The beauty of her

Under electric light

tears my heart out

every time.

PJ Harvey – ‘Electric Light’

Dear friend,

It is holiday season here in the UK and there are colourful lights everywhere. The abundance of neon feels like a manifestation of Sagittarius’s mutable fire.

When neon lighting first appeared as a light source, it caused major disruptions. Christoph Ribbatt, in his book on the history of neon, recounts a story of one community’s reaction to its unearthly glow.

The town seemed to be burning. The telephone rang at the fire department headquarters in Missoula, Montana, way out on the American prairie. A man was calling from Rattlesnake Gulch, 26 km away. He reported a glow right over Missoula; he was so beside himself that the fireman had trouble calming him down. Then he asked the caller whether what he thought was a blaze was long and rectangular. When he said it was, the fireman assured him that it was not flames lighting up the night but the neon sign of the Florence Hotel in Missoula. It had turned the night sky red in that year of 1928.

The artificial light of neon caused panic in the 1920s when people weren’t yet accustomed to it; it read as a natural disaster.

Ribbat describes the proliferation of neon as, ‘part of the overall hypnotization of passive consumers, continually dazzled by light in a capitalist “society of the spectacle”.’

Alice Sparkly Kat, in their book Postcolonial Astrology, describes how artificial light attempted to banish the ‘shadow world of the night’ and contributed to the twenty-four-hour city and its distracting, adrenalising spectacles.

As Edensor writes, “the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term ‘enlightenment’ have been consistently aligned with a belief in the progressive function and moral desirability of banishing darkness.” As Thomas Edison writes, “put an undeveloped human being into an environment where there is artificial light, and he will improve.” The futurist Marinetti simply said, “kill the moonlight.”

🜁🜃🜂🜄

Sagittarius II is Neon. It is a kaleidoscopic atmosphere that shifts moment to moment. It is mutable fire.

Kening Zhu’s illustration is trippy and wild; like the night sky has opened up and turned into a videogame with a psychedelic trail leading into the heavens.

The Moon provides the unwavering luminosity that names this decan.

But it is also Martial – connected to battle, striking while the iron is hot, and faking it until you make it.

🜁🜃🜂🜄

Sagittarius II is represented by the Nine of Wands.

T. Susan Chang describes the nine of every suit as a place of the ‘magical backstage’. She says that:

If you can create change in the 9, the blueprint of reality, it will manifest inevitably in the 10 – our real world.

The Nine of Wands is Martial and Lunar.

The energy of Mars can produce heat and light but it can also keep us running on empty as with the exhausted, but tense, figure apparently still fighting a battle that has ended.

The Moon is present in the tenderness of the warrior, whose body and nervous system are strung out.

The Nine of Wands is the battle won and the battle to come.

It is the magical backstage and the spectacle.

The Nine of Wands is the red neon light that glows in the distance, keeping you awake, but also reminding you that you aren’t alone.

🜁🜃🜂🜄

Neon and other kinds of artificial light and strange illuminations have long fascinated me, and informed my creative work. My PhD was on bioluminescence and experimental poetry. My books and stories are haunted by eerie light.

My short story, ‘Ceremony’ (which also inspired the name of my practice) was sparked by a nightmare I had after watching gas flaring over the North Sea when I lived in Edinburgh.

But the fire was still there, the gas burning even brighter in a column that did not reflect into the sea. She lifted the blinds and let the colour swamp the flat, prisming it into wild neon brightness.

My story ‘Electric Light’ was inspired by the ambiguity of PJ Harvey’s lyrics in her song of the same name.

He pushes lights inside me until I am full of gleaming. My belly is a tundra. I burn off two more layers. He lets me drink. My cocktail is full of real jewels and fake blood. Once I have laid down I cannot remember. The screen is arctic. My body is fluorescent.

I hope that Neon might spark some creative ideas for you, even as the year draws to a close, and demands us to hold on, as the warrior does in the Nine of Wands.

🍄 Fruit

This week in Atmospheres, there were some incredible strange illuminations that came out of people’s writing – luminol-lit swimming pools, quarry raves, backstage theatrical lights, and bleached-out landscapes. If you want to come and join us to free associate and write, you can find out more here.

🦠 Spores

• I am still tinkering with Ableton, and learning how to mix. I don’t know where this will go, but it’s been fun playing around.

• I have been making some changes to my website to make it feel more Leo x Scorpio. More intensity, more drama, and more cake!

𓍊𓍊𓍊 Mycelium

• I’m still thinking about an artwork that I discovered when researching my PhD – Mike Thompson’s Luminol Lamp.

• Midwife’s album Luminol has been the soundtrack to this week.

I wish you a week of childlike pleasure, neon, and fairy lights.