On September 2, 2024, the Sun moved into the second decan of Virgo, that ruled by Venus, who–being in their fall when in Virgo–receives the least support and resources of any Venus sign-placement. The Nine of Pentacles card is often depicted as one of the most beautiful cards in the minor arcana: a woman centered in intimate communion with a bird in the safety of a garden, clothed and surrounded by abundance. As a mutable sign, Virgo is double-bodied, embodying multiple realities beyond what is first apparent. Thus, when I contemplate the image of beauty evoked by the Nine of Pentacles, I also reckon with these questions:
What are the true, oppressive costs of my access to material comfort?
And who is paying the price?
My keywords for the Nine of Pentacles and Venus in Virgo were: Love requires discretion, rejection, criticism, and uncompromising standards of care. Love requires that we risk loss of pleasure. Love is, among all things, risk of discomfort.
And a crucial work that exemplifies this process of collective responsibility and care is an essay written by Aurielle Lucier, published in The Offing in May 2023, “Free Black Gxrlz and Free Palestine”.
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In “Free Black Gxrlz and Free Palestine,” Aurielle Lucier writes of how, during the Ferguson protests in 2020, online Palestinian allies were “among the very few in our global community who came to [the protestors’] aid,” sharing tips on how to endure the violence of being tear-gassed by the militarized state, among other life-saving knowledge. Lucier also writes through a shared ecosystem of grief entwined with resistance, drawing exacting, critical connection between the material circumstances and lived experiences of Black and Palestinian people:
"In cities like Atlanta, Ferguson, Philly, and NYC, resident tax dollars are used to finance police exchange programs like GILEE, where local police are sent to Israel to be trained by settler forces under the guise of “counter-terrorism” and “urban policing.” Countless other cities, too, have set up exchange programs. Settler nations support other settler nations. Settler violence births and normalizes other settler violences. So, my connection to the Palestinian people was made by the very nations that persecute us. The US, by its own actions, linked the persecution of Palestinian people to that of my people: since beginning their collaboration with Israel, police killings of Black people in America have not slowed. They’ve nearly doubled. Our taxes were due this month, and in most states, nearly half of our taxes fund militarized tyranny, both domestically and abroad. With our money, our country’s government will continue to fund Israel and supply them with weapons even though it acknowledges nearly 250 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Israeli government in the past few weeks. This money, our money, will fund bombs dropped on the heads of children, a militarized push of families from their homes, and will further the reach of settler displacement. Friends, this is our fight, too."
They continue:
"Solidarity is profoundly simple at its core: should we ever find that our comfort is at the expense of someone else’s life, it becomes our responsibility to divorce from such comforts."
On September 17 and 18, 2024, Israel remotely exploded hundreds and hundreds of pagers, walkie-talkies, home-installed solar panels, and other electronic devices–many used by healthcare workers, first responders, teachers, and children–in Lebanon. Over three thousand people were gruesomely maimed on the first day alone, at least two children were among those who were killed, and the healthcare system has been overwhelmed. One of the explosions on September 18 occurred at a funeral, a gathering of people mourning somebody they had loved and lost. Since last week, Israel has committed massacre upon massacre in Lebanon, displacing people and families, and insisting that homes are being bombed because Hezbollah is hiding precision missiles in garages and attics. The response of the United States as been to send more military troops in support of Israel. Watching Israel and the United States bomb Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria–is screaming a language? Is weeping a language? Is grief a language?
On September 24, at 6:00 PM (CST), the state of Missouri and the people who chose to work for the state, murdered Khaliifah Marcellus Williams, a Black man who had been on death row for a crime he did not commit. No person, regardless of status, should be executed by the state. In Williams’s case, DNA evidence had exonerated him from the crime he had been incarcerated for, and the victim’s family as well as the prosecutor had requested that his execution be stayed. The horror and grief of the killing of Khaliifah Williams has been made more horrific as thousands upon thousands of people called and emailed and protested to/at the statespeople’s office, only to be denied by the Governor, and then by the U.S. Supreme Court. The national entity of the United States government demonstrated yet once again that the cruelty is the point, that Black lives are devalued by those who have been granted power they absolutely do not deserve, and that Black people, families, communities must live in this nation under constant threat of unconscionable murder by the American state, unconscionable theft of safety by the American state.
I wish to call on what we call discomfort. Discomfort sounds like a much more diminished feeling than grief, but something I have been sitting with (uncomfortably) lately is the idea that–when I put my “feelings” aside, as is appropriate to do in a shared humanitarian struggle against white supremacist occupation and imperialism–discomfort has more material impact on what my solidarity looks like than my grief. When I deny myself anything that maintains my sense of comfort, discomfort influences my decision-making on what actions I take, and it also activates instinctual limits on my speculative capacity. Discomfort, and my service to it, diminishes my ability to imagine different ways of living, being, relating, and giving in service of our most marginalized people.
I am part of a recovery community that taught me to say: I cannot think my way to right action; I can only act my way into right thinking. Thus, in response to discomfort, I must make concrete changes within my lifeway, and then continue to do so. Some of this is very very simple: families on the ground, whose campaigns are organized through www.gazafunds.com, need real, actualized support. The Municipality of Gaza needs resourced support. Some of what will need to be done will need to be conceived, designed, organized, and taught with more complexity, but no less urgency or concrete possibility. What are the ways we are currently skilled in acting in solidarity? What are the ways we can grow further each day, in practice, to deepen solidarity? How do we get from here to there? If we cannot think of the path yet, what are the first steps we can take upon it, regardless?
When thinking about love and solidarity, an important gift from Venus in Virgo is the lesson of adaptation as survival. When Venus (connection, love, compassion) is severely under-resourced, she must become more resourceful than those who more privileged, more creative, less reliant on institutional prestige, more liberatory in praxis.
I can't stop thinking about how this, at the bare minimum, requires repurposing the mundane practices of capitalist obedience (including but not limited to to-do lists, automated phone reminders, personal achievement spreadsheets) towards routinizing solidarity/sacrifice actions, deepening involvement, and refusing to lose sight of the realities of how our personal power creates impact. One immediate example that comes to mind is a tweet I saw encouraging people to set a repeating phone alarm to remind us to donate to a Gazan family’s support campaign. Another very practical tip was to skip going out to eat once a week and transform those resources into a donation benefitting a fundraising campaign, instead.
We also need to call on the problem-solving impulse within those of us who have ever prided ourselves on running our shit really well, getting a project off the ground, or improving workflow for our employer–we can take the energy that goes into such efforts and channel it towards the formulation of, for example:
new dispersal methods of educational information on the BDS movement and participation within it
developing new communal practices that continually decrease our material, emotional, psychological, and social attachment to institutions that we know are conscripting us into grievous and oppressive harm
generating new language that decomposes our material investments and mental attachments to the police state, white supremacist hierarchy within organizations that have not yet addressed their role in continuing racial apartheid, and legal (but unjust) processes
Spreadsheet templates that can be shared with our friends to help us reorganize our resources to deprive colonial institutions of our effort and money, which can then be redirected to mutual aid in support of our most vulnerable people and communities
Any and every other item that could be imagined and which might support the changeable, ongoing space of crisis we will fight to dream a way through
I repeat something I said before, but in a different tone, the twinned voice, the one inspired by Lucier's work and words: every guardian of love and care must become more resourceful. The state of being in fall is not that of having the luxury of choosing which options we'd most prefer; it is the reality of no choice left, no way but the way through. We must change in response to institutionalized cruelty, colonial violence, and white supremacy.
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Closing questions:
What does sacrifice look like on the level of mundane, everyday practice?
What must I sacrifice in service to growing my solidarity with our most marginalized people?
What do I have to give, and what lies in the way of my giving it?
What tools do I already have within my physical, financial, emotional, spiritual, communal reach that can dissolve, remove, exile the barriers that keep me separated from giving care to our most marginalized people?
Links and other reading:
"Moving Towards Life" by Marina Magloire: "In her poem “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.,” Jordan writes, “I COMMIT / TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING / OF THE PEARL.” These lines can be taken as a mantra for Jordan’s role in pressuring members of her community to identify with and assume responsibility for the plight of the Palestinian people. Perhaps we can even infer that Rich’s eventual anti-Zionism, and probably Lorde’s, was generated by the friction of Jordan’s uncompromising commitment, and by the example of her willingness to lose friendships and opportunities by standing up to the Israel lobby. Jordan’s Black feminism was predicated on refusing the empty privileges afforded by life within what she called “the Big House” of the United States, where Black people have the unique opportunity to “throw salt or arsenic in [the] soup.” Jordan’s conflicts were meant to be (and were) galvanizing, an attempt to encourage her sistren to use their positionality to sabotage the US war machine."
"In The Open Air: Saul Williams on Breathing, Reading, and Resisting": an interview between Aurielle Lucier and Saul Williams, published by Scalawag on September 3, 2024
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