VENUS DAZE!

RE-VISION

QUESTION “PROGRESS”

GET INTIMATE WITH VENUS

LEARN ABOUT RETROGRADE MOTION

A VESSEL FOR HOLDING CONFUSION AND CREATION

GET DAZED. Venus goes retrograde once every 18 months, making it the planet who spends the least amount of time in this cycle. I originally taught VENUS DAZE back in 2020. It was a really special, rigorous, and leisurely deep dive into Venus and retrogradation in general. During each of the 7 weeks of the Venus Rx cycle in Gemini in 2020, we came together and discussed what Venus was doing in the sky and how those motions related to certain themes, art, worldly happenings, and daily life.

In 2026, prior to Venus’s retrograde through Scorpio and Libra, I revisited these course materials and updated/adapted/re-recorded the content. You can download anytime and my feeling is that you can use this workshop in tandem with pretty much any planetary retrograde (or creative project/whenever) – as it’s ultimately a way to slow down, get devoted to a particular transit, planet, or project, and revision your own relationship to the creative process, progress, and the notion of veering off course.

I suspect this workshop will be especially helpful if you’re going through anything Venusian (troubles with love, partnership, taste/aesthetics, self-worth, or creative practice/art).

 When you download VENUS DAZE, you get:

·      7 full-color slideshow presentations with astrological and artistic content.

·      7 audio recordings (25-45 min. each)

·      2-page list of recommended readings/viewings with links.

WEEK 1: TO PAUSE

Venus stations retrograde. This class focuses on the energetics and symbology of a planetary retrograde station – along with notions of pause and gaps in love, art, and our cultural moment.

WEEK 2: TO LEAVE

Venus heads to the underworld and goes deeper into her journey. We discuss artists and writers who have left or dropped out. Times we have left. What does it mean to quit?

WEEK 3: TO GO INVISIBLE

Venus is getting closer to the sun and thus is going invisible, eclipsed by that mad light. We’ll discuss notions of invisibility/visibility in art and life.

WEEK 4: TO REVEAL

A planet’s conjunction with the sun marks a turning point in any retrograde cycle. Venus conjoins the sun at the midway point in her Rx cycle. It’s said to be symbolic of a “revelation at the bottom of the underworld.”

WEEK 5: TO RETURN

Venus begins her journey away from the sun, carrying new information with her as she emerges as a morning star. We’ll explore writing and themes re: souvenirs and memory, and the energetic differences between an evening star and a morning star Venus. 

WEEK 6: TO HAUNT

“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are,” wrote Andre Breton. Venus continues her return journey, separating from the Sun and becoming visible again. What remains? What keeps coming back?

WEEK 7: TO PAUSE (AGAIN)

Venus is making her direct station, having completed her retrograde cycle. She prepares to move forward. How is the nature of this pause different from the pause at the beginning of the cycle? We’ll discuss beauty, attention, and slowing down.

DOWNLOAD THIS WORKSHOP IF YOU:

• Want to engage with Venus on a deep level, in real-time.

• Slow down, work on a creative project, and learn about what happens when Venus goes into the underworld.

• Revisit your own creative process and (re)examine your own Venus, values, art.

• Make connections between art, writing, and astrology.

• Want a creative refresh and/or a grounded way to form your creative routine.

SOUVENIRS:

• A deeper understanding of Venus cycles and retrograde meaning, as well as how to connect it with your own life and Venus placement.

• A nuanced understanding of the planet of love and art.

• 50+ color slides with art and text from Ana Mendieta, Simone Weil, Roland Barthes, Wolfgang Tillmans, Andre Breton, Sappho, Rita Ackermann, Joan Mitchell, Leslie Hewitt, and more.

  HAPPY DAZING <3

A workshop on the mystical philosopher Simone Weil, originally held between Christmas and the New Year, 2024. This includes 6 hours of audio recording from the class and an accompanying slideshow with several quotes. The class gives an overview of Simone Weil’s thought while delving deeply into some of her most discussed topics, such as attention, reading, God, and roots.

“To accept the void in oneself is supernatural,” wrote Simone Weil, a 20th-century mystic, philosopher, and activist. We’ll discuss her ideas about attention, truth, revolution, justice, God, and thought itself. Lecture/slide show format + reading her work together. How might we apply Simone Weil’s attentive, rigorous, and heterodox thought to our own info-saturated age?

CLASS 1: ATTENTION & READING

Discussion and overview of Simone Weil’s life and work and this class using her writings on attention and reading as a framework. We’ll discuss Weil’s biography and Gravity and Grace, her most well-known work. Close readings and discussion of excerpts from the text, with a special focus on the sections called “Readings” and “Attention and Will.”

CLASS 2: GOD, ROOTS, FUTURE

Discussion of excerpts from Waiting for God, On the Abolition of All Political Parties, and The Need for Roots, as well as Simone Weil’s relevance today. 

Features:

-both an overview and deep dive into Simone Weil’s work and life

-how Simone Weil might act as a guide to these times

-using her concepts of attention and close reading to structure the class–a meditative space for thinking and considering in the space between Christmas and the New Year

Benefits:

-space and time to think and reflect before the New Year

-stronger critical thinking skills

-deeper understanding of and engagement with not only Simone Weil, an important 20th century thinker, but of concepts like Love, Reading, Attention, and The Void

-new ways of thinking about the internet, attention in the information age, political parties, and rootedness

Audio recordings (with accompanying slide shows), plus an extensive list of resources for further study, from a class I taught March 6-April 3, 2022

What can angels and demons teach us about our current relationship to technology, mediumship, information, and each other?

Angelology, writes Regis Debray, should be read as “mediology in a mystic or nebulous state.” Angels and their structural counterparts (demons) are (in)visible messengers that raise curious questions about communication, transmission, relation, and thought.

We’ll ask, through readings of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophical and theological texts, as well as fiction, poetry, and visual art: What moves in the space between? Who/what mediates our experiences and ways of relating? How does the medium alter/transmit the message? What were medieval understandings of angelic/demonic messengers and how might they help us understand our own myriad transmissions? What the hell is happening with the internet? This is a reading and writing workshop focusing on zooming-in on modes of ancient and modern transmission, using various understandings of mediation (supernatural and otherwise) to think about our hypermediated now.

You’ll receive access to the class google drive which contains tons of scanned readings and resources on media studies, angelology, and their intersections, plus the audio recordings and slide shows for each class. Each of the five workshops is devoted to exploring one specific aspect of transmission and mediation through focused attention. This is a generative class with about 20-30 minutes of in-class writing time and prompts will focus on experimenting with mediums, messengers, disappearance and appearance, and analog and digital modes.

Readings span several centuries and come from Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Regis Debray, bell hooks, Giorgio Agamben, Byung-Chul Han, Kathy Acker, Ibn ‘Arabi, Michel Serres, Elizabeth Klein, Legacy Russell, Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, bell hooks, Sybille Kramer, Jean Baudrillard, Melody Jue, and others.

When you purchase, you’ll receive the full syllabi and a link to the google drive with all class materials.

WEEKLY THEMES

WEEK 1: MESSENGERS, MEDIUMS, INTERMEDIARIES

WEEK 2: ETERNITY + HIERARCHY

WEEK 3: ON ANGELS + DEMONS, THEN AND NOW

WEEK 4: (ANGELIC?) TRANSMISSION + SPACE

WEEK 5: MASS MEDIA, ATTENTION, THE INTERNET

“Alchemy is a profession of marginals; those at the edge. Those who live from their own fires, sweating it out, self-sustaining their own temperatures which may be at variance with the collective climate.” — James Hillman

ALCHEMY OF THE WORD is the culmination of years of research and teaching on the relationship between the astrological planets and alchemy. It takes the form of 8 video recordings on the seven original planets alongside their corresponding metals and alchemical processes through the lens of art and the creative process, with generative prompts and trippy-beautiful music by CONTAIN.

When you purchase, you’ll receive:

12+ hours of video recordings with 100+ color slides

Alchemical and astrological resources for further study

LECTURE TOPICS:
CHAOS AND COSMOS / SATURN AND JUPITER
THE RAVEN SYMBOLISM
MARS AND VENUS
THE ALCHEMICAL VESSEL
MERCURY / DIVINE WATER
MERCURY: MEDIUM, MEMORY, MADNESS
SILVER AND GOLD / SUN AND MOON
THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE / GOALS OF THE WORK

DETAILS

In the sacred art of alchemy, base metals are turned to gold, chaos into cosmos, primal material into subtle glimmers. Alchemy is grounded in the material world and attuned to the invisible. It’s a language and practice filled with strange vessels, creatures, substances, planets, stars, and processes of merging and separating. Things in our material world correspond with another, invisible one: inner with outer, earth with spirit, heaven with earth, the planets up above with the metals hidden in the ground. Profound and surprising conversations emerge from these occulted associations. In my experience, studying these correspondences is psychedelic, generative, and helpful in the artistic process and life at large.

You’ll take a piece of writing or art through the alchemical stages from primordial blur to greater understanding. The idea is to bring something, whether that’s an idea, a novel, a poem, or a pile of words and images, and work on it steadily – getting to know the work’s hidden languages and potentials. In alchemy, gold is already present in lead, cosmos in chaos.

My hope is that you’ll return to these recordings with any number of projects in order to see the work/world differently. No prior alchemical knowledge necessary. And no preparation or prerequisites, just curiosity.

Sources include ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance alchemists and philosophers, as well as major western alchemical manuscripts such as Paracelsus, Nicolas Flamel, Rosarium Philosophorum, 12 Keys of Basil Valentine, Donum Dei, and Splendor Solis, as well as artists, writers, poets, and astrologers including Carl Jung, Demetra George, Liz Greene, H.D., Yeats, Julia Kristeva, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud, Albrecht Durer, Anne Carson, Leonora Carrington, and others.

Upon purchase, you receive 5 recordings from a class I taught back in 2023. We read and wrote through T.S. Eliot’s mind-bending poem, THE WASTE LAND, which beings with the immortal line, “April is the cruelest month…” during the month of April. The poem is in 5 parts, and we focused on one element for each section: earth, air, fire, water, and spirit.

ABOUT

THE WASTE LAND, first published in 1922, is a 434-line poem by T.S. Eliot, known to us now as a modernist classic. Some say it changed poetry forever. It’s a series of fragments, Eliot’s own Inferno, a smashed epic, a machinic and incantatory take on modern life, and a plague poem, among other things. The poem is divided into five discreet but interconnected sections and teems with references and allusions to scripture, literature, and tarot as well as direct quotes from other texts, rapid shifts of voice, location, and decorum. Trippy and strange, it begins with the famous line April is the cruellest month and from there, spins into a polyphonic poem-scape, dense, airy, and unwieldy. The Waste Land will hold us for the month of April 2023, which has five Saturdays – one for each section of Eliot’s poem. Each of the sections can be said to correspond to a different element, beginning with earth. The fifth section is the immaterial fifth element, spirit. Eliot’s poem has many doors and portals — and in reading it together, we’ll think about wastelands, ways into and out of wastelands and how Eliot’s poem evokes our own modern madnesses and beauties. It begins and ends with spring.

FORMAT

-introduction/lecture from me on the section we’re reading that week and areas of focus

-group readings of the poem in a few different voices followed by discussion

-writing time with prompts [about 25 minutes per class]

OTHER RELEVANT INFO

-you can come to this class with a writing project in mind or not. the writing prompts each week will build on each other, so that you will finish the month of April having completed a long poem of your own under the influence of The Waste Land. however, all prompts are optional and you’re obviously free to use the writing time however you wish.

-anyone open to Eliot and The Waste Land is invited to attend! you need not like him or have any experience with his writing or this poem, as we’ll be reading the text and considering its present day reverberations together during the cruelest month

-full text of the poem is available online in many places. but I’ll also email you a PDF prior to the first class, along with the zoom link.

SCHEDULE AND DATES

We meet via zoom (link will be emailed to you the day before class) once a week during the month of April. Classes are 2 hours and begin at 11am ET/8am PT:

CLASS 1

I.               THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD (EARTH)

CLASS 2

II.             A GAME OF CHESS (AIR)

CLASS 3

III.            THE FIRE SERMON (FIRE)

CLASS 4

IV.           DEATH BY WATER (WATER)

CLASS 5

V.             WHAT THE THUNDER SAID (SPIRIT)

*Upon purchase, you’ll receive an email with a link to the google drive, which houses the readings, resources, audio recordings, and slide shows from this class, which was held in the winter of 2022.

What is mysticism? What is it not? What is the dazzling darkness beyond light? How to think through (un)mediated experience of the divine? How might mysticism teach us to read, write, and pay attention differently? The term mysticism is related to what’s secret, veiled, or mysterious. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James suggests that mystical experiences are ineffable, transient, noetic, and passive. In this 5-week workshop, we’ll closely read various philosophical, poetic, mystical texts to locate entry points into this curious, paradoxical, and generative arena, as we read and respond to both medieval and modern texts.

Each 2-hour workshop will begin with a brief introductory lecture and slides, followed by discussion of the texts. Topics covered include: divine darkness; pandemic mysticism; eros; mystical speech and writing; and presence/absence. We’ll pay special attention to the formal and affective elements of mystical writings, their hybridity and complex engagements with mediation and communication. We’ll set aside about 20 minutes each class for free writing and reflection. No previous mystical experience or knowledge required – just a desire to read closely and find tunnels into mystical experience, speech, and dazzling darknesses. This class is especially for writers or artists of any sort, as we’ll be approaching mysticism primarily through the lens of creative process and form.

Texts will include some foundational texts of mysticism in the West (selections from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Song of Songs, and Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology), as well as texts from Byung-Chul Han, Michel de Certeau, Farid ad-Din ‘Attar, Fred Moten, Amy Hollywood, Marguerite Porete, Angela of Foligno, Anne Carson, Georges Bataille, and more.