Notes on the Leo Full Moon: Everything You Do is a Balloon
Dispatches from my new Bay Area hitching-post on the recent full moon, the Leo-Aquarius axis, the AI gold rush, and Balloon-gate.
“Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk
Invisible air drifts,
Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish—”
— Excerpt from “Balloons” by Sylvia Plath
“Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning.
And behold it.
And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.”
— From The Red Book, Carl Jung
As the Leonine foil to our rising Aquarian epoch — a journey into the lands of virtual mid, as the AI goldrush quickens — I was interested to see what would culminate over this past Full Moon. The axial tension between Aquarius and Leo will be part of a much longer story as we enter the new AI-eon this spring — at least for a rousing first act. And this lunation didn’t disappoint. More on balloon-gate soon, but first some notes on my latest movements.
After Mermaid-maxxing in the bioluminescent lagoons of Puerto Escondido, where my Cancer stellium was very much in its flow, I’ve drifted to another 12th House port of call. A sublet became available near Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where a Mars line is reinvigorating my third house Sun-Mars-IC. This is a busy and mercantile house: a hodgepodge of commerce, data processing, secular ritual, and quotidian matters. And indeed, I’ve been plugged back into cafe culture, bringing my writing to a circuit of dive bars, book stores, and Pho joints, as snatches of overheard conversation get collaged into my poems (and scopes).
In another desperate bid at 12th House sympathetic magic, I’ve found myself in a shared house literally at land’s end — or the Outside Lands as this Western-most neighborhood of SF used to be called: a wind-swept collection of jetties and dunes that receives the full force of Poseidon. The wounded Diana presides over these lands, her attic fragments held together by iron cable and gobs of cement. Actaeon is not far away either, his antler sockets filled by sporting sprigs of fir. A heron approached me during my first jog through the Sutro heights and I knew I had landed exactly where I was meant to be — at least as these Neptunian swells of uncertainty subside.
As the Full Moon in Leo culminated Saturday morning, I was walking barefoot along the ragged coastline of Ocean Beach, which emerged all but sparkling after 24 hours of Uranian squall and bluster. The snowy plovers were skittering busily along the glassy surf, like wind up toys lost to their errands. Curds of sea foam were scattered by the wind — the San Franciscan equivalent of the tumbleweed perhaps. So strange to have landed on another surfer’s beach on the Pacific — as if I never really left Puerto.
Outer Richmond is a bit like alternate reality Puerto Escondido, but stalked by capricious weather systems and the video game limit of that impenetrable fog — anthropomorphized here simply as Karl. And yes, London Fogs are London Karls in my local cafe.
As the Moon waxed this past week, I found myself on first-name basis with the baristas at Simple Pleasures, where I kept being mistaken for a local singer named Don — Mars in Gemini things. SF has rekindled the flames of the things I most love: indie cinemas with neon marquess, jukeboxes, art crawls, long runs past crashing waves, bodega cat chin scratches, and the possibility of archery lessons in a sprawling nearby park. As I wandered barefoot through the dunes on the Full Moon, watching the progress of a sea-shrimp kite, I felt more alive than I’ve felt in months — maybe years. This liminal city is seeded with portals and I already know there’s medicine for me here.
The Uranus element of the Full Moon didn’t miss me, however. On Wednesday, a goateed man in a ball cap, claiming to be an agent of Mossad, shot a round of blanks into a nearby synagogue on Balboa. In the video surveillance of the incident the Russian Jews look remarkably chill as he unloads his clip — a surreal scene somehow emblematic of the dissociated spirit of these times.
The same man brandished his gun in the aforementioned local cinema, the night I was on the fence about catching a flick. Everything All at Once didn’t quite pique my interest enough, though I was down the street having Pho while he was apparently flashing his pistol at the cinema employees. At the cafe, I overheard an even stranger story about the suspect showing a video of his pet parrot to the couple who run a furniture upholstery shop. So yes: darker and weirder undercurrents of this city surfacing too — the lands of acid, gold rush, psychedelic rock, and now a metastasizing tech bubble (speaking of balloons).
The fixed Leo-Aquarius axial tension is of course being felt in the horrific news of catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. Even my parents experienced a mini quake the night of the Full Moon up in British Columbia. I’ve been giving the ocean just blocks away the side-eye, especially as Neptune’s final square of my ascendant perfects this week.
On a somewhat lighter note (and yes, yell at me for making that pun), there’s something so hilariously Hindenburg-core about the great balloon panic that gripped the West over this Full Moon in Leo. This lunation squared Uranus in Taurus, where jolts and jumpscares are relegated to the realm of slapstick and earthbound stage props. Leo, of course, has a penchant for drama and performativity.
Indeed, there’s a stagey and theatrical side to this flurry of anachronistic espionage. A shit-post in the key of Orson Welles (both Uranus and Aquarius are associated with aerial happenings). And how textbook Aquarius for an alien “rogue moon from the East” to be found drifting over Kansas farmland. You can imagine George Melies or the Lumiere Brothers shooting this silent film, or Charlie Chaplin with a potato gun chasing the craft to frantic swells of piano.
Perhaps this Leo Moon has brought a moment of needed steampunk cope: regression into an age of mustache-twirling goodies and baddies, as the true man-made horrors of Pluto in Aquarius loom somewhere between Crispr babies for the super-rich and the dopamine-sick Ipad kids that will be coming of age soon. The tech-industrial-complex’s infiltration into every corner of our lives is a much less charming foil than an old timey spy balloon, after all.
Or China’s true satellite malware, TikTok, eroding the executive function of zoomers and millennials everywhere (myself included: I deleted the app a few days ago and good fucking riddance). Only on Tiktok is ADHD simultaneously seeded and affirmed, through the hair-pin turns of its heroin-like algorithm: easily the most addicting app out there. But nobody wants to talk about those particular spy balloons of the mind, or the simultaneous MK-ultraing and data-harvesting of its billion users. As far as psychological warfare goes though, it’s kind of brilliant.
This whole debacle has reminded me of another exemplar of the Leo-Aquarius axis: Carl Jung. The archetypal force of the spy balloon capturing the West’s imagination cannot be denied, when something as abstract but nonetheless omnipresent as algorithmic infiltration is impossible to gather in an image-complex. Aquarius is an energy that tends to disperse into rhizomes, networks, energy grids: it’s not given to cohering in “glittering images” — like Leo.
Anyway, I find it interesting that Pluto’s first toe dip in Aquarius will be followed later in the year by Venus’s retrograde in Leo. As AI content accelerationism flattens art into endless virtual wastes of mid, will we rediscover that spark of divinity that illumines art with a singular, radiant, human intelligence? There’s a whole other post I’ve been drafting about AI (coming down the pipe soon), but perhaps the white pill of Pluto in Aquarius will be the pendulum swinging back to the inner sovereignty of Leo. Or, in the words of Leo Carl Jung:
“I am the wise man who came from the East, suspecting the miracle from afar. / And I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me.”
And of course Aquarius season calls for some Boards of Canada, the Scottish band I once heard described as “elevator music for the end of the world”. This particular video has a California link too: apparently the footage is drawn from a bicycle safety video shot in Glendale California in 1963, which was distributed to school districts for years when 16mm was still used in classrooms. It somehow makes sense from my outpost in Frisco.
Also, thank you so much for being patient with my sporadic posting. I’m trying to keep the Mercury Papers alive while writing horoscopes 40 hours a week and riding the waves of 12th house transience. I’ve also been reviving my poetry practice (!!!) and hope to preview some new material here soon on the Sutro Baths ruins and the wounded Diana. I really appreciate you being here. xoxo
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