, and involves this danger—that it may change the event, in which case the whole science falls to the ground, and becomes nothing more than a childish game.
The Charterhouse of Parma, Chapter 8
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 03:54PM 
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 itself
PIXEL, 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 unpredictable, uncanny event in 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 cyclical (rather than linear) concept of time, an Eternal Now, the epiphanic Instant, the electrical zap, the accident, the gratuitous, the lightning strike, the thunderclap. 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)
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 02:39PM 
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 (since in this scherzerade of one's thousand one nightinesses the sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) 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
Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 11:02AM 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?
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 12:40PM 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.
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.
Saturday, April 2, 2011 at 03:38PM 
"Where the Music Comes From" words & music by LH
"Evening" from 'Evening without Angels' by Wallace Stevens
"Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll
