New Moon in Pisces: We Are All Gucci Ghost

A New Moon meditation on erotic escape valves, non-fungible tokens' nebulous new currency, the Greek emotion of acedia, and Gavin Bryars' Neptunian composition after the sinking of The Titanic.

From Walt Disney’s Fantasia

“Now the entire aim of our speculative cognition amplifies the synthetic principle. Everything glimmers, delights, fades, goes. We drift through the cognition with exceptional grace. Attached as we are to the senses, we manifest the sheer porousness of boutiques. The boutiques are categories. We have plenty of time. The problem is not how to stop the flow of items and surfaces in order to stabilize space, but how to articulate the politics of their passage. Every culture is the terrible gush of its splendid outward forms.”

– Lisa Robertson, (on the necessity of public fountains)

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

-Georges Bataille

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This New Moon cycle we wrestle with a divine dissatisfaction, and intoxicating flights of poetic inspiration. We are still floating the cosmic womb in a state of innocence, but can smell the blood of an imminent birthing—a warm wind that smells of pennies.

Neptune, the luminaries, and Venus, all entangled limbs in Pisces, on their last fumes of MDMA, squint at the dawn and pour cava into their orange juice—they know there’s a hangover to come, but for now suspend disbelief. They draw the velvet, motel curtains, and toast the smothering of the light.

The infinity loop of the two, love-knotted fish, according to Austin Coppock, echoes the divine split of the soul that necessitates the grail quest for union: “The heart’s fondest wish dwells here, as does the price we are willing to pay for it — the life’s blood we offer in return. It forces the question — what is worth bleeding for? At the end of the day, when the credits are about to roll, the answer has always been, and will always be: Love.”[1]

There’s may be a temptation this lunation to lose ourselves in something divinely incommensurable, though we need to consider our escape flumes carefully: our wanderers in Aquarius strike a counterpoint of detachment and rigor. Mars in Gemini helps us poke pinholes into overly pompous balloons.

Pisces’ ruler is still a house guest of Saturn after all, and so we are confronted by the paradox of structured intoxication. Such heady creative ambrosia may do well with the constraint of the sonnet’s sluices and locks, lest it dissolve into apostrophe’s ecstatic O: a hieroglyph marking sheer air. More darkly, a narcissistic projection of the self onto the ghostly beloved—a covert gesture of possession.

There’s a real danger here of elevating someone, or something, into implacable rushes of marble, thereby dehumanizing the coveted object, and deadening the self in the process. This New Moon dawns in the sublime threshing of the Pegasus’ wings, a creature connected to flights of divine inspiration.

Nevertheless, we do well to remember Pegasus’ origin story: born of the spray of blood from Medusa’s severed head, we are issued a warning of the petrifying quality of projection, and the narcissism that underlies the abusive cycle of elevation and devaluation. We are asked to consider the agenda of our gaze, and its impact on that which is coveted. The murder of Sarah Evererard, releasing waves of grief today, speaks to the darkest side of Venus-Neptune.

“Perseus on Pegasus Slaying Medusa” by John Singer Sargent (1925)

We can literally lose our heads, this lunar cycle, in the pursuit of a Neptunian mirage that allows us to escape the immensity of, say, pandemic fatigue, with a proxy fantasy of seductive sprawl. We may erotisize the boundless reaches of the intoxicant, insofar as its endless rustle of veils obscure a more pressing problem. We can fetishize our escapism.

Emily Berry’s poem, “Freud’s Beautiful Things” comes to mind: Yesterday and today have been bad days / This oceanic feeling, continuous inner monologues / I said, “All the beautiful things I still have to say will have to remain unsaid,” and the writing table / flooded.”

To this end, we might want to scrutinize the frictionless, all too easeful scrolling of content on the internet: our Neptunian reservoir of mirrors, masks and emotional vampirism, now going through its Saturn return. I wonder about the strange permissiveness we see in terms of content consumption: the binging of TV shows is normalized by pet phrases like ‘Netflix and Chill.’ The Instagram ‘discover feed’ has a hypnotizing power, and I’ve sunk alarming amounts of time in its AI curated lures.

Every day, we’re confronted by another opportunity to expend our emotional energy on a proxy that’s beyond our actual control. I question this ambient pressure to constantly signal your politics, your compassion, your goodness, the purity of your soul. I question cults that demand unambiguous capitulation, and force you to testify in an instant of time.

Social media would gladly keep up entrapped in its confession booth forever, until this state of constant, insidious anxiety has us blurting out sins that aren’t even our own. As long as we allow ourselves to be plugged into these communicative loops, we will seek to appease this invisible, hovering priest. Except we were never meant to bear the entire suffering of this hyper-connected global matrix: it’s more important now than ever to salvage our emotional energy for supporting those suffering in our inner circles.

The recent proliferation of emotional-labor scripts speaks to a soul exhaustion that’s all pervasive. The self-care industrial complex is another Neptunian mirage that obfuscates the importance of community care, while reinforcing our Covid alienation and atomization. Imagine the energy we’d free up by not feeding the hungry Gods in the feedback loops, and instead focusing on the humble, unsung deeds that we can bring to our immediate sphere of influence?  (I’m not trying to sound overly prescriptive btw: a lot of this is me talking to myself!).

Nevertheless, metaphors of being born aloft abound this New Moon, and we may be seduced by only the most glamorous of causes. False gurus may hard sell you with utopia, and the diagnosing of an ambiguous void only they can fill. Any movement that lacks forgiveness and redemption is not tethered to the truth of the soul.

The New Moon’s levitation is in fact multi-pronged: our exalted Venus, in her golden chariot, continues to elude our reach; the New Moon’s fixed star is capricious Makrab, the saddle of the Pegasus; and even the Sabian symbol continues the motif with ‘levitation during a séance.’

I’ve been wondering how this disembodied moment would play out in the zeitgeist, and the sudden proliferation of news stories about Non-Fungible Tokens may just be it. The fact that my bafflement increases the more that I read about it, speaks to the Neptunian mystery (or fakeness) of it all. Pisces Grimes has already made millions, which makes me wonder if the proles will have a seat at this floating table.  

From The Guardian:

“At their simplest, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, can be thought of as “bitcoin for art”. Just as bitcoin created the ability to spend and save a sort of digital money without any centralised authority, so too do NFTs allow for pictures, videos, music, or anything else that can be digitally represented, to be wrapped up in a format that can be traded, stored or authenticated without needing to turn to a gatekeeper.”[2]

Neptune’s chimerical ectoplasm rules over deep-image, photographs, celluloid, poetry and everything that’s endlessly evocative yet blurs when we try to define it. This transubstantiation of crypto-currency into art feels very Neptunian: money has finally dissolved from the weight of stacked ingots, into an untethered matrix of projected valuation that now hovers around all art objects.  This GIF of Gucci Ghost below is now worth 16,400 dollars (how Neptunian is this image though?):

GIF by Trevor Andrew

However, I do find it concerning that an entirely speculative market is leaving a very real carbon footprint, as the electricity needed to mine the block-chain continues to rise with these crypto-bubbles. Saturn squaring Uranus in Taurus, in waves, all year, speaks to karmic repercussions for the increasing abstraction of our markets into something free-floating. Nothing is for free.

Our Uranian bull will only ground so much electricity, and Saturn’s regulation will likely come fast and hard (or simply further demarcate divisions between the elites and the rabble: rules for thee, but not for me). As far as I can tell, NFTs are just another airy game for the ultra rich: an increasingly incomprehensible way for them to launder their riches, and avoid taxation. Am I wrong?

On a purely aesthetic level, I was struck by the recent purchase of the world’s most valuable NFT for 69 million. The collage, by graphic designer Bleeper, (from his Everydays series), compiles 12 years of artistic production, in which a new digital art work was uploaded to his Instagram everyday (themselves warped mirrors of the cultural pulse). Aggregated, his images offer an abstract patina for infinite projection:

Image by Beeple (otherwise known as Mike Winklemann)

Metacovan, the buyer and mysterious founder of Metapurse, explains the reasoning behind his 69 million dollar purchase: “When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat. And here’s why — it represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.”[3]

Is there anything more Neptunian than the hubris of presupposing that one can possess time itself? Interestingly, the purchase was making headlines as the Sun drew ever closer to Neptune, and I can’t help but see the collage as a strange visual melting of the two planet’s respective physical surfaces: Sol’s golden mosaic tiles, and those obscure azure gases of Neptune, create a new alloy.

Close up photographs of the structure and composition of the sun - by Lumen

Frankly, I’ve been struggling with the dissonance of trying to wrap my head around Gucci Ghosts, while the pandemic’s grim anniversary hovers. It’s also a year since the horrific murder of Breonna Taylor (another face of Venus born aloft as saint, and screening board for so much despair and hopeless rage).  

Canada will not fully vaccinate its population until the end of September, and so my lonely exile stretches on. The Neptunian spring-melt is bringing back a sense of movement at least—a pastoral balm. Or, to quote Beckett: “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”

It can be comforting to find a nomenclature for feelings that are alien to us. That which is named can also be released. To this end, I wanted to share an excerpt from an article by Jonathan L. Zecher, on the Greek word of Acedia. He describes it as a lost name that captures the darker side of this Neptunian moment: the exhaustion, the overwhelm, the vague guilt around a perceived lack of productivity, and the insidious malaise of this loneliest of marathons.

“Early Christians called acedia “the noonday demon”, and sometimes described it as a “train of thought”. But they did not think it affected city-dwellers or even monks in communities.

Rather, acedia arose directly out the spatial and social constrictions that a solitary monastic life necessitates. These conditions generate a strange combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. Together these make up the paradoxical emotion of acedia.

John Cassian, a monk and theologian wrote in the early 5th century about the ancient Greek emotion called acedia. A mind “seized” by this emotion is “horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room … It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading”. He feels: such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast … Next he glances about and sighs that no one is coming to see him. Constantly in and out of his cell, he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting.”[4]

“Melancholia” by Albrecht Durer

It’s comforting to be able to put a name to my inability to finish a book, as I listlessly cycle between four or five. It also captures my resentment of yet another sunset that heralds an hour of playing Zelda alone—no laughter, no negronis, no lalala life. (Though this too will pass).

In light of the very real potential now to lose ourselves in the gorgeous tumult of Neptunian mirages—the heat shimmer that hovers in front of seemingly endless loneliness, and lives reduced to pin-holes—I would suggest that we also find time this lunar cycle to sink into these more difficult landscapes. Perhaps we can find the artistic inspiration to render these places in a visual medium, and therefore release some of their ambiguous, invisible weight.   

Saturn is also an ally through melancholia’s labyrinth: I plan to start limiting the time each day I spend on social media scrolling, or reading the news. I know there will be days that I overflow these containers, but it’s something to hold me accountable.

As social creatures that love and desire to be loved, we are not meant to be pulled by the endless emotional appeals that flow, as another strange form of capital, through every platform of the internet. We are not meant to be endlessly open, elastic and porous (as personified by the boneless corporate art humans). The Uranian technology of the internet has outpaced our human evolution—our souls are playing catch up. We must take the time to fill our own chalices first.

A satirical take on the corporate art style (just had to post this again)

Perhaps it’s my Mercurial contrarianism surfacing here, but instead of floating I fantasize about sinking, and rooting myself to something ancient and earthen. For my thesis, I’ve been writing a section on Gavin Bryars’ haunting musical composition The Sinking of the Titanic, and I plan to use this as a scaffold for a meditation today as I let my bathysphere sink into my subconscious’ darker fathoms. Wherever echelon the Non-Fungible Tokens are darting with their hyper cherub wings, I want to go to the opposite of that place.  Join me?

For some context, I’ve excerpted Bryar’s artistic statement on this most Neptunian of compositions:

“All the materials used in the piece are derived from research and speculations about the sinking of the “unsinkable” luxury liner. .. The initial starting point for the piece was the reported fact of the band having played a hymn tune in the final moments of the ship’s sinking. A number of other features of the disaster which generate musical or sounding performance material, or which ‘take the mind to other regions’, are also included.

This Episcopal hymn, then, becomes a basic element of the music and is subject to a variety of treatments. Bride did not hear the band stop playing and it would appear that the musicians continued to play even as the water enveloped them. My initial speculations centered, therefore, on what happens to music as it is played in water. On a purely physical level, of course, it simply stops since the strings would fail to produce much of a sound …  On a poetic level, however, the music, once generated in water, would continue to reverberate for long periods of time in the more sound-efficient medium of water and the music would descend with the ship to the ocean bed and remain there, repeating over and over until the ship returns to the surface and the sounds re-emerge.”[5]

Sending weary blessings to you all. Let me know how it’s going.

Works cited:

[1] https://austincoppock.com/astrology-mar-10-19-pisces-iii-beginning-new-moon/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/12/non-fungible-tokens-revolutionising-art-world-theft

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22327594/metakovan-beeple-highest-auction-price-69-million-nft

[4] https://getpocket.com/explore/item/acedia-the-lost-name-for-the-emotion-we-re-all-feeling-right-now?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[5] https://gavinbryars.com/work_album/the-sinking-of-the-titanic-jesus-blood-never-failed-me-yet/