Mercury Ingress into Aries: Harsh Pan Pipes and the Heart's 'Atrocious Beat'
I offer my ruminations on my Doukhobor ancestry, the gift of Mark Creek, the Martian quality of spring in the East Kootenays, and Mercury's ingress into Aries.
As I took my Good Friday ramble along Mark yesterday, I was struck by an unlikely boon of the pandemic—through exile, I've experienced the privilege of living an entire revolution of that battered star wheel in one place. Though I spent my teenage years here in Kimberley, now I'm learning the rhythms of this boreal landscape with a watchfulness, and attunement, earned from many years as the outsider, the alien, the expat intermezzo.
I'm learning the sharp voltas of its seasons—the sudden pressure drops that claw holes in my vision, behind which a sickening chromatic radiance. The endless winter makes fall's brief torch, and the balmy evenings of lilac season, all the more sweet—though frenzied.
For a decade I've been betwixt cities, and markedly different climates—the moors of Northern England and the Mediterranean sea. This was true to my Mercurial nature perhaps: living through friction and the tension of opposites.
Then suddenly a mass exodus of progressed planets from my third house of fairy-time and Escher stairs, into the fourth of root systems, sentient hyphae and the familial matrix. True to the clockwork of my chart, I've been returned (rather dramatically) to my ancestral lands where my Doukhobor grandfather, Dimitrio, raised all sorts of hell as a staunch communist, revolutionary, and a founding figure in the establishment of the Sullivan Mine's trade union. He fled the Ukraine, with his brother, as part of a persecuted sect of animists that saw Gods in everything that lived, and considered themselves ascetics and 'spirit wrestlers'.
This animism informs my spirituality of course, and I burn with that same heretical fire. Speaking to a wise Sagittarius the other day, we agreed that the collective must return to reclaim something ancient, before moving forward into all emergent futures (the lesson of the Saturn-Uranus squares, perhaps). And so it is with this volver to my native lands—to the asceticism of the spirit wrestlers, the praising of Mark's banks, and endless quiet hours in the fourth ‘subterraneous place’.
My Scorpio father (who is now writing his memoirs) has memories of working in the mine, where twinned vending machines sold glass bottles of milk and slices of apple pie in the gloom of the canteen. The idea behind the milk was that it would allow the lead in the blood to show up more easily in testing—too much contamination and you would be sent to a less toxic mine.
There's something Lynchian anyway about the image of those quarts of milk, practically incandescent, against the ore-streaked flesh of teenagers squeezing their youth through the chutes and bellows of Hades itself (for beer and cinema money). My father’s Pluto conjoins my Leo Mars, and the psychic-imprint of that side of the family—breaking new land and struggling against the elements—is one I carry with me.
It was also here, among Kimberley’s tinker-toy mining houses, that my grandmother lived the brief flush of her own youth. This was before schizophrenia sent her to the Riverside Asylum in Vancouver, where a blade would be tapped neatly into her prefrontal lobe (lobotomies being all the rage in the Uranian 50's, around the same time suburban housewives started to swaddle their alienation in Valium). Her name is practically swallowed now by grass on the rolling lawns of the once grand estate—a place so thick with shades I left with my ears hissing tinnitus.
The romantic in me would like to imagine her soul, springing, like a steel trap, from the orbitoclast wound of her forced docility (and may we pause to consider the sci-fi horror of the word orbitoclast?). Like that hellion, Athena, born from Zeus' ax-split head, maybe something of her fled the Victorian grounds on feather-light deer hooves.
The Mercurial skeptic in me knows better: life in war-time—in Mars time—can be brutish and short, and there were no therapies to uncross the wires that made her believe her belly was full of snakes, or a safety-net to keep her from prostitution. Her trauma echoes through me, like a struck bell: a past relationship with a much older man; mental health struggles; lean times when I considered camming, or selling photos to Janus Magazine (Lilith signatures run through my father’s side of the family, including my Venus-Lilith in Cancer).
Still, I wonder if she walked fretfully along Mark as well—pregnant with my dad, or falling in love with the much older Quebecois general whose name would die with her. The sharp foreclosure of her life through vainglorious scientific intervention is something that will always haunt me.
Mars season; Mars thoughts... I cannot help but be awed by the violence with which the pastoral machinery hauls us, metal-on-metal, into another season. The pandemic's seemingly endless grief is no match for the shrill pan-pipes of the rutting season, or the struck cymbal of that exalted, though feral Aries Sun.
I lived as a young woman in Prague, and remember the stalls set up every spring selling birch switches decorated with ribbons. The man was to ‘hunt’ the object of his desire and playfully whip her, which necessitated the counter-strike of a splashed glass of water (to ensure her fertility for the coming year). I recall the roles reversing, however, and the Czech women seemed even more fierce in their lashings.
As my own passions are stirred again (and I simultaneously brace for the dissolution of Neptunian mirages, as Mercury leaves Pisces), I'm reminded of this short, brutal poem by Denise Riley:
"The heart does hurt / and that’s no metaphor. It really is / that ‘throbbing muscle’ you can’t say / since that’s ‘steel comic-sex meat’ // but it does hurt / top mid-left / under my shirt / with its atrocious beat."
Perched high in the mountains, our springs come late and Ares' bolt of blood-stiffened cloth is mirrored in the landscape of March and early April. In the absence of green shoots, or even the mosses' bright canes, the most Martial of the Mars decans presents the swoop of its battle axe. The glare of that exalted Sun is not yet filtered, and sends the town into a palpable fever.
There's nothing pretty about this first act of the East Kootenay spring: the last of the snow, rotting in the shade, has the look of nuclear waste. Leaves are still packed tight as parachute silks in the iron-hard spurrs that stud the branches. Mark's waters have gone the green of bottle glass, which set off the rusts and vermilions of the oxidized iron deposits of the stones astride his banks. Lichen's industrial wastes paint the trunks of the poplars. Dust devils switchblade out of nowhere, and I return home with burrs riding my pant legs.
I never met the grandparents on my father's side of the family, but through the pin-hole of this past year, I have found a way to commune with my ancestors through a stubborn attendance to the minutia of this tract of land.
I recall this quote by the late Sharon Butala, who left her cosmopolitan life as an academic when she fell in love with a rancher who owned land in the Cypress Hills, in Saskatchewan. The grief of her exile, and the friction of dislocation, was slowly absolved by watchful, daily walks under the scraped skies of the prairies:
"I began to see, in the place of emptiness, presence. I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension.”
Mercury ingresses into Aries later this evening, and what was obscure, or blurry at the edges, can finally be hammered out in clear, and incisive language and thought. Scintillating wit and repartee replaces endless run-on sentences and 'vibes'. Particularly as Mercury is now in a mutual reception with Mars, (who is intellectually combative in the sign of Gemini), the coming weeks will be ideal for cogent argumentation. Our tolerance for ambiguity increases. Irony can be weaponized. Issues with transport, communication, deliveries and even the dispersal of vaccines, could swiftly be resolved.
Still, this ingress may feel like the final veil falling away after weeks of swooning, and poetry, and “paint me like your French woman, Jack". Was it all a Neptunian dream? As well, the spin-doctors, and spiritual grifters, of Mercury in its fall, may find their masks clattering to the floor as we're suddenly onto their bullshit. (Anti-union Amazon bot accounts, I'm looking at you, and the hologram of a hologram that is Joe Biden at this point).
My fourth house is ruled by Mercury, which could explain the sudden urge to speak on the bower of my ancestors, especially as he lingers on the anaretic degree, which can send us ruminating on cycles of birth and death, the reverberations of epigenetic trauma, and the karma our souls are freighted with in this life time.
With Mars recently having cleared the north node in Gemini, this a time of honoring the mysterious weaving that brought us here—the miracle of this moment—while being willing to drop certain threads, and begin a glistening new motif. For now, I give thanks for the plain, bright fact of the sun, the bristling livery of pine cones, the harsh pastoral brief to begin again, and the deer scraping sustenance from bark as we wait just a while more. (All photos of Mark taken by me on my shitty phone camera, lol).
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Also, Here’s a scene from the 1965 Ukrainian film, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, which I’m planning to revisit soon. xoxo