Venus Retrograde, and a forgotten love
Winter thunders on, dipping and weaving in unforeseen movements. As I wrote for an article in The Ingress, last summer, Saturn and Uranus contact correlates with extreme weather events. 2021 did not disappoint in this department. A new term for this is floating through astrology circles: “astrology good,” which refers to when something correlates in a literal or expected way with the current astrology, even if the event is troubling or disastrous. What ‘astrology good’ allows for us to do, in our own lives as well as the collective, is to take a step back from the Leonine stance of being the hero of our story, to a more air element orientation of being a witness.
In my graduate studies, the term for this distinction was ‘the observing ego.’ It is a step removed from the part of us that identifies with our emotions and impulses, and cannot see the larger patterns and story-arcs as it is trapped within our current circumstances. The observing ego allows us to witness ourselves as other, to see our own behavior as others might see it, to feel our words as others might feel them. It is our observing ego that allows us to change deep psychological patterns, because our observing ego can see them without identifying with them.
When ‘astrology good’ happens, we can enjoy the often ironic or metaphoric manifestation of a combination of archetypes, even if what we experience personally is complicated or painful. The practice and capacity to step outside of our lives and imagine what could be instead is cultivated through developing the skill of empathy, first with others, then with ourselves.
This brings us back to a shivery moment I had a few days ago, remembering my early love of reading, and missing it like I miss my grandmothers (achingly, wholeheartedly).
I moved when I was eight years old, to a new state, a new climate, and a house divided. My parents divorced as we moved — we were in one house in California, and two by the time we got to Colorado. The loss of community and finding myself alone in a new school brought me to a love of reading. I sat at recess and read historical fiction throughout elementary school. In high school, I took every English course my school offered, and when I chose my college, I thought I was headed to the source of great literature: the classics.
Unfortunately, though my college degree did include many great works of literature, it was a philosophy degree, whose harsh and abstracted modes of thinking never quite became lucid in my mind. After I graduated, I stopped reading fiction. Not entirely, but almost.
Where philosophy had alienated me, I thought surely psychology would have the answers. And then my editor’s feedback on my Master’s thesis for my Counseling degree was that somehow I had managed to write a thesis that was more ‘literature’ than psychology. I had promised myself to non-fiction, but I did not burn for it. In the twisting paths of the mind, I still prefer poetic metaphor than a clinical outline.
Last week I discovered a list on LitHub of 50 classic novels under 200 pages. With my current life of mothering an 18-month-old, running the house, doing astrology, and keeping my therapy career inching along, a 200-page novel sounds like a bowl of ice cream and delicious solitude. It also sounds like the sweet relief of receiving the outpouring of someone’s inner life without the worry of if I am responding to it properly. Should I empathize here? Ask a question? Simply reflect? Are they asking for guidance? Should I think through the symbolism or offer a worksheet? Am I present enough? Am I too present? Freud would say yes, Aaron Beck might say no, what would Winnicot say?
No. That is not what happens in fiction. There are no boundaries to maintain or cross, but a deep intimacy with a book lets you explore the depth you are willing to go. Titrating how much you let in, you moderate mostly your own receptivity, without simultaneously being asked to respond in the right way in real-time.
How does one relate to a novel? In the quiet pouring over character and metaphor, the slow assimilation of language into an inner voice, the permission to understand a character without carving that understanding into a living psychological being. It is an immersiveness that changes us, as fresh ideas and dialect weave their way into our inner life, brought like a foreign food from a lover into the quiet kitchen of our minds. We do not know it, but we trust the source.
And what of entertainment? A sweet pass time? Entertainment for its own sake is a controversial deity, blamed for the degradation of culture and virtue, slipping down into our systems dopamine laced and vapid, a distraction from what is ‘truly’ important. It catches in my throat but I must say, enjoying whole hours of life at a time is truly important. Not punishing yourself for it is truly important. When you worry as an act of love, ‘fun’ can feel like a betrayal.
Non-fiction, like social media, can feel full of imperatives. Under the burden of ‘this is supposed to be real,’ non-fiction wants us to learn, digest this idea, look at this research, have opinions. Make life changes, stand firmly against the past, devour relentlessly the future. There is work to be done, and reading non-fiction will fill you with reality. It is too much to live up to.
The dichotomy of real and unreal is false. Reading canonical texts and tracing the veins of thought through history, like mapping an ancient river bed, shows you that each age’s fundamentals of reality are the next age’s naive mythology, each twisting and malleable, ribboning over the landscapes of time.
And yet, a metaphor, like a river, endures. I find it tucked in a paragraph read by countless others, echoing a quiet hum of belonging between my contemporaries, but also all the before, and the after, together in the knowing and being, together in gratitude for literature and solitude and a poetic way through the bramble of life.
Let me know what novels and characters I should spend some time within the comments.
