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.

Taurus/Gemini cusp

Hermes/Mercury stealing the Oxen of Apollo, one of several mythic resonances at the cusp of Taurus and Gemini.

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.