The Moon and the Matter of Changing Form

You may be wondering about the delay since my last letter… Well, for the last couple of weeks, both my body and one of my paintings have been having a meltdown.

Because of the images in this email, it may be cut off in your inbox. If you’d like to read in full, I recommend opening it in a browser or your Substack app.

We have been moving through what qualifies as a heat wave here on the Dingle Peninsula. Compared with the temperatures much of the world is enduring, it feels faintly ridiculous to call it that. Nevertheless, the heat was enough to push my already chronically ill body into a fairly severe flare.

It was also enough to make my painting melt.

The painting was part of a method I have spent months developing. It was my first work on gessoed wood panel, and the surface had been drying for weeks. Then, as the temperature rose and conspired with the intensifying humidity, the medium reactivated. Passages I had believed were stable became nearly liquid again. The paint smeared beneath my hands and transferred onto my skin.

The body of the painting could no longer hold the form I had given it.

And my body reacted to the paint as if I had plunged it into boiling water.

Then… my body kept reacting whenever I worked with the medium.

Through painful trial and error, I have come to believe that I am reacting to gum arabic itself. All of the materials I rely on are high in gum arabic content: watercolor, gouache, Neocolor II crayons, and the thickening medium I use for my method. I react to all of them.

At nearly the same threshold, the body of the painting and the body making it, my body, lost their tolerance for the method.

One could no longer remain stable, while the other could no longer sustain the process.

This is one of the Moon’s less romantic lessons about bringing something into being. A vision does not become fully material simply because we have made it visible. It must acquire a body capable of holding its form, and the maker must have a body capable of maintaining the relationship required to make it.

Sometimes the Moon’s message is:

Not through this material.

Not in the form you first imagined.

Not in this particular body.

This is one of the relationships I examine in a Creative Court Report: how the Moon receives, supports, complicates, or redirects the visions and methods of the rest of your planetary Creative Court.

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This has been an unexpectedly grievous discovery.

Gum arabic is not one obscure substance I can simply remove from the cupboard. It is fundamental to several families of art materials I have loved and used for years. It was also the primary binder in the medium I had been experimenting with… The method I had invested in as the central pillar of my current practice and my future art ambitions.

I had invested money in it, certainly, but also time, curiosity, physical effort, and hope. I had learned how the material moved. I knew how to push it across a panel, wipe it away, lay it down again, and build an atmosphere through accumulating layers.

The material and I had developed a close, intimate relationship through the many encounters we had while working together.

My hand learned its drag and slipperiness. My eye learned what it did while wet, what happened when it became tacky, and what it would become when dry. My body began anticipating how much pressure would move it and what kind of mark would remain behind.

In such a close relationship, the maker and the material begin to think through one another.

What once required concentration begins to look (and feel) like spontaneous coordination.

There is grief in discovering that a relationship you developed out of love is no longer safe for your body to enter.

This is especially difficult for me because I am an intensely kinesthetic maker. I need to feel my world in order to understand it.

When my fingers are enclosed in gloves, something strange happens to my proprioception. I lose the immediate sense of where my hands are and what they are doing. My grip and movements become clumsy. My body seems to develop a temporary lack of coordination.

Gloves would remove the very contact that allows me to work intuitively. Over the years, I have used brushes less and less, relying more upon my hands and fingers, cloths, wiping, pressing, and physically moving paint around. I find gesture through contact. Some painters discover their most organic mark-making by standing three feet from the canvas with the longest brush known to man. I find it by getting close enough to wrestle with the material.

I am not a particularly clean or demure painter. At my most absorbed, I probably work more like a gorilla rearranging the physical world. Even if gloves did not disrupt my sense of touch, the method is messy enough that the paint would almost certainly find its way inside them or onto the rest of me.

For me, a barrier is not a viable solution because touch is central to my methods.

But touch is more than a personal preference here. It is where my body meets the material body of the work. It is how I learn what a substance will permit: its drag, softness, resistance, temperature, fragility, and response to pressure.

Touch is where I encounter hyle.

The Greek word hyle means matter or material substrate.

In my last letter, I wrote about the Moon’s relationship with memory, dreams, and the imaginal life. An encounter enters the soul, remains after its physical source is gone, and acquires an inward form capable of returning. But that imaginal body is not yet a painting, sculpture, garment, loaf of bread, or any other physical creation.

To return fully, it must cross another threshold.

It must enter hyle.

An image cannot become a painting through vision alone. It requires pigment and a surface willing to receive it. A sculpture must enter clay, stone, wax, wood, metal, or some other substance capable of being modeled, carved, cast, joined, or assembled.

The Moon, as generatrix, wraps an imaginal form in physical matter (hyle), moisture, and time.

Luna carries what is still ghostly, remembered, dreamed, or envisioned into the dense conditions of a body.

She does not merely make the invisible visible. She brings it into relationship with weight, chemistry, texture, temperature, vulnerability, and duration.

Luna introduces the image to all the relational conditions of earthly life.

Wood responds to fluctuating temperatures. A binder softens in humidity and heat. Paper buckles beneath water. Pigment fades with enough sun exposure. Clay cracks in the kiln. A maker’s hands stiffen, tire, tremble, swell, or become inflamed.

Matter permits the image to live here, but living here means becoming subject to change.

In the old philosophical worldview, generation was always entwined with corruption. Whatever enters physical life can also soften, warp, crack, fade, rot, smear, or lose the form it once possessed. The same material conditions that allow something to come into being continue acting upon it after it has been made.

My painting had successfully entered hyle. Pigment and binder had acquired shape upon wood. But generation is not secured by a single moment of arrival. The work still had to survive heat, humidity, chemistry, and time.

The Moon’s work did not end when the painting became visible.

Generation requires continuance. Something unfinished must be enclosed, nourished, and held together long enough to become what it is trying to become.

This is the fertile dark.

A seed does not germinate because it possesses a sufficiently beautiful vision of a flower. It germinates because the surrounding world can hold it: darkness, moisture, temperature, soil, time.

If those conditions change beyond what the forming life can bear, desire cannot negotiate on its behalf.

As Regent of the Creative Court, the Moon asks the material questions…

• Can the maker’s body sustain this process?

• Can this substance carry the image?

• Can the work retain its form in the environment it has entered?

• What scale, pace, and method remain possible now?

These questions determine whether the intentions of the entire Court can acquire a life on Earth.

Otherwise, inspiration remains a dream. Beauty remains a longing. Skill can be practiced faithfully and still feel frustrated by its results. Courage cannot compensate for a body or material arrangement that is no longer stable.

As an example, my own chart contains a particularly complicated version of this negotiation.

My Mercury is strong, angular, retrograde, and inclined toward strange methods. It likes invention, experimentation, and the slightly heretical solution. But Mercury is in aversion to my very powerful domicile Moon. The technical intelligence and the generatrix cannot see one another directly.

Mercury can speak to Mars, and Mars can speak to the Moon. But Mars is also in exile and not especially interested in the conventional route of doing things, since that route is most often blocked to him. Together, Mercury and Mars are quite willing to take things apart, misuse materials, ignore the instructions on the label, and see what happens when I move paint around in ways it was not designed to move.

All three meet in my hands. Mercury devises the method. Mars pushes, scrapes, wipes, wrestles, and acts upon the material. The Moon receives the consequences through the body and determines whether the resulting form can continue to exist.

This arrangement has produced some of my most exciting experiments. It also means that the method I devise and the form my Moon can sustain do not always agree.

There is often a distance between what I can imagine, what I can invent, and what the whole living system of my chart can bring into material stability. I have come to think of this distance as a form of divine discontent.

Most makers know some version of it (much to our annoyance and chagrin).

The poem in the mind and the poem on the page are not identical. The vessel that emerges from the kiln is not the vessel the hands thought they were building. We reach toward one image and something related, but indisputably other, meets us in matter.

Sometimes this is a technical gap that closes with practice.

Sometimes it becomes the enduring friction through which a creative life develops.

And sometimes the material world issues an edict with enough gravity to change the practice itself.

I will not pretend I received this development with serene lunar wisdom.

I was devastated. Truthfully, still devastated.

My health and circumstances have already taken enough of my creative life at different points.

But… I know what happens when creative expression has nowhere to go. When I cannot make for long periods, I become less present inside my own life—more miserable, more blocked, less wholehearted.

Don’t get me wrong: I have never successfully forced myself to do things through pain. I have always lost the battle whenever I treated my body as an obstacle to be conquered instead of a partner with whom I must respectfully collaborate.

Continuing, for me, means listening carefully enough to distinguish the method from the creative need living inside it.

The images have not stopped coming.

My body has simply made it very clear that they can no longer return through this particular arrangement of gum arabic, pigment, and skin.

Thankfully, I also find great joy in working with charcoal.

The irony is not lost on me. The material my practice can presently tolerate is a substance whose specially prepared forms have long been associated with absorption and purification, especially good for reactive bodies. After weeks in which my body and my paintings both seemed to be inflamed and liquefying, I have been led toward something dark, absorbing, elemental, and quiet. Like the fertile void of the night, where the Moon rules as queen.

More importantly, charcoal allows the tactile, Lunar relationship to remain.

There is less distance between my hand and charcoal than there ever was between my hand and paint. I work almost entirely with my hands, pushing it into paper, blending it with my fingertips, grinding it into the tooth of the surface, and wiping it this way and that in broad, gestural marks.

My Mercury can still experiment. My Mars can still move with intuitive force. My Moon has found another material capable of receiving them without asking my body to sacrifice itself in the process.

The same nocturnal images continue to return: fog, darkness, the shifting edge of the landscape, the light that appears when the world has nearly disappeared. What has changed is the hyle into which they enter.

The Moon is wrapping them in charcoal now.

While I search for the paper that can hold the work in the way I want, I have also begun binding my own sketchbooks. I fold the sheets into signatures, pierce them, pass thread through paper, and make a small physical place in which the next image might live.

I will speak more about those books next time.

For now, making them has been a balm. After so much material refusal, I can put my hands on paper and thread without fear. I can remain inside the physical intimacy of making while my practice puzzles out its next body.

Perhaps this is one reason so many artists move between more than one medium, even when only one becomes the work for which they are publicly known. We are curious, certainly. There are too many ways to speak for a creative person to remain entirely uninterested in all but one.

But it also allows the practice to wax and wane alongside the rest of material life.

A poet also paints. A sculptor also bakes. A painter also binds books.

The Moon changes, our bodies change. Our resources, desires, capacities, seasons, and environments change. A living practice must be able to respond to those fluctuations without demanding that we override them.

The Moon herself does not remain full. She waxes, wanes, disappears into darkness, and gathers light again. Her continuity takes the form of rhythm: relinquishing one form, entering another, moving with the conditions that make life possible now.

“Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement.” - Haruki Murakami

I am still grieving the material relationship I lost. Grief belongs to the lunar story, too. Generation and corruption unfold in the same matter.

And when the old arrangement can no longer hold, the Moon turns toward the dark and begins again.

If anyone is interested in buying a bundle of watercolor and gouache paint, Neocolor II crayons, and various brushes and palette knives, let’s chat privately via email or dm. You’ll get a sweet deal on professional art supplies, and I’ll feel happy they went to someone who I know will cherish them.