Infinite, Selfish Love
This morning I woke up with the inner critic ringing in my ears about a million different things that have worked themselves out since. I tossed in my sleep, waiting until some incorrigible will to wake arose, but in the meantime I idly marveled at my surprise. It had been so long since I’d immediately contended with the inner critic in the morning. I had forgotten how long it had been my shadow. Nowadays, my morning pages are filled with vows of trust and self-love; I practice loving phrases as I wake up or the walk to somewhere new.
So lately, I have been thinking about love, perhaps because the Venus Retrograde is having us go inward. Jeffrey Wolf Green says that Venus retrograde natally causes a person to “internalize the Venus function. This means that such an individual is orientated to establishing an inner relationship with themselves as a primary focus in life”. 1 Such a native "is orientated to establishing an inner relationship with themselves as a primary focus in life”. They are led, in other words, to go within; to find their own way of loving rather than seeking solely outside sources to shape them.
Generally, external relationships formed during Venus retrogrades are volatile— they might stop before they even start or delay; be rife with scandal or require reworking to go smoothly. I myself have still attempted to start something during these periods and I don’t begrudge giving yourself to love. We’re not here to make things nice, etc. But if the current entanglement doesn’t work and you’re on your own love again, I advise you get really intimate with yourself for the next month.
I always pay attention to themes in the art I consume around a certain time— a way of reading the signs. I’ve found myself intensely revisiting Yves Tumor’s 2023 album “Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)”. Its first track, “God is a Circle,” immediately hooked me and serves as a thesis statement of sorts for Tumor’s relation to love. “There's pieces of my heart that I can't show,” they tell us, “There's parts of me I still don't even know yet,”: body as cavern, mind as uncharted territory. So much to learn, both inwardly and outwardly. We want it all:
You would tear
Everything apart
If you found out
Everyone you loved loved someone else2
Desire is inherently possessive, especially when it’s toward something we can never fully possess. My mind immediately pulled an Auden poem from its files, one I had just reread, “September 1, 1935”. It’s a poem about the war but it’s also a poem about people and the heart.
My favorite passage goes like this:
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.3
We want not only the impossible but the unenviable: who has not seen a folktale of a wish gone wrong: a love come back from the dead but different, or a charm turning the beloved into a blubbering obsessive, unable to be satisfied by anything but you, the horror. In “A Lover’s Discourse,” Roland Barthes says that rather than annhilate the self, being crazed with love reifies it. Barthes tell us that the madness of love “is becoming a subject…I am indefectibly myself, and it is in this I am mad: I am mad because I consist”.4 Our capacity for love is intertwined with our unique self, though not without its suffering, like any earthly pursuit, which I do not see as lower or unconnected to our spiritual ones.
Barthes cements this point by relaying “a Zen story”. A young monk, obviously still green, asks an older one why he insists on doing the work of drying mushrooms. Surely there are others more capable, quicker, who can accomplish this task. The older monk responds, saying, “Another man is not myself, and I am not another…I must create my experience of drying mushrooms” (emphasis mine).5 We love, Barthes seems to imply, because every love is singular, profane, maddening: “"love drives me nearly mad, but I do not communicate with the supernatural, there is nothing sacred within me”.
It is of the nature of the self, it is selfish, our desire, but it is not without its benefit, nay its necessity. One of the words associated with Venus retrograde is scandal: passionate but volatile love affairs, dark secrets or unruly desires revealed, a deeper look at past romances and relationships. They are, generally, not good for external, public sides of Venus. So perhaps you are feeling the madness of love. Rather than seeing it as a failing on your part to have easy desires or find “the right one,” can you see your wrestling with love as the best task for such a time?
I think often to Zen teacher John Tarrant’s teaching of “carrying stones”. “It is wisdom to find the tasks that are right for us at each moment of our journey,” he tells us. “They may not be the tasks we hoped we should have, yet we must simply bear them”.6 He goes on to say that while the deepest layer of Hell is frozen solid, in Purgatory there is work, movement, to be had, and thus the chance to transform.
All of which I’m trying to say: there is vital work in this madness, this human error, that exists within us all, as well as vital work in attuning to our highly singular ways of feeling and embodying this desire. If you want to be present for your life, make good art, develop your intuitive or gnostic powers, you have to love where you live, even if it is imperfect and halted and messy. Tarrant assures that “because there is movement, the stars are visible, there is growth”. Ultimately, though, “[w]e carry the stones because we want to exist in the world”.7
That’s ultimately why I study astrology, Zen, poetry, art: to exist more surely in my life.
Echoing this sentiment, Auden, finishes his poem thusly:
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
The Lot of Revelation
For my latest newsletter on Writing and Astrology, I introduced a new lot I’ve been playing with. Put simply, a lot is a calculated point used to more acutely pinpoint information about a specific topic of the native’s live. You find them by finding the distance between two points in your natal chart, usually two planets, and project them distance from another sensitive place, usually the ascendant.
As I associated the Moon and Mercury with writing specifically, and revelation more acutely, I use these two as the two planets in the formula. Take the distance from the Moon to the Mercury for both day and night charts, as the former represents our undistinguished feelings and raw material for revelation and the latter the organizing force that turns it into something legible. Then, project that distance from the Ascendant. My friend Hawk sees it as a the way that we receive revelation and transmit it, whether that be through writing, movement, speech, or some other form.
Let’s take singer Sinead O’Connor, who passed into the other realm this past week, and whose past has been reconsidered as a result. Her Moon is at 26º Libra. and her Mercury at 25º Scorpio, making them 29º apart, if you start from the Moon. Her ascendant is at 5º Sagittarius, and 29º from that is 4º Capricorn, the position for her Lot of Revelation. This places her ability to reveal and speak the truth in Mercury’s term, which Valens describes as “theatrical, comic, on the stage, lying, whoring, seducing, covetous of others’ things, of no reputation, in everything, blessed, wealthy, but not of high rank”.8 Not only is she infamous for dramatically ripping up a picture of the pope while on stage performing for Saturday Night Live, a comedy sketch show, she also did so to speak her mind and use her platform to decry the Church’s cover-up of child sexual abuse. This performance of her revelation also ruined her standing and lowered her rank as a famous musician. Ruled by Saturn, her Lot of Revelation demonstrates her attempt to speak the truth, while also dealing with the harsh consequences she faced as a result of wanting more for the world. Perhaps those with Saturn-ruled Lots of Revelation are intimate with the idea that truth-tellers are not often valued by those in power.
Consider where your Lot of Revelation is: calculate the distance between the Moon and Mercury and project that from the ascendant.
Let me know where you Lot of Revelation is below ✨
And if you want to discuss your writing life, your creative routines or anything in between, my books are open for August. Use code SHINE to get 20% off my Creative Praxis Readings if you want help attuning to your practice and calling your Muse ⛲
Until next week,
Love,
Chloe
Jeffrey Wolf Green, “Pluto: The Soul’s Evolution Through Relationships,” p. 130
Yves Tumor, “God is a Circle,” 2023
Roland Barthes, “A Lover’s Discourse”, p. 120
ibid, p. 121.
John Tarrant, “The Light Inside the Dark,” p. 160
ibid, p. 160
Vettius Valens, Anthologies, Book I, p. 5
My Lot of Revelation is in Leo, 29°26’ in the 12th house. The Valens description for that is "The final 6° belong to Mars: very base and monstrous, destructive, injured, torpid, censured, unlucky." My 12H is ruled by the Sun which is in Aries in the 8H also in the terms of Mars... lots of Mars happening. Oh and Mars is in my 1H. Well! Don't know what to think about that lol