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February 05, 2014

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Bell,

POetry is literary divination. YES. Exactly.

As much I hate to start a sentence "I'm thinking about Uranus..." -- this post brought up a sidebar I have been preoccupied with for a while now, which certainly comes up in the reading you did on my book. As I understand it, Uranus has an orbit of approximately 84 earth years and so from roughly 39-41 a given human will be in a cycle wherein Uranus is at 180 degrees opposition from its position at the time of the person's birth. Uranus opposition is essentially the mid-life crisis -- a time of enormous upheaval, shedding of previously held orthodoxies and beleifs, expansive and explosive creative thinking and bizarre master insights that often fuel the next several decades of a thinker's intellectual life. Also, it's about breakdown -- families fall apart, major illnesses rewrite the body, maybe you get a sports car you can't afford :-)

I'm thinking out loud, but the idea that the poet's craft is an outer-planet operation is interesting to me in this regard. my own uranus-opposition crisis began EXACTLY on schedule when i was 39 and that is when the book i'm working on now first came into being. Do you know when Yeats first got into the occult and the golden dawn thing and all of that? was it at that age?

Not sure, Amy, though in Mary Greer's book Women of the Golden Dawn, it's cited that Yeats was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1890. Given his date of birth on Wikipedia (yay, real research), I'm going to say he was 24-ish when he was initiated.

My understanding of western astrology is limited, so the precise influence of Uranus is not something I can speak about. My basic thoughts are on point with yours, though.

Fascinating discussion that jibes with my own life experience.

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I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


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