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May 19, 2021

Reading the Moon from here on Earth, we follow its cyclical encounters with the Sun, as their monthly dance adds to the tools, techniques, and themes available for thinking, for making sense of what goes on at a given moment. Every moment. Anything.

After renewal comes a crossing, a 90 degrees angle between the Sun (at 29* Taurus) and the Moon (at 29* Leo). A crossing implies a movement, a crisis, a tension between different directions, but it’s also a meeting point, an opportunity, an interpellation, an “Hey!” which makes one turn around and for a moment pay attention. How is that which was re/newed and re/turned in the New Moon appearing now? Is that materially untenable duality starting to take some shape? What does it look like?

This halfmoon shines on the last degree of Leo, conjunct the Ascendant coming through as a feeling worn on the skin. It is the (hopefully unbearable) feeling of existing as a single being, still dragging through its last degree, holding on while needing to shift, as it faces off with Jupiter at 0* Pisces conjunct the descendant, renewing with largess all the ways in which we can, and already are committed to each other. This opposition forms a 90* square with the Sun at the last degree on Taurus, also holding on while needing to shift, the relationship we collectively hold to resources and land. The ways value is formed, what matters and what not, is for everyone to see as the sun shines high in the 10th House, lighting half of the Moon surface.

I like to read the tensions marked by these squares and opposition, as imaging the crisis of the “social contract”, a mythical agreement made with nobody’s consent, and look at this halfmoon as presenting us with (yet again) an opportunity to break this contract or better, to divest from it completely. Inundated by the vast consent not to be a single being (Jupiter 0* Pisces) the contract feels untenable, the Subject feels himself in it, naked. Pluto at 26* Capricorn inconjunct the Moon, indirectly but powerfully drives the total transmutation this feeling suggests, that is, the death of the Subject.

The crisis suggested by this halfmoon is playing out in the brutal attacks on Gaza, which the State of Israel has intensified since the new moon, and that keep escalating. I see the crossing as the matrix of settler-colonial violence being exposed in its ruthless and logical deployment. It is from the midst of this crossing too that the opportunity arises to draw a line, to revolt and refuse colonial and racial violence – old, ongoing, and new.

What if the crisis that this first quarter moon highlights would allow us to divest from this contract we are held hostage in? Could a next Full Moon prepare the stage for the general strike?