Pisces New Moon Meditation for 2005:

The Poisonous and the Sublime
by Jean Hinson Lall

Here in southeast England the weather is still cold, grey and unpromising. What relief we’ve had from the severe cold, snow and ice that shut down schools and disrupted transportation last week has come at the cost of being mired in mud and a penetrated by a lingering damp chill. It doesn’t feel like a time for new beginnings. And we know that astrologically the ideal time for launching new ventures is around the New Moon in Aries, when fresh Fire energy is on the rise and new green growth appears above the ground. Yet every new moon is a new beginning. If Aries is the time of public emergence and heroic going-forth, the Pisces New Moon is the secret conception in the depths.

As the image of Pisces shows two fishes swimming in opposite directions, Piscean waters are constantly fluctuating and revealing the presence of dualities or multiple possibilities. They are the waters of gestation and of dissolution, of pollution and of purification, of contemplation and of drunkenness, and above all of imagination. These watery complexities are brought to the fore in the current exhibition entitled "Turner Whistler Monet" at the Tate Britain in London. The show features the works of J. M. W. Turner (1775-l851), James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Claude Monet (1840-1926), particularly those depicting scenes along the Thames, the Seine, and the lagoon of Venice. It traces the artists’ relationships and influences and the new paths they struck in painting.

"Faced with an increasingly polluted industrial landscape in Europe," says the museum’s guide to the exhibit, "all three artists abandoned realism and sought out beauty in the modern urban environment. They directed their focus more and more on transient effects of light and weather and revisited their subjects under varying conditions . . . experimenting with innovative painting techniques."

It turned out that a crucial element in the beauty of the urban scene was pollution. "During Turner’s lifetime London had become the largest industrial city in the world," our guide continues. "By his death the first ‘pea-soupers’ had begun to appear, peaking in the 1890s when a Chelsea health official reported that over two hundred tons of fine soot were sent into the London air every day."

In the eyes of some Victorians this poisonous fog was seen as a metaphor for the moral corruption of the age as well as a source of disease and a cover for criminal activity. But these artists saw it differently. "Atmospheric pollution brought with it sublime effects which excited Turner’s imagination, and were sufficiently remarkable to lure Monet across the Channel." Whistler too found the effects of the mist and fog irresistible.

The watery scenes painted by these artists transformed the vision of the city and revolutionized painting. Fog, smog, toxicity, contamination, and blurred images are Piscean phenomena, as were the techniques developed by the three artists to convey their vision and the controversy their work sometimes provoked. In a sense, whatever they painted (sky, fire, gardens, bridges, majestic buildings), they were painting Water in its elemental sense, as the imaginal substance that is infinitely malleable, ever transforming itself, capable of mirroring, dissolving, purifying and renewing all things.

So profound is Water’s duality that its very toxicity and impurity can be a source of healing. The veil of pollution through which Turner, Whistler and Monet saw the urban landscape served paradoxically to reveal the city’s inner radiance, its majesty, vulnerability and worth. The eyes that view these paintings are bathed with a purifying Water that revitalizes the city of the imagination and renews our love for the actual city around us.

Pisces represents a point in the emergence of a thing before it is fully manifested, when its multiple potentialities are still evident. It remains as the misty, ill-defined substrate of that which seems most firmly and securely established in the world, as the hidden fluidity behind solid forms and the unrecognized or unexpressed ambivalence we retain in the midst of decisive action. The ultimate deconstructive sign, Pisces performs its role in the archetypal wheel of life by revealing where things are coming undone, how mixed and impure they are and how far from being under our control. As the work of these artists shows, such deconstruction frees the imagination to renew the world.

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Many thanks to Lindsay Radermacher for taking me to the exhibit and for sharing her astrological reflections.

"Turner Whistler Monet" continues until May 15, 2005. Further information can be found at www.tate.org.uk .

2005 Jean Hinson Lall
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