Honoring Saturn’s twilight dance with Venus, Deep Dedication to One’s Art
October 3, 2011
Yo Team,
yearly family reunion with cousins from hither and yon, a lecture /performance in honor of my late Aunt Argentina Copello Dudley is tonight October 3rd – which I will be attending.
So there will be no call tonight…
Yet, much to co-ponder this week of waxing Moon, as Venus emerging from Underworld dances first with Saturn, exalted in her sign.
The presentation at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC will be a one man play by Gordon Clapp embodying Robert Frost, while not a favorite poet of mine, (no air in his chart, except for Saturn. And as late great astrological ally Jim Lewis used to say, wherever Saturn is, subtract 5.) “This Verse Business is a one-person play about the great American poet Robert Frost, who “barded” around the country for forty-five years with his poetry, dry wit, and “promises to keep.”Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, as Jupiter was trining Pluto, currently humming now. Certainly the capacity to direct collective attention. And the Sabian for his Saturn in Aquarius is “bringing one’s talents before the public – fame.” Let us consider Destiny, Drie-ing our weird…and whatever, whomever presents itself to us now at equinoctial tide, we presume to be pertinent. I hadn’t realized he was such an animist. His chart guides me to deeper access.
Certainly his Aries Sun (and Vesta and Venus, Chiron, Neptune, Ceres) and Pagan Mars square Saturn is expressed in the following oft quoted out of context “Good fences make good neighbors.” :
“…Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
And as I deeply peruse his work, they seem a good guide to Saturn, walls – down…Let Pan romp in solitude, and “no, you can’t cut down my tree friends for Christmas trees.”
The sun shining in his eyes prevents him from reading his brilliant quirky pertinent poem at Kennedy’s Inauguration (I was there, on my Dad’s shoulders…More Saturn…)
Way productive to his last breath on January 29, 1963.
Pan with Us
Pan came out of the woods one day,–
His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they,–
And stood in the sun and looked his fill
At wooded valley and wooded hill.
He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,
On a height of naked pasture land;
In all the country he did command
He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.
That was well! and he stamped a hoof.
His heart knew peace, for none came here
To this lean feeding save once a year
Someone to salt the half-wild steer,
Or homespun children with clicking pails
Who see so little they tell no tales.
He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach
A new-world song, far out of reach,
For sylvan sign that the blue jay’s screech
And the whimper of hawks beside the sun
Were music enough for him, for one.
Times were changed from what they were:
Such pipes kept less of power to stir
The fruited bough of the juniper
And the fragile bluets clustered there
Than the merest aimless breath of air.
They were pipes of pagan mirth,
And the world had found new terms of worth.
He laid him down on the sun-burned earth
And raveled a flower and looked away–
Play? Play?–What should he play?
A Time to Talk
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, ‘What is it?’
No, not as there is a time talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(Quirky aside, I never knew – Frost’s Mercury retrograde in Pisces: “1883 – Frost hears voices when left alone and is told by mother that he shares her Swedenborgian gift for “second hearing” and “second sight.” )
Saturn is now at 18 + Libra, (where it was when I was born, now, my Saturn return) “Robbers Hiding in a Starlit Forest, Ready to Claim a Caravan Laden with Precious Cargo – the endlessly unfolding wonder of the universe; magic; ability to tap into other’s thoughts, losing oneself to find oneself.”
Inviting us all this week to consider our dedication, the walls we may want to take down to invite the wild, a long creative life, the voices we may hear (may the less than desirable rants of possession by the grumpitudinous mob descend with the darkening light, passing the baton to the ascending lyrical guidance to find our weird, our destiny, the poetry that seeks expression through us in small and large ways until our last breath.
(for those in DC who might want to attend – 7 pm tonight Corcoran Gallery of Art, side entrance)
