Taurus in the Age of Pluto in Aquarius

I had a dream recently about an old Episcopal Church with a burial ground attached. While I watched, the tombstones in the cemetery were removed by invisible workers and replaced with smooth river rocks. The bodies buried underground remained undisturbed, but the cemetery was transformed into a Zen garden.

I went into the church and looked for someone to ask about the changes. I found a curate dressed in high church clerical garb with the energy of a priest rushing to get to Mass on time. 

The curate was kind to me. They paused what they were doing and listened while I asked them about the garden. I told them that the decision to remove the tombstones bothered me. It felt like an affront to the dead. 

The curate assured me that they hadn’t just paved over a cemetery. 

“We’ve replaced it with this database,” they said. “Anyone can search for the location of the people who were buried here. All of the information has been preserved. It’s actually much easier to find now.”

I opened my mouth to argue with the curate, but I woke up before the words left my mouth.

I don’t keep a dream journal, but I was irritated enough about being interrupted that I wrote what I would have said down in my regular journal:

There is more to a cemetery than a list of names. There are stories carved in the stones. There are stories in the way the stones are arranged. The weathering of the stones is a story. The stone that has fallen in the mud and cracked is a story. There are ghosts who live in stones, reaching out to strangers when no one else will visit. With no anchor in the physical world, how can they speak? 

Even after I vented my irritation, the dream felt important, but I didn’t know why, so I filed it under “things to think about later” on my mental shelf and forgot about it. 

One of my great projects as a writer is learning how to be a better archivist. For years, I’ve known about the importance of keeping notebooks, indexing notebooks, and revisiting notebooks, but I struggle to put that knowledge into practice. 

I am a future-oriented person. I have always had a natural optimism that insists that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. I spend most of my time living on the bleeding edge between today and tomorrow, straining to reach as far into the future as I can. 

Most of the time, this works for me. I am good at coming up with ideas, and I can blissfully hop from one project to the next without retracing my steps. Occasionally, though, I find myself between projects and unsure what to do next. I’m learning to become an archeologist of my own work, seeing my creative past as something that is worth preserving. 

As I have become a better archivist, I have discovered that notebooks are like tombstones. Just like the act of picking up a pen and giving thoughts form anchors me in the physical world, the notebook itself becomes an anchor for the person I was in the moment I was writing. My notebooks are haunted by the ghosts of my past selves, selves that are gone (and worth remembering) just as surely as Margery Benet Blythe (1817-1902 “May she live in glory.”)

As I write this, I am in one of those in-between places. Realizing it had been awhile since I’d indexed my journal, I went to work. I opened my notebook to where I left off last time and found the entry about the cemetery dream. 

Once again, the dream struck me for reasons I couldn’t explain. Then I turned the page. The following entry in my journal was a collection of notes I’d taken on the book No Logo by Naomi Klein. 

This is the quote I recorded:

“Savvy ad agencies have all moved away from the idea that they are flogging a product made by someone else, and have come to think of themselves as brand factories, hammering out what is of true value: the idea, the lifestyle, the attitude. Brand builders are the new primary producers in our so-called knowledge economy. This novel idea has done more than bring us cutting-edge ad campaigns, ecclesiastic superstores and utopian corporate campuses. It is changing the very face of global employment. After establishing the ‘soul’ of their corporations, the superbrand companies have gone on to rid themselves of their cumbersome bodies” (196). (Emphasis mine)

No Logo is a critique of corporations who believe that physicality (workers, factories, physical products, etc.) is a liability. These superbrand corporations believe that people don’t buy shoes, they buy ideas. In the process, they conveniently forget all the customers who abandon companies whose boots fall apart in the snow.

The error of the superbrand corporations is the same as the curate’s erroneous belief that the physical world is nothing but an inefficient means of storing data. The natural end-point for this belief is attempting to upload a cemetery to a database believing that the only thing of value in a tombstone is the data carved in the stone.

(It’s ironic to me that the curate was dressed like a high church Episcopalian. It’s hard for me to imagine an Anglo-Catholic priest making that mistake.) 

These beliefs neglect all of the elements of physical experience that can’t be reduced to code. People, of course, can’t be reduced to code, and corporations can only neglect employees and customers for so long before the humans in the equation rebel, but human bodies aren’t the only ones that matter.

Anyone who has ever had the book they need leap off the shelf knows that matter has mind and a will of its own. Like the neglected humans in this equation, the soul of the world doesn’t suffer fools. It’s only a matter of time before the Ents march on Isengard. 

We’re in a liminal time in 2024. Pluto is in the early degrees of the air sign Aquarius. When a planet is in the early degrees of a sign, it’s new to that energy. Like a child learning to crawl and feed themselves, the planet is still learning the rules of how to operate in this new world. 

In the wheel of signs, Earth always precedes Air, and the jump from the physical to the ethereal is an especially difficult transition to make. More than anything, Air wants freedom, and Earth is like a pair of lead shoes at a hot air balloon party. It’s easy for Air to look at Earth and see nothing but limitations. 

In the early days of a new phase in a cycle, resistance to the energy we just left is natural. The longer the cycle, the more we are sick of the previous phase by the time the new phase arrives. We need to kick things off with a rebellion. It gives us the energy to launch into something new. 

At the same time, we can’t fully disconnect ourselves from the earth. Even when Jupiter and Uranus leave Taurus, we will need some people to continue wearing lead shoes. Some of us need to visit the cemeteries, keep the physical archives, and relish the smell of the good earth in spring. We need people who will remember that we need to eat physical food sometimes, that we can’t live on data and air.

As a Taurus, I suppose one of those grumpy, earthy people is going to be me.

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