"The inner life is not apolitical"
Welcome to the Saturday newsletter for paid subscribers! Today’s version is free—a chance for all of you to glean oddball insight into the week ahead, to see what I mean when I say “literary and astrological guidance for the week ahead.”
There will be a few changes coming to the newsletter schedule next month as I finish teaching and begin to focus more intensively on queries and the nonfiction book proposal I have in the works. I want to write a collection of essays that hinge upon the questions: How does the irrational—divination, dream, magic—figure into illness? What do I mean when I say the tarot saved my life? When does the irrational interfere with healing? When does it help us endure the unendurable? Survive what shouldn’t be survived? The questions arise out of the shock of being sick: I most recently survived breast cancer for the second time; I’ve also been called crazy most of my life. The questions also arise out of everyday need: I read tarot cards and natal charts to help my pay bills; I’m enrolled in year three of an astrological magic school to help, among other things, keep me alive.
I want the questions to grow and splinter off into other lives, other histories, too. (They are at the base of many essays in this newsletter about the books and writers I return to again and again, from Anne Boyer to Johanna Hedva, Roy Scranton to Simone Weil). I want to explode and complicate my faith in the stars, my decision-making with the cards, through a deliberate engagement with opacity and illusion, essential elements of reading—books, planets, cards, bodies—that we like to overlook. Tarot and astrology may have helped me live through and beyond the pain of addiction, amputation, and suicidality. But these occult practices have also, at times, riven with me fear, forcing me to understand how the failures of reading and the power dynamics of interpretation inscribe violence onto the body, especially when that body is already read as “other.”
So, lots of work, which means I need to shift around how the Wednesday and Saturday newsletters work in terms of focus, length, and time-management. I hope to have a clearer picture of what that rearrangement will look like by the start of June. In the meantime, if you have suggestions about or requests for what you’d like to see here on interruptions, please respond in an email or leave a comment below!
Sunday: Gemini seasons begins with the Sun’s entrance into the sign of the twins. The Sun sextiles Pluto. The Moon waxes into Cancer. The beginning of Gemini season is marked by Mercury retracing the missteps or miscommunications that happened throughout late April and early May as it covers old ground in the Taurus area of your chart. There’s power to reclaim in doing things right the second (or third time through)—the Gemini Sun’s early fist-bump with Pluto underscores this today, the Sun’s day. At some point, Gemini has to learn that seeking knowledge must end in a decision, Austin Coppock likes to say, and this lesson comes early this season. Read “Beauty is Method” by Christina Sharpe: “I’ve been revisiting what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible,” she writes. “How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.”
Monday: The Sun sextiles Mars in Leo. The Moon waxes deliciously through Cancer. We love a waxing Cancer moon on the Moon’s day; we love when Mars—in the Sun’s sign—helps the Sun take action. The astrologer Micki Pellerano identifies this as a good day to start something important, the big thing that was maybe on the backburner during Mercury retrograde. No cowering in corners—no cutting corners!—today, unless that’s the big thing you’ve been trying to teach yourself to do. How do you become “more certain of your own viability,” as Dionne Brand writes in this tribute to Toni Morrison? How do you use the incessant influx of information in our world today not to bar yourself from making a choice, but to, instead, choose correctly?
Tuesday: Mars in Leo squares Jupiter in Taurus. Tension between the King and his general on the general’s day. Mars is battle-ready and battle-weary already at the beginning of its time in Leo. I don’t know, maybe we throw out the old metaphors of rulership and war today, or at least turn them on their heads, focusing instead on the “sovereignty of the interior,” as Kevin Quashie writes about in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. “The idea of quiet is compelling because the term is not fancy—it is an everyday word but it is also conceptual,” Quashie writes, continuing: “Quiet instead is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior—dynamic and ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty.”
Wednesday: The crescent Moon waxes through Leo, emphasizing the recent Mars-Jupiter square. Venus squares Chiron. Find your tarot deck, and pull out the Five of Wands and the Five of Pentacles. If you don’t have a deck, google the images of these cards online. Use the competing images as a writing prompt; set the timer on your phone for eight minutes and write about a conversation you’d imagine these cards having. Tarot not your thing? Spend eight minutes writing about your relationships to competition and worry, ambition and rest. Use the insights that arise from writing on Mercury’s day to guide you through your interactions with others this Wednesday. “Idleness, a refusal of the conditions of work, a refusal to be purposeful or dutiful, to strive or protest, feels liberating, especially after several years of working so very hard,” writes Saidiya Hartman in this New Yorker review of Alison Mills Newman’s “Francisco” and the Black arts movement.
Thursday: The Moon in Leo squares Mercury in Taurus. Jupiter’s co-presence with Mercury in Taurus creates an unusual ease with learning, communication, and stewardship of knowledge. The square from the waxing Moon asks us to not let such ease go to waste. It’s also a good day to honor teachers, to reflect on how good teaching bolsters our sense of self, our ability to strive toward wholeness or something like it. Read Phillipa Snow on Jordan Peele’s Nope as auteur—one kind of a teacher: “If I appear to be struggling to explain just what Nope is trying to say, it may be because Peele does not totally explain it, either; this is fine by me, since I would rather a film have too many ideas than too few. An auteur should be an artist, and not an interpreter, and if Nope is Peele’s response to the historically exploitative relationship between the media and non-white performers, it is not his job to draw me, a white critic, a blandly elucidative diagram.”
Friday: Venus in Cancer sextiles Uranus in Taurus. Mars squares the Nodes of Fate. The Moon waxes into Virgo. You need some room to be both genius and fool in your intimate relationships today, maybe. Meanwhile, your passions might feel buffeted about by forces largely outside of your control. The Virgo Moon wants to contain and explain, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. Eat two lunches today, instead, break the mold of routine in weird, indefensibly comedic ways. “The thing about trauma, as I always say to my [Literature of] Trauma students, is that it doesn’t kill you and you have to live with it,” Lauren Berlant notes in this interview. “And that’s the thing about comedy, too. The comedy is that you get up again after you fall off the cliff, and have to keep moving. You have to live with the brokenness, and you have to live with surprise, and you have to live with contingency. And you have to live with the pleasure of not knowing, if you can bear it.”
Saturday: The first-quarter Moon in Virgo bookends the days with trines to Jupiter and Mercury. Let it feel good! All the Virgo Moon people I know are at least a little suspicious about good feeling. This is their wisdom! This is their curse! Today, there’s a supportive energy from and for learning that feels good—think flaneur at the Farmer’s Market, think no-need-to-worry-about-anything-right-now-I’ve-got-good-coffee-and-a-good-book. The old, good book that I just finished is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House; my recommendation is that you return to it, or start it anew if you didn’t have the pleasure of reading it in school: “Nothing is really ever wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by.”
