Some offerings can only be made once.

– Austin Coppock, ‘Sagittarius III – A Horse’s Skull’

Dear friend,

I am writing this early in the morning, before the sun rises. I will have time to watch the sky blaze pink before I get ready to go to my daily psychoanalysis session.

This time of year has always been highly creative for me, even though it is full of deadlines and pressures.

I haven’t had time to write much, outside of Atmospheres sessions, but I have been feeling into the colours, the light, and the micro-shifts of the season as Solstice approaches.

🜁🜃🜂🜄

Sagittarius III is Spectrality. This is a time of year when the border between life and death flickers.

Not everyone will make it through the winter, and some offerings can only be made once. The historical presence of sacrifice, difficulty, and a longing for the sun’s safe return are all present in this decan.

Saturn imposes limits, and grounds us in the reality of time and distance.

The horse’s skull of Austin Coppock’s decanic name provides a spectral flicker between life and death – there is a recognisable animal yet one who has already passed on.

Pines, the plant for this decan, are both Saturnian and solar. They reach to the heavens and take years to mature.

They have a numinous quality.

Evergreens like pine and their otherworldly nature facilitated a direct connection with the Gods which, as Schroeder (1992) states, offers deep experiences of awe, and awe can be understood as the experience of spirit.

– Corbett, Sarah. (2022). Pine Monograph.

Kening Zhu’s illustration, above, captures the chill sunlight, and the infinite vortex of the tall pine trees. It also echoes the impossible burden of the Ten of Wands, the card for this decan.

There is a movement towards the solstice, and the sun returning, but this sun is chilly and austere.

🜁🜃🜂🜄

The Ten of Wands takes you deep into the woods, and lets you get lost.

There are tall trees in white sunlight, bleached animal skulls, and flickering light.

The monochrome landscape and white fog make everything look the same.

🜁🜃🜂🜄

Sara Tuss Efrik’s ‘Persona Peep Show’ is a spectral artwork. A video-poem that recreates Bergman’s Persona, a film about doubles.

Its dream-logic tells us that the images that saturate ‘Persona Peep Show’ are false – copies, ghosts.

Efrik reminds us that reproduction is an uncanny act; that to reproduce is always to die.

Reproduction exists as a means to protect the dwindling, fragile object which is replaced.

I wrote about this piece when it was still available as a video, but it has since been taken down from the Internet. It exists as a fragment; a vanished referent.

Only a handful of images remain.

‘Persona Peep Show’, like Spectrality, is about getting lost in the woods.

Secrets can be hidden in the shadows but too much whiteness – fog, bright sunlight, overexposed photographs – can conceal just as much.

I hope that you can allow yourself to get lost in the woods, just a little, at the end of this year, dreaming among the tall pines and flickering sunlight, feeling the cool moss underfoot.

🍄 Fruit

• Reproduction in Sara Tuss Efrik’s Persona Peep Show

  Efrik’s video-poem acts as a container for the spectral feminine; the womb, tomb, and home of Freud’s uncanny. Spiking the domestic with the sinister logic of fairy tales, the narrator taunts: ‘You want to pee in a red hood you want to lock yourself inside the house. You want to sleep with the wolf. You want to turn on the oven.’

• Deviant Strategies: The Flicker

  When I shared films like these with students, their creative responses were incredible. Often they were impressionistic and strange, something between the recollection of a dream and a map to an unknown world. Sometimes they were vivid and clear – the images laid out as precisely as objects in a gallery.

𓍊𓍊𓍊 Mycelium

• Agnes Haus’s ‘Persona’ is another text inspired, partly, by Bergman’s film. The video captures the monochrome spectrality of this atmosphere.

  Every night, for two weeks in my attic studio, I watched granular Bergman and Tarkovsky films in the background while I crudely experimented on my small modular synthesiser.

  

• Dylan Henner’s album, Star Dream FM, is another spectral artwork. In this case, the artist imagines tuning into a radio to find their own memories being broadcast in between frequencies.

  Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while. Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories.

• Laura Cannell’s new winter album ‘Brightly Shone the Moon’ reimagines carols and makes them bleached-out, spectral, and numinous.

I wish you a week of contrast, beautiful light, and evergreens.