Fifteenth-century zodiac wheel.


Forsake thy cage, 

             Thy rope of sands, 

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee 

Good cable, to enforce and draw, 

          And be thy law, 

While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. 

George Herbert, “The Collar”

AT 11:41 AM EST, THE MOON MAKES ITS LAST ASPECT IN CANCER, an opposition to Mercury in Capricorn, to go Void-of-Course over lunchtime 'til she enters Leo at 1:53 PM. 

This interval is a wonderful opportunity to be silent, or at the very least to slow down your speech (Mercury in Capricorn) and train your inner dialogue on your heart of hearts.

Mercury will enter Aquarius tomorrow, the better to disburse your intellection among the fiber optics and satellites, so best make use of the saturnine sobriety & sacred silence (pardon the alliteration) in today’s midday inhale.

By the time she enters Leo, the moon’s weakening opposition with Pluto in Capricorn is still taking to heart lessons from the collapse of patriarcho-capitalist structures over the past ten years—(Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008: financial collapse, the fallacies of Too-Big-To-Fail, the Occupy Movement, Brexit, the rise of the Orange One, #MeToo....). 

The heart wants what the heart wants, or so the saying goes. And yet—we’re so easily caged by “petty thoughts,” as Herbert has it, that they might as well be our ribs. What if the heart could become an organ of second sight; of true vision? Like the eyelike wound in the side of all those old Christs. Or the eye-shaped zodiac above.

Ariana Reines

January 30, 2018. Photo: Ariana Reines.


Ariana Reines is a poet & playwright. She astrologizes at lazyeyehaver.com.

Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes, Paix, 1972

fer dans notre coeur (St. John Perse, in a poem I haven’t read in a decade, which I might be misquoting, which I might have invented)

I'M THINKING ABOUT THE BLUE BLOOD that flows through the heart of the queens and kings of the jungle, the blue interiors of your body, the blue light that spreads behind your eyelids when you’ve seen too much sun. When light is suddenly thrown on you after an accustomed darkness: the blue-white of the shock. The blue haze that hovers around the Alps in real life, making them resemble old photographs of themselves: because that haze is the exact blue hue of decomposing color photographs from the 1970s. It’s a blue that’s just the billion shimmers thrown back up against the sun by all the mica in the stone up there, where the snow and permafrost have melted off. Krishna’s face. The color of lips and tattoos in Timbuktu. The berry blue of swollen orifices, chapped from love.

On Wednesday the Moon is full in Leo, eclipsed by the Sun, which throws its shadow from Aquarius, at 8:37 AM EST. It’s a Blue Moon, because it’s our second Full Moon this month, and it’s a Blood Moon, because when the Sun throws its shadow upon it the Moon’s face will appear red, and it’s a Supermoon because it will be in perigree, at its closest point to us, & thus will appear extra large in the sky. Finally, because the point of fullness & eclipse happens after sunup on the Eastern Seaboard, you’ll have to get up before dawn with me if you want to see it.

Leo rules the heart; the Moon pulls the tides, controls the flow of the menstrual cycle in mammals, and is the pilgrim power of our “natural” splendor.

What do I mean by “natural”? The Natal Moon (i.e., the position of the moon in your birth chart) indicates who you are in your magnificence, when you are simply receiving and reflecting the bounties of the universe, what you’ve been given and what flows through you, without having to prove or accomplish or earn it. Thus, your Natal Moon also indicates what you need in order to feel magnificent and total, above and below and beyond all striving.

Aquarius is technology, the future, the structures of social relating, the apparatus of group belonging. It is, as we’ve discussed, less “content” than the means by which “content” arrives to you. What does it mean that the Sun’s Aquarian shadow will cross the face of this Moon in the heart of the world? (Leo rules the heart—and the Sun rules Leo.)

Think about the ways the collective, and technology in its present incarnation, throw their shadow across your heart of hearts. Leos, though great actors and politicians, are actually terrible at insincerity. Walt Disney taught us to wish upon stars and follow our hearts: the simplest thing in the world, and easier said than done. And yet, with Mercury, Pluto, and Saturn all in Capricorn, the collective mind is in analytical, executive mode—trained on notions of true authority—while Mars, the iron in our hearts (to translate the line from the St. John Perse above), having departed Scorpio a few days ago, is now squaring Pluto from adventurous Sagittarius—pulling this twilight of the patriarchs toward an ambitious new future. Following his sojourn in Scorpio, Mars has transformed and is transforming from the God of War to the foot soldier of Matriarchy. For the planets, forever changing places, just as we do, are also consciousness itself—evolving. Uranus, in its long square to Pluto and its current square to Mercury, bespeaks an era of explosive collapse and radical transformation—but you don’t need an astrologer to tell you that. Jupiter in Scorpio’s squares both to Saturn and to Venus suggest that uncompromising truth, in matters of both sexuality and repression, of being extremely honest with yourself about your own desires, even if they’re (or rather, have up to this moment made you feel) freaky, gross, disgusting; like an asshole, or just flat-out unrealistic. Sexuality and desire are more elastic than we think. The ways we’ve been are not the ways we have to be.

The first seed planted at the New Year is almost full to bursting. The heart swells. What does it long for, and where does it find its food? How must we conjugate our need to shine, to love and be loved, with the developing global sense, on the nano level in us all, that in order to continue on this planet we must all weave our way into a social (and digital) fabric very different from the one connecting and alienating us now?

Ariana Reines

“The first seed planted at the New Year is almost full to bursting. The heart swells. What does it long for, and where does it find its food?”


January 29, 2018. Photo: Ariana Reines.


Ariana Reines is a poet & playwright. She astrologizes at lazyeyehaver.com.

The French Twist. Photo: Ariana Reines.


IT SEEMS TO ME THAT MANY, A GREAT MANY SENSED THEIR—BUT I DON’T WANT TO USE THE WORD INCOMPLETENESS. A certain discontinuity in themselves, an opening, a sense that somehow between their skeletons and the flesh there was work to be done, a sense of something insufficiently-come-into-being—not merely the personality, but something else. I think they felt this from the very beginning.

And I suppose the old sages filled this space with breath, which carried God, I guess, to every cell of the body—commanded God back into the flesh: a kind of mystic remarriage after the necessary divorce of birth.

When artists make, it seems to me it’s a cousin of the breathwork of the Yogis and the Sufis and the Kabbalists, even when any mysticism is disavowed. Making springs, at least mine does, from a profound experience of the incompleteness of what has been given, of the need to reconcile, to somehow balance the books between what merely is and what your ten or is it twelve bodies and all of your experience know also and often more importantly to be.

It seems to me this space—poeisis, or whatever—is now filled and constantly filling with technology, which is a sloppy term, but this is just a predawn speculation and I have six clients to astrologize for today—so let it stand for the moment. The openness, the incompleteness, the dissynchrony we feel—which it seems to me is both divine in nature and creative in what it demands—can be everywhere and in every wise now filled and reconciled by entities designed to entertain, to surveil, and to profit from this unnamed and perhaps unnameable openness, which is also a curiosity, which is also a longing, which is also the fact that we breathe.

Nobody who comes to this planet in a human body can escape the task of becoming human. That is the goal. We are here to become human. Becoming human is a task. Birth alone does not confer this gift. Birth is the beginning of the possibility of this gift being recognized, received, put into action.

David Bowie, “Memory of a Free Festival,” 1969

I’m tired of hearing speculations about our grim cybernetic future. It is here. Feeding the Aquarian structure, the micro veins of our minutest thoughtforms with the worst of ourselves and the wildest among our delusions, the reflections of which, upon the merely real and upon—to use an antiquated term—meatspace, is what we’re living out now, won’t excuse us from the human task. There is no avoiding the task. I don’t care if you were implanted in your mother’s womb by a super race from Sirius B, as I recently heard a squat man with a supposedly evidentiary dent in his head declare, or if you trace your origins to enslaved kings or Sumerian goddesses or if, like me, yours are the epigenetics of refugees, again and again genocided.

When I feel most Jewish I find myself remembering the idea of God existing, I remember this idea like it’s any other idea, except I always find myself bringing forgiveness to it. I forgive the demiurge, YWVH or whatever his name is, the possibility of his existence and the many dismaying aspects of himself he reproduced in us. This capacity to forgive the creator and even the idea of a creator sprang up spontaneously, shortly after I’d finished my first book. I forget the capacity periodically, just like I forget all the time even the idea of a creator. But sometimes I think this forgiveness in me could be a talent. Sometimes I think it could even be the beginnings of a theology.

Yesterday the clouds were like horsehair, and blocks of naked trees made a weird merkin on the Dallas sand. Metaphor comes easy when you’re in the air, and you permit it to yourself with the same kindness that lets you let movies make you cry. I watched the one about the glamorous gossip columnist and her brilliant alcoholic father, the transparent castle he never built her, the glass walls and ceilings through which she never did get to see the stars. She went to Barnard and so did I; she didn’t have the money to go there and neither did I; I haven’t become a glamorous gossip columnist; my father does however look at the stars. He looks at them through a telescope. I imagine he still does this, but I don’t know him anymore. In the Mariah Carey sense.

As many times as I’ve flown over the city at night, like a great singed body covered in smoking embers, like a catastrophe that always seems to have just happened, I never get totally used to it. I almost felt used to it at night. Then slept fitfully, braided among four tatters of dreams—in one a newscaster was using my coinage—the verb to astrologize—without, of course, crediting me.

I loved the hair of the person above. I had been looking at it a long time before I noticed their nails, their manly sideburns, the fat diamond or cubic zirconia engagement ring they were wearing. I don’t think I’ve seen a French twist on anybody but Catherine Deneuve in forever, Catherine Deneuve whose sex life American women are not trying to take away, but that and everything else must remain for now another story.

Ariana Reines

January 26, 2018. Photo: Ariana Reines.


Ariana Reines is a poet & playwright. She astrologizes at lazyeyehaver.com.

Bett at work. Photo: Ariana Reines.


 

SORRY I'M LATE. I'm on a plane. Woke up to coyotes laughing like emphysemic old ladies, rattling their teacups, rattling their big costume jewelry. Orion's Belt was so frank in my dull city eye, like the silver belts studded with fake turquoise they sell at the airport under glass: sometimes it's hard to believe how much you're allowed to have for free you find yourself paying for the knockoff. Being A Parody Of Heaven, a memoir. The virility of “3.” Mercury sextile Jupiter in Scorpio today should have you feeling a little clearer and less freaked out/grossed out by some of the old yous and permanent records dredged up by yesterday's sky audit and the politics of evil. My friend said, yesterday, about the mass rape of the land and the living consequences of genocide: Ceremony is important, but it alone can't heal the land. Magic can't do it. Only action can do it. Dreamers on the soil. I’ll be back tomorrow with more on “Value”; the ground beneath our feet. Mark E. Smith and Ursula LeGuin are rocking Charon's boat. I love it.

XO

A

Ariana Reines

Last night's quarter moon. Photo: Donatien Grau


Cathy, Rebecca, & Tony. Photo: Ariana Reines.


January 25, 2018. Photo: Ariana Reines.


Ariana Reines is a poet & playwright. She astrologizes at lazyeyehaver.com.

Dick Rickard, Ferdinand the Bull, 1938. Lover not a Fighter. See Eliott Smith; Lena Dunham <3

THE MOON entered Taurus at 8:41 AM EST squaring the Pluto-Mercury conjunction in Capricorn, forming a trine to Saturn in Capricorn, inconjunct Mars toward the end of his run through Scorpio. This is a day for forensics. The Moon attains First Quarter stage at 5:20 PM EST: this represents the first parry, or the first big question put to what you seeded at the New Moon. The seed of the Capricorn New Moon is turning and, to quote Huey Newton, “contradictions are the ruling principle of the universe:” ambition and executive capacity meet an audit both practical and spiritual today.

1. To find the smoking gun, follow the money. This is surely what Mueller is doing, just as sure as the sky heralds seeing through the rot, graft, and bullshit in the senate. Pluto-Mercury in Capricorn in a clear X-ray of the halls of power; the Moon in Taurus puts the emphasis on $, and secondarily, the Earth’s simple—and seemingly endlessly exploited—gifts.

2. The sky is lit up with questions of profit and loss, cost-benefit-analysis, actual money and who’s making it and who isn’t, and, more fundamentally, the question of value, of true values. If not the gold standard, if not cryptocurrency, if not the primary tenets of our young and swiftly rotting democracy—with a radioactive half-life to make your head spin—then what about the Taurean virtues of clean water, unraped lands, unhurried in-person friendship unmediated by multinational corporations, the luxuriant pleasure of refusing to rush, of not even knowing the meaning of rushing, the pleasure of the Earth’s simple pleasures, the notion that a real Bull market would involve a lot of slow sex and smelling flowers, not seeing red and goring matadors.

3. Try making a Venn diagram for four kinds of value this afternoon: 1. what I actually value (be honest and include the crap you wish you didn’t value), 2. what I want to value, 3. what the culture values right now, and 4. what the culture I want to live in would value. You can add circles for the scenes, subcultures, and worlds you move thru, just to add density and potential for overlap. I’ll do this today too, of course, & share with you what it brings up. This should be useful as you strategize and develop the intentions you set when the Moon was new.

See you tomorrow.

Ariana Reines

January 24, 2018. Photo: Ariana Reines.


Ariana Reines is a poet & playwright. She astrologizes at lazyeyehaver.com.

 

January 23, 2018. Photo: Ariana Reines.


OBVIOUSLY I KEEP WANTING TO BREAK MY NDA.

Obviously I have been wanting to do this for years. I have discussed it with editors, with journalists, I have discussed it with myself, I have taken up fiction in the dark, I have “hid my face in a crowd of stars,” I have found so many ways to hide my rage in universal currents and found ways to channel my pedagogy into the stars, about which I have only a beginner’s knowledge, because I want to give, and because I was born to give, and because I have tried to work outside of the ordinary delivery systems of power and knowledge as long as I’ve lived, and because I have always wanted to work, and I always have worked, and because I don’t want to starve, and because I have starved.

Obviously my lawyers, who are excellent, have said again and again over the years, we completely understand why you want to break your NDA and we strongly recommend that you not.

So, putting this out there without actually putting it out there, something that writing a daily column before dawn has gradually been teaching me how to do, I do want to tell you about the Federal mediator who described to me in intricate detail having her ass grabbed by her direct supervisor in the military, how when she reported it and nothing happened she punched the guy and then “he made me scrub the floor of the Quonset hut, alone.” The prosody of this sentence, if you could hear it in her accent, might fill you with the same empathy and hilarity it filled me with. She kept me in her windowless office for hours, recounting her own experiences with gross bosses and creep coworkers and a total absence of accountability ever for decades upon decades, for her entire life, and then describing bad bosses her own daughter had had and all the bad career advice she consequently gave her daughter, which it turned out was all meant to clarify for me why it was her intention and in fact her noble duty to throw my case in the garbage.

I strongly suggest that you not pursue this, she said. It will ruin your career. You are young. You will be marked in your industry. It will even affect your reputation in other parts of the country. Who do you think wrote the law, she kept saying. Who do you think the law is for.

This is supposed to be some kind of celestial text, but some nights still fill my belly with knives, and some mornings I still wake up gasping.

Even though I know better, even though I’ve moved on, and even though the culture has now begun to move into this territory, in ways that both slake and enflame a rage and a sorrow that unfortunately have the exact shape and size of my entire life. Of our entire lives. And every other crime our culture commits in the name of safety, security, and the market fulminates around the same source. 

I am confident, I wrote in a poem from the belly of the worst of this era,

I am confident

This sensation of futility

Will go straight into my pussy

That this futility

Is in fact

The very substance of pussy

Leaving aside for now how transphobic it was for me to essentialize gender with genitals or how unfeminist it felt then and still feels now to feel that the maw of my own body had become a grave for every single evil in the culture.

Leaving all that aside—

What I would write would describe what attempting to use the existing channels to address a toxic situation could and could not accomplish. It would describe what the knowing whispers of—at first blush sympathetic—female colleagues did to protect the predator. It would describe the colossal dismay at seeing what older self-described feminists were really made of. I have wondered for years at the sorrow of women who are so ruined themselves by this whole structure that the main quotient of their response to a younger person’s act of courage is jealousy.

It would describe how a lifetime of experiences—let’s call them extracurricular experiences—not just with assault and violence, or with an often homeless and occasionally incarcerated parent, or the career suicide of putting care for another human being ahead of your own ambition—and the experience of the impulse to care as nothing but a feminine liability, a maladaptive vestigial trait that capitalism should have fucking learned you to shed by now, and it would describe the whole situation of the kind of labor and the kind of fight for personhood you do because you have to, because it seems to have been laid out for you as your role, this arena become the proving ground for your virtuosity, however wee, however grand, and this particular conversation, this subject, your being forced to pay in every way for men’s appetites, for their negligence, for their prominence, and then for their willingness not to destroy you—for the privilege of not being totally destroyed—not to mention the ambient white noise against which you take your every step: the constant war, the incarceration, the trivialization of your moral sickness and the moral sickness of your sisters, the wall to wall humiliation of your distinguished sentiments, the requirement that you and your sisters do all of the thinking and all of the militating and all of the sacrificing and all of the caring and all of the succeeding and all of the beauty and all of the visionary futures and all of the prayers and all of the self-lacerating for it never ever ever ever being enough.

It would describe the warped shape of the law and the nothing the law again and again becomes, when it comes to men and their institutions.

It would make light of the insane stream of texts I got last night from an ex, in which he compared me with high sentiment to Ruth Bader Ginsburg (?!)

It would speak of Venus, under whose aegis the Law supposedly does its work.

I want to write an opera for Bulgarian Women’s Choir called Divine Justice.

I want a judge and jury made of grinning eminences who are more confessors than sentencers, who sing you your sentence so it rings through your heart, rearranges your guts, un-incarcerates whatever’s left in you that’s good.

The Great Voices of Bulgaria Women’s Choir sing “Pilence Pee”

Sometimes I can’t sleep. Sometimes I wake up with a belly full of knives. Sometimes I don’t know what will ever be enough.

Sometimes I can’t believe I still haven’t written THE SECOND SEX ON THE BEACH, describing what happened when I crashed the memorial service of Shulamith Firestone at Saint Marks Church, THE SECOND SEX ON THE BEACH because the program featured a picture of Shulamith in a bikini, reading The Second Sex on the beach. I found myself in tears at the podium, telling second wave feminists how much I had needed them my entire life and career, how my mother was every bit as brilliant and insane as Firestone, and how scary it was to really confront what seemed to have been the real wages of feminism: isolation, penury, schizophrenia, despair.

The feminism I grew up with was benevolent propaganda. Because my own mother conformed to the old Plath/Dickinson model of suicide/insanity/confinement as the true husbands of female brilliance, I have I think been a bit extra retrograde and extra fucked in my attempts both to confront and to completely flee this culture, the present, the now, the cold facts. I have always felt that the space where I have had to make my life—and where we are all making our lives—lies in some mysterious suspended zone between everything we’ve been told we can be and what is (and it cost the culture nothing, but profits corporations greatly, to have women, and Dreamers, and queers, and people of color yearning and working toward a world in which we can truly be everything we already are, and give all that we have to give, rather than contorting ourselves into wrung little parodies of our talents and our enormous love....)

We thought we were citizens; we were made into spectators.

We thought our sexuality at last belonged to us, but it remained a commodity; a grotesque family heirloom.

Psychic, telepathic, empathic, neurotic—we are gifted. We are so gifted and our experience is so grave. We have had to invent these worlds beyond the world in which to restore light and grace to ourselves, slough the callouses off our ideals, honor our again and again destructed sex, cry over all the spilt and the spoiled milk.

My teacher says the fight in the heavens is over. He says the woman in blue and white is sitting on the throne. He says that this is a time in which prayers will be answered. When I’m in grace I know it’s true.

But acts are prayers. This month so far I have written twenty-one columns, given eighteen astrology sessions, written two blurbs and two letters of recommendation, paid off a debt that has gnawed at my heart for years, been approached by a Berlin gallery and a Kansas theatre who want to put on my play, I have pined for my lover, I have quit pining, I have been offered a fancy residency and asked to speak on a panel about French literature about which, I protested, I know nothing, have gone to the desert to see if I could see what’s wrong and right with me, and the one day I went without photographing the sunrise I felt very sad to have missed it, and the sleep I do is stolen from my deadlines, and love I give is stolen from my career, and the competing I refuse to do nurtures my sense of justice and feeds, like Rilke’s night, on my face, and nothing, none of it is enough, and nothing, to quote Claudia Rankine, nothing in nature is private.

Ariana Reines

January 23, 2018. Photo: Ariana Reines.


Ariana Reines is a poet & playwright. She astrologizes at lazyeyehaver.com.