oops...

after bitching at somebody today re. nobody wishing and wanting to engage with my blog on any serious comment levels, they told me I had my comments set on some obnoxious setting. Well, go bloody figure!!

I have de-obnoxioufied it, so hopefully one will begin to see a bit more traction in this arena.

New Painting Process: Choreographed Chaos

While in an experimental mood, I came up with a style of painting that perfectly captured my sentiments of what it's like to LIVE, to be alive in this body, dragging around this recalcitrant, dumb, willful sack of flesh - while at the same time contending with a bright, fast, searching, unresting mind.

The result: choreographed chaos.

The technique is as follows:

1) find a preposterously uncomfortable painting technique - in my case, alternate lefthand and righthand strokes, with two paintbrushes per hand, each paintbrush holding a different colour

2) find a particular rhythm, and stick to it religiously. In my case, alternate red brush in right hand with blue brush in left with yellow brush in right hand with green/white brush in left. One, two, three, four, over and over again, with no distraction, editing or variance

3) play an album of music non-stop, hopefully of the same artist. My first experiment had me use Amy Winehouse. My uncomfortable left-right-left-right alternating occured to the beat of both of her albums.

4) Commit to making a cool, interesting, cohesive work of art, under those limitations.

I am the sort who finds debates re Fate and Free Will (the sort of thing most people don't really THINK about.. I mean.... honestly....) to be charming and quaint, due to the Machinaean view that we must advocate for the supremacy of one or the other.

Of course any notion of Fate as such pretty much defies all scientific ideas and concepts, especially as the whole discipline of Science has come down to us from the days of Occam at the height of the Plague, whereby he was able to establish the philosophical justification for the idea that "even if there IS an all knowing force that understands, defines, and unifies the meaning of everything*, the human mind will never be able to apprehend this. However, we CAN apprehend the small phenomena we can mediate and observe, and can apply rules, theories, etc to those things." This allowed for the development of a scientific methodology which advocated for the study of phenomena somewhat divorced from the obligation to capitulate to God, All-that-is, etc. It gave permission to the scientific mind to TINKER, and to view the possibility of phenomena acting of its own accord. It also raised the importance of pragmatic empirical reasoning, based on observable phenomena, theory, praxis, etc etc - and none of this intellectual heritage allows any of us to seriously take something such as 'fate' seriously. (damn, I really need to rework this)

In spite of that, I contend that we poor humans have far less FREE WILL than we would like. And i don't refer to any particular mystical, astrological or religious thinking in this regard - the simple fact is, we are already TRAPPED in a fated way to certain collective experiences that pretty much militate against the sort of unfettered freedom that the mind is capable of.

We all have to eat. We all have to sleep. We all have our highs, lows. We all are young. And then we age. We are all subject to the same sorts of social obligations, myths, urges, desires, and destinies - defined by our personal heritage, our social and economic status, and our place in history.

We all have particular character traits - for good and ill - that operate at a sub- neocortex level that we will drag with us to our graves - no matter how hard we try to slough some of them off. These character traits in parts, summed to the heritage we are born into, will, in a very alarming way, define our destiny. Hence, it starts to look a lot like FATE has the upper hand.

As such, I find it a more HONEST approach - if not entirely pictorially successful - to employ a technique which limits us in our physical expression of whatever beautiful image we are trying to bring to fruition. This seems more like life to me - more accurate than simply dashing off a pretty lady or a landscape or whatever it is that our mind imagines and which we have trained ourselves to do.

The peculiar inexorable rhythm of the technique itself is, to me, analogous to life within the body - the way that, no matter what, we are subject to its cycles - its eating, its sleeping, its joy and woe (always so predictably provoked), and its eventual decline. All we do in life must somehow be accomplished in the interstices of all those demands that flesh makes - the 25 aggregate years sleeping, the 10 or so years eating, the countless centuries spent cleaning, cooking, fixing things, getting into arguments, getting out of arguments, contemplating sin, tossing all life out the window thanks to some grateful or ingrate passion - the list is endless.

Yet with all this against us, our minds race ahead, light years ahead, and expect so much of us!

The requirement that the rhythm never stop is also analogous to the entire life experience as a series of heartbeats that, unceasing, takes us from one life phase to another, and helps - or hinders - us in the manifestation of whatever it was that - according to us - we incarnated on earth to create.

Once the music stops, life is over, and the painting is done.

No more. No touching it up. No cheating. No coming back for a last touch, a final edit, the last word. The music stops, the rhythm ceases, you're done. Whatever shows up on canvas reflects what you were able to do in life. Doesn't quite look like what you dreamt of or expected? Too bad. It's not so bad --- it has its own intelligence, its own grace. Be satisfied with that.

I plan to develop a series of these works, if circumstances prove convenient.

*crude paraphrasing

On Quitting Smoking

As Mark Twain was quoted once: "quitting smoking is easy - I've done it thousands of times!" Likewise, ever since the nicotine fiend grabbed me in earnest the Spring of 1996, I have likewise felt that a truly honest person can never really say "I quit smoking..." rather, one must say, "I am taking a BREAK from smoking." Even if I ever manage to put down the thing for more than a year, more than ten years.... or indefinitely, I will always say the same, "I am taking a break."

The following painting occurred during one of my most successful 'breaks' that lasted a good 3 1/2 months, and ended two weeks ago. The painting itself tells the story of how I would someday go back, no doubt!

But I wanted to further explore the idea of smoking and quitting smoking in general, and point to some personal experiences which might or might not help others.

First of all, I fully intend to go back to not smoking, and to making my break from smoking as long as possible. Only when you succeed in not smoking for a longish spell do you really realize how nasty the habit is.

Things I noticed:

1) increased energy

2) clearer skin

3) a sense of possibility emerged out of nowhere, as if things long dormant by all the poisons were coming forth. I became strangely artistically productive during those months, working on 10 or more paintings

4) a renewed interest in exercise

Exercise itself is KEY, and a fundamental aspect of non smoking. I found that it not only helped me compensate for additional eating, it helped reduced cigarette cravings, even from the very first. To every person undertaking this feat, I recommend an hour-a-day daily committment to SOME form of aerobic exercise. Without it not only will you gain some dreadful weight, but you will constantly battle cravings and MOODS - the two things that finally felled me two weeks ago.

To show how FUNDAMENTAL exercise is when quitting smoking, I will point to the fact that, due to general busyness, I had to cut down or eliminate my exercise habit.

Almost immediately, all sugar cravings became intolerable. And, a week or so into the 'non smoking mode', cigarette cravings, once thought lost forever, came back.

At the same time, even without my awareness, my mood soured. My affect changed, and even the most minimal setback became intolerable, painful, unforgivable. All this in a context of running around trying to effect all sorts of new things ---- something had to give. Something finally did.

Here's one fundamental thing I learned about nicotine/tobacco during research:

Nicotine inhibits the release of insulin from the pancreas, a hormone that is responsible for removing excess sugar from a person's blood. This leaves the smoker in a slightly hyperglycemiccondition, meaning he has more sugar in his blood than is normal. High blood sugar acts as an appetite suppressant, which may be why smokers think their cigarettes reduce hunger.

This site explains all sorts of other effects - nicotine on adrenaline, nicotine on dopamine, all which affect generalized moods and mindstates - both which declined for me after quitting. But the effect on blood sugar was just absolutely key for my understanding of the whole mess.

I have lived in a hyperglycemic state for the past 15 years or so - all which have affected my ability to eat reasonably on a schedule, but mainly which has trained my body to only be happy when excess sugar is going through my system. Any wonder the desire for pie, cake, anything is HUGE when the cigarette goes away? Any wonder moods go up and down, and that exercise - which to me is a process which helps break down body fat and complex meals for the release of sugars into the blood stream - helps with all these ills?

The study:

In his laboratory study, he exposed human blood samples to nicotine. The nicotine raised the level of hemoglobin A1c, a measure of blood sugar control. The higher the nicotine dose, the more the A1c level rose.

...

Liu took red blood cells from people and treated them in the laboratory with glucose and nicotine at various concentrations.

To measure the effects of the nicotine on the levels of blood sugar, he used the hemoglobin A1c blood test. This test measures the average blood sugar control for the previous three months or so.

The higher the test results, the more uncontrolled the blood sugar is.

Liu used doses of nicotine comparable to what would be found in the blood of smokers. The levels of nicotine he used in the lab would correspond roughly to the exposure a smoker would get by smoking one or two packs a day, he says.

He found that the nicotine raised the HbA1c level by nearly 9% to up to 34.5%, depending on nicotine exposure.

In the future, I will benefit from understanding more the role that sugars, exercise, and stress play in keeping me hooked - a multidimensional approach might prove more successful.

In a more existential way, the whole thing made me think of MEDICINE - the paradigm of medicine - medicine is in itself inherently toxic/alien to the body - and the reason we administer it is so as to correct an existing imbalance.

When you think about homeopathy (where small doses of the poison/toxin causing the illness are administered so as to cure it), or vaccination (where the offending agent is introduced in the body so as to help the body create antibodies), or Western medications of all sorts (which are in many cases so acutely toxic that many come with long lists of warning or sideffects), we can see that a lot of healing involves, in a sense, unbalancing the body and actually exposing it to ills.

And here's where we get to smoking. I've always been a smoker. Then I quit. For 3 months. I LOVED not smoking, let me tell you. Then I became emotionally/mentally unstable, and smoked again, right before the psychosis hit me full force, as it has in the past. I felt sorry that i HAD to, in essence, SMOKE, so as to manage my mental space. But that's when it hit me - tobacco was one of those things long- used by Native Americans for whatever obscure purposes. Nicotine directly affects not only Adrenaline and Dopamine, but it also has a long-term destabilizing effect on blood glucose levels. If you are someone who, for whatever reason, suffers from mental issues, tobacco is pretty much... medicine. Until you find something better.

Maybe I will- maybe I won't - but, for now, I am happy to imbibe long draughts of the "peace pipe" - the name does not come in vain.

Signage for Local Restaurant

Interesting opportunities arise when you have some skill at the ole paintbrush. A recent 2-week opportunity came from me when our neighbor and landlady from Momma's Kitchen came to me about producing new signage for the restaurant.

What emerged were two 8ft-tall mountain men, as well as two profiles of girls in bonnets. James, co-owner of Momma's Kitchen, cut out the forms out of plywood, primed them, and delivered them to me to paint them.

I also got to practice some typography while designing/painting the signs that the mountain men carry.

I definitely enjoyed the process - time-consuming though it was. I also enjoy walking down the street and seeing my handiwork at large, proudly taking up space, changing the surrounding landscape.

I have received good feedback re. my handiwork, and I hope it fills Momma's Kitchen advertising needs.

If I have a chance, I will seek out similar work, both locally and farther afield. Something could come of it.

The Flaneur

Through some weird twist of fate I will not necesarily go into in depth, a 'self-made interview' re. moi appeared on The Flaneur, a British online pub.

Link here

Revisiting old works: Atacama then and now

Back in 2006 I cobbled the following painting together, and called it Atacama, a place I've only, alas, gotten to see the mere outlines of, thanks to a random outing to the city of Copiapo with family members 10 years before the creation of this work. I was not particularly remembering that particular outing, which involved hunting clams by the seashore on our way north, a storied and hilarious journey inside a creaky winnebago accompanied by step sibling Francisco (recently married... how time goes by...) the youngsters (one now completing passage at the Naval Academy ... time does go by indeed!), and Los Tres (tape deck.. no MP3s!! Ancient!!) , and plenty of cachaça and.. of course... red wine. Rather, something of the arid colours of the piece itself reminded me of the Northern Chile desert. I hadn't even thought about any of the other aspects of that trip until I sat down to relate this.

In any event, this 3 foot x 3 foot landscape begun as a school project for a Tim Flowers drawing class. Random driftwood was the subject matter, or, to be more exact, the picking of a subject matter and developing it across a whole semester. Anyone who know anything about me and Jim, it's that WE HAVE US SOME WOOD. This is part of the reason we are developing the concept of the Homily Stick, among other things - but I digress.* The drawing part (floating woods in a yellow-blue background) was something of a culmination of a semester's work - possibly uninteresting and unremarkable in itself as an artwork, but OK enough for a harried last-minute effort. The piece since then evolved when I affixed the finished, coloured drawing onto an abandoned canvas found on the side of the road of the never-forgotten Oakhurst neighborhood of Decatur.

The piece lived on in this way for years until a sudden impulse of late led me to affix all sorts of whimsical details, glitter, fabric, decoupaging of all sorts. I was revisiting lots of old pieces - some which were frankly unresolved, some which required minor tweaking, others which I randomly decided needed revisiting, such as this one.

Part of the impetus was finally unearthing a lot of the random playing cards, bits of ribbon, old-timey Victorian calendars and other assorted hodgepodge that artists tend to acquire in hopes that someday they will fit onto a piece - and the truth is, the original image always looked a bit plain, a bit severe to me. I feel I managed to integrate more of the background with the foreground, and added a bit of zip, zap and zing. I like the way the foreground was extended in the yellows, grounding the drawing more onto the wacky outer space quality of the original discarded canvas.

The last thing I want to do, as soon as I get some funds, is encase the whole thing in a layer of EnviroTek epoxy resin, though I balk at this seeing as the interaction of chemicals and elements can change things in unexpected - and sometimes undesirable - ways.

In any event, the new and improved version can be seen here.

*everyone forgive my trucculent and spacey prose - I must be undergoing an unfortunate Mercury transit.

How to heal a warped canvas

We all have experienced it: a favourite painting which humidity has its way with, and pretty soon is warped beyond all recognition.

I reached out to the Atlanta arts community for advice to help with this standard problem and the answers follow:

• Diane Hause: "I have been successful many times in similar cases: put the canvas facedown on a flat non-carpeted floor...take a wet sponge or cloth, and dampen (not soak) the backside of the canvas, the unpainted side. After doing this, place weights (heavy Art books work great) on the corners/sides of the wood stretchers and let dry."
• Tom Ferguson: "i once built a new larger, sturdier structure to screw to a warped painting... worked, but made it very heavy... i was trying to avoid re-stretching it on a stronger strainer but i'm afraid that's the best solution. putting a board on the back may provide a temp solution but likely would create more problems long-term. off the top o' me head"
• Mandie Turner Mitchell: "If that doesn't work i've applied gesso on the back of some and flattened them out. 50/50 water/gesso"
• Anita Arliss: "try adhering to the back large, thin plywood triangles in 4 corners (glue or nails) of the stretchers. Then dampen the backside of the canvas with water or 50/50 water/gesso. Weight it down on flat hard floor."

I am truly grateful for all the great advice - I have at least 2 canvases suffering this malady at present - am hoping one of these tips will work

The Fear

Lately, I have been wanting to expand my experience of existing, which has included expanding my reach as an artist, interlocutor, or whatever the hell I am anyhow.

What this has meant, lately, has been blogging a lot, painting a lot, organizing a lot, and plotting certain scary actions I've not done before very well.

Mainly, i will go out and call people, email people, etc, to get them excited about my art, or Jim's photos, or the Marshall Arts process in general. I began gathering a list of prospects - mostly people I knew personally or knew through acquaintances, either people interested in arts or at least interested in the fact I COULd make art. IT seems risky, but I was willing to eat my pride and fear or whatever it is and take the plunge, fueled by a real feeling of energy abut the whole thing. Feelings, rationalizatins, justifications, research backed by data, affirmations, even astrological formations all seemed to point towards my great Art Outbound Outreach.

Then I choked.

1. The few outreaches met with utter silence. Even friendly supportive people I had counted on before ignored me utterly
2. Reading into generalized sales processes showed me my methodology was bunk
3. further analysis showed I did not have all my ducks in a row or my strategy mapped out - or even really my message
4. I began having Serious Doubts about some of the folks on my list - does this person REALLY want to talk to me? I mean, really? Do I really want to talk to them? Didn't we have some sort of disagreement that one time? When was this person so interested in art that I can justify thrusting this upon them? etc - in other words, all the things that telemarketers WILL NOT ask themselves before calling everyone and annoying them. Save that telemarketers get PAID for their efforts. I would here be trying to be my OWN telemarketer. I don't know about that!!!!!

So here I am, choked, stuck, flaking out on a sort-of committment I'd made to myself - and Jim as well, in a way. And I'm mostly OK with that, except that other things have begun slipping as well. Staying up late fiddling on FB again. Eating crap again. Running out on all sort of other minor but important committments. And a general sense of discouraged flatness that did NOT exist when i had first made the personal committment.

Susan Johnstone over at "the Hearts Voice" has many interesting things to say about this process:

When you understand that your resistance is the very raw material that will become the new you, you can approach it with compassion and curiosity instead of battling to just make it go away.

and listening in on a joint e-lecture she gave once ("your resistance is the map of where you are now.. thus will take you where you're going if you listen") really has helped me come to terms with a lot of what, in life, feels like living in a jail cell with jabbering monkeys, broken bicycles and haphazard fancies as your only companions. I am able to, for example, say to myself "the Fear won out this time, but some day I will win" - when I sit there with the phone in hand AND DO NOTHING, the way I'd stand at the edge of the pool for 10 minutes DOING NOTHING when everyone around me was diving off, back in the day.

And i probably could bluff my way past the fear to a certain extent - were it not for the real-life doubts it has placed in my mind. As Susan also says:

That’s right! There is NO information in your obstacles or resistance about whether you’re going toward the wrong thing.

Your blocks and obstacles CAN tell you lots about:

• the route you’re taking
• the strategy you’re using
• whether the timing is right
• your beliefs and fears
• the inner work you still need to do
• and more

But they tell you nothing about the rightness or wrongness of your goal.

And those are, specifically, my sticking points and things I can't just ignore: my route, my strategy, my timing, and the way you can NEVER really see others for what their own experiences are but always through the lens of what YOU are, projecting onto them.

Part of me's like I almost DON"T CARE whether it's the right move or NOT. Because when I move on this, something will SHIFT and MOVE - something in the world which was stuck before and did not exist will now EXIST and that, at least, has to be better than the big numbing now, the big numb dumb stuck NOW. A rolodex full of pissed off people and annoyed relatives seems like a small price to pay for having put it out there that HEY!!!!!! I'M OUT HERE MAKING THIS STUFF!!! AND IT MATTERS!!!!! AND I WON'T LET YOU IGNORE IT!!!!

As well, I am sorry to have let myself down the way I'd be sorry to let down my mother, or a friend, or husband, or anyone who at all depended on me. I would be unsurprised if any of those whom I'd let down were to then turn around and let ME down - hence, I am sorry and not surprised that "I" no longer "trust" myself and am "unable to commit" to larger goals, etc. and slipping to unproductive habits. Thus I feel, in a way, that in order to reclaim this broken 'trust', I NEED to do the bastard - contact every last person on that list, come what may.

I don't feel particularly BETTER or BRAVER after having posted this, but, at least, I have publicly committed to this path - and put out there a warning to all those who will hear from me soon.

Hey, how YOU doin'????????

Landscape Commission process

In a previous post, I mentioned a particularly beloved painting of mine which found a home with the wonderful Stuart Thomson. The notion of the 'Vanitas Still Life', showed to me the natural life cycle of the grape, yet reminds one that all phases of life are useful - from sweet youth (grapes) to the potent prime of life (wine), to bitter, brittle old age (balsamic vinegar). The technique was simple alla crema oil application, and the daily scrutiny of the same still life that occupied the cramped room used as a studio at the time.

Stuart, who came up from Atlanta to escape the noisome toxic noise of the city at least twice this past summer, then commissioned a landscape painting. I have been busy with that piece.

The technique this time used is that of indirect painting through the use of an original underpainting, and then glazing techniques:

Indirect painters put their first strokes on the canvas with the expectation that they will paint over them again when they are dry in order to change their effect in some way. Therefore when they put on the first layer of paint, called the underpainting, they do not try for a finished effect, complete in final color, drawing definition, and pattern emphasis. Instead at the beginning of the work they concentrate on one or two of these problems, and they depend upon [and make allowance for] the subsequent layers of paint to develop and modify the underpainting until the remaining problems are finally solved.

Indirect methods of painting have been employed in the past by many artists including Van Eyck, El Greco, and Rembrandt. More recently such painters as Soutine, Modigliani, Rouault, Braque, and Paul Klee have utilized the optical effects of indirect processes.

I first used this method in Teresa Bramlette Reeves' oil painting class in 2008. I simply ADORED the technique. The technique itself is incredibly difficult and requires a lot of practice and conceptual know-how. But, even though I understand I am far from mastering it yet, I have faith that it will help me resolve the riddle that old Flemish masters' paintings posed for me when I saw them at the National Art Gallery as a kid: how do you get an oil painting to be so luminous, so real? So... I may not be there yet - but I know, if I live long enough, I will get there.

I have played with the technique in other contexts, and it also a landscape commission work seemed a good candidate.

As can be seen, the underpainting layer is completed. I'm on the fence still about having used such a light colour for the underpainting, but we will see what comes up.

I estimate I will need at least 5 layers to complete this piece, if not more.

Like in the still life, I prefer to work from real life, vs photography. IT just seems so much better, though working from a static still life setup under controlled light conditions differs widely from working plein aire, where the artist is at the mercy of weather and light conditions.

It is fun to work on - it is our backyard, and neighbor children and dogs and cows and donkeys dot the landscape and distract the concentrated eye. Sometimes the weather is tricky and I have to wear an umbrella and hide the thing under a layer of sheetrock I had lying around.

Hoping to finish it before the weather becomes completely impossible as well.

Requiem for Troy Anthony Davis

Ah, today's specimen is a good one.

It shows a man alone in the wilderness, singing a song of utmost urgency, a song that's ignored, over and over and over again, until it is absolutely too late.

We all have that man inside of us, of course - the outraged iconoclast, the to-your-own-drummer proponent, the visionary, the crazy man, etc. We all honour and condemn that part of us in equal measure.

Some of us make it something of a life's vocation, to give voice to what must be said, to the best of our integrity and ability. Come what may, whether we are thanked or damned for the effort.

In theory, people are ENCOURAGED to be thus, but the reality ---- Consensus Reality poo-poohs on all true iconoclasts and prophets.

So, why persist?

What motivates this lonely songster continue his lonely song? When so much is frightening and hopeless, what compells one man to stand against Consensus Reality and really state what needs to be stated?

The man who pens the following posts IS the lonely singer.

The song in this particular case, of course, is that of the murder of an innocent man, Troy Anthony Davis, murdered for the dubious crime of being black in Savannah. Black, and unlucky.

More on the story here: Accessories, Before, During, and After the Fact
When the State Murders the Innocent, When Will We Really Stand Up?

Not just Treesus Jimbo has talked about this, however. Many hundreds and thousands, even, have, at some point or another, voiced loud objection to Troy Davis' death.

It really has not done any good, has it?

But you know, I was also thinking about a conversation I had with my mother last night and how she always said "I never give up, never give up - if there's something I want done, I persist till the very end. You should be more like that - do the same..."

And this morning we get the email, "Troy Davis Clemency Appeal DENIED"

and I write her

"never give up? They're gona kill this poor bastard in spite of what 100,000 of people desired, wanted, worked for - just saying, is all"

and she writes back

"It's not over until the Fat Lady sings."

And I think, 'that's interesting' - if I were someone who didn't give up, who had HOPE that her actions affected the outside world, I might pick up the phone and call a few people, the way one site recommends.

I actually took it a step farther and found a list of random Capitol/GA government employees to heckle. Why not, right? If I'm on payroll to a murdering mafia organization, I deserve to catch a little flak. Just saying. In any event, it was mainly an experiment.

The script was very much the same: "I'd like to complain about the murderous, corrupt, racist organization which is the State of Georgia. You work for the State of Georgia... are you aware that your employer is a corrupt, racist organization? How does that make you feel?"

The answers were telling and varied. The experience in itself was also informative:

1) it's damned difficult to stand for something in any way, even in the most tangential, haphazard, cowardly and uncommitted way (no wonder nobody does anything to REALLY improve this shite world we live in) - damned difficult because it is damned terrifying

2) it feels GOOD to voice something you would otherwise censure. It makes your heart beat in a different, stronger way.

3) you really can't do shit about much of anything, it's true - but sometimes it's just good enough to ruin someone's day

Pluto in Libra, here we go

here I am responding to a prompt. I might come back and clean this up. Yes! I am an artist ... and an astrologer! I'm so bloody talented I can barely stand myself. Also, attaching a random painting of mine to keep up the art blog ruse.

Me: One thing I would add- a lot of your relationship problems are somewhat dictated by problems beyond your control - the way opposes all that stuff in . This is one of those unfortunate collective, generation problem we in folks have to deal with - the concept of relating/relationship. How to redefine Relationship in a way that's healthy, loving, evolutionary advantageous, etc. Since so many personal planets oppose this for you, you might either experience or activate a lot which is perhaps toxic or maladaptive in relationship. Goes with the territory.

Querent:

Dear Pierrot Lunaire,

thank you very much for your comment !!! It helped a lot : i felt a lot of time, that all you wrote is absolutely right. I am thinking often, that i dont have to do anything in a relationship, and that it is coming to me automaticly and without much effort. I have only 2 question left : when you wrote, that because of all the planets in - does this mean, that i have no influence on this ?

Me:

1) you wanted to know about the nature of your personal planets- as to whether it was "does this mean, that i have no influence on this " and in a sense, this is correct. As individuals, we always forget that there are larger forces at play, exerting pressure of different types on our lives.

When we begiin to think about it, it makes sense: we all have to deal with, for instance, the same GLOBAL CONDITIONS - economy, politics, warring ideologies, values, etc - the same HISTORY as it was unfolding. OUr lives were etched in stone in accordance with where we were placed in the world - some people are 'lucky' to be born in places with more mobility -IE being born in the Western World to well-off parents vs. being born to poor sheepherders in the Serengeti.

this might be considered a view of identity, both individual and collective identity. That there are limits as to what you can and are able to express in life, represent, experience, etc.

To me (and others), is a planet which marks GENERATIONS - that clump of people all born at around the same timeframe, and whose identities have been defined by collective events, histories, etc. Wherever falls in the chart is an area where those born under that sign will be shaped, to a large degree, by advances and bad experiences related to that sign.

An example= recent 9/11 events. Here in America lots of newspaper articles made big headlines advertising "Susie So-and-so was born on 9/11/2001" - seeing this reminded me of this - how a whole generation of in children came into a world where that event was more or less universally relevant - and the themes of that purely symbolic (for our purposes) event shaped the sort of society, economy, etc under which these children grew up.

For in , the larger theme which that event symbolizes was a certain loss of innocence regarding an infantile, bloated, overblown ideology of bombastic excess and utter irresponsibility which the U S of A has gleefully represented forever. America got its first (I daresay it's ONLY) serving of that which it has been dishing out for decades - and for the first time possibly ever, random people suffered something of an ideological/spiritual crisis. Definitely in the U.S. 9/11 galvanized a rabid, orgiastic brand of patriotism in many - and thoughtful pained Hamlet-like introspection in others. I dare not go into the matter further, though I hope it is obvious how the kids born into that energy will be tainted by issues of ideology, temperance, and their role in the larger world.

To go back to Susie So-and-so, let's say that (like you) she had her in , directly opposing the 12degree. It means that, in her life, she will forever be witnessing, personally, the fallout of 9/11 and all it brought. That, in spite of her best intentions, she will always manage to push people's buttons whenever she speaks. She will find herself taking sides and defending points that either makes others re evaulate their lives, or will make her unpopular - she might even find occasion to be thought of as 'a terrorist .. an agitator' in her life. People will forever be projecting onto her all the crap that 9/11 raised.

In an astrological sense, Susie can't help it - through those personal planets there, her whole mode of expression is meant to polarize. Compare her with someone who has no personal planets near 12degree , for whom 9/11 was just
'that weird thing that happened' and for whom the whole generational drama is just noise in the background.

In your case, with the in , your generational baggage had all to do with relating, social/gender roles, the institutions of marriage, partnerships of all sorts, etc. saw the solidification of FEminism and the tail-end of the Sexual revolution, the American decision (roe v. wade) that made abortion legal and federally protected, which helped liberate women from the bondage of involuntary breeding etc. Social and sexual roles were severely tested. A divorce epidemic arose which affected all of us born in those years. Etc

In the larger world, US foreign relations showed a definitely 'unloving' and 'unbrotherly' relating to the rest of the world (and for all of those still stuck in the offended-Polyanna "why do they hate us???" of the saturated 9/11 reminiscing, you might view US foreign policy in the 70s as the merest CLUE). Aside from the Vietnam debacle end, the 70s show a definite, relentless intervention on freely elected governments all over South America. This link states that, between 1972 and 1984 (the range, roughly of ), the US made no less than 16 incursions and interventions in latin america - probably more.http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

Does any of this, Martin, ring a bell? Does any of this I state make you feel particularly uncomfortable, or excited, or fired up? Do people ever accuse you of (like the US policy of the 70s) forcing your hand too much? Do you find yourself in conflicts with women? Is there something in you that feels particularly affected, confused, antagonized by the ways that men seem to relate with women nowadays? Have you had male role models who talk about 'the good ole days'? Do you ever act out that tension in your relationships? This is what I meant when I talked about 'influence' & 'fate'. Just the understanding that we are all dealing with relationship, but you deal with it on a personal level.