Lunar eclipse in Virgo
hating often gets you closer to the thing you hate and other thoughts
If I could grant words to the moon, more specifically to the upcoming lunar eclipse in Virgo Friday, I’d bestow upon it “the sovereignty of quiet” and “the wisdom of retreat.”
South Node lunar eclipses suck up to us, suck out of us.1 I’d rather offer than be sucked; a vestigial horror from pumping milk when I had still had breasts.
Those words I’m offering aren’t even mine to give, though. They belong to Kevin Quashie, from his book The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, and from hexagam 33 in the I Ching, which offers a backing away from things, paradoxically, to preserve either them or yourself.
In his book, Quashie2 is writing about the importance of nurturing one’s interior life as an act of Black resistance, a way out of the double bind of performing Black citizenship at the expense of Black (sub/collective)consciousness. “Could the notion of quiet help to articulate a different kind of expressiveness, or even to stand as a metaphor for the interior,” Quashie wonders, continuing a few paragraphs later:
“Said another way, the interior is expansive, voluptuous, creative; impulsive and dangerous, it is not subject to one’s control but instead has to be taken on its own terms. It is not to be confused with intentionality or consciousness, since it is something more chaotic than that, more akin to hunger, memory, forgetting, the edges of all the humanness one has. Despite its name, the interior is not unconnected to the world of things … nor is it an exact antonym for exterior. Instead, the interior shifts in regard to life’s stimuli, but it is neither resistant to nor overdetermined by the vagaries of the outer world. The interior has its own ineffable integrity and it is a stay against the social world” (21).
Hexagram 33 in the I Ching says something similar, reminding us we can tap into the “ineffable integrity” of the interior when we choose to retreat rather than engage with whatever keeps us hating, roasting, burning in whatever fire. Hate is a trap of closeness.