The Astrologer is Present

I came to astrology with two degrees in reading and writing books. I was so terrified of math, I always had to pull out a calculator to figure out the tip at restaurants. Astrologers with my background aren’t unusual. Scrolling through a database of astrologers, I mostly see psychologists and the types of literary people that I might expect to meet at an MLA conference.

On the whole, the astrology community takes the liberal arts and social sciences demographic for granted, yet the existence of astrologers with little interest in math is an anomaly of the last hundred years, made possible by software that can turn birth data into a birth chart in seconds.

Before the creation of astrology software, casting a birth chart required you to consult complicated tables and do calculations that I, frankly, don’t understand well enough to talk about even vaguely. Astrologers were the quants of the ancient world, and astrology was a discipline for math and science people.

The number of astrologers who can cast a chart by hand shrinks every year, yet there are ways in which the community still behaves as if being a good, professional astrologer means attempting to be objective like an 18th century scientist.

Where Are You In This?!

When I started my MFA in creative writing, I was a poet, but I graduated as a novelist.

There were two reasons for this:

1. Even though literally everyone else at my school disagreed with me, I thought fiction was cooler than poetry,

2. Writing poetry the way I was being taught in school made me feel vulnerable, like I was dancing down Broadway naked.

I always felt bad about my insecurity because the corner of the poetry world I inhabited was shockingly supportive of vulnerable art.

In the literary world, it is technically impolite to assume that a poem is autobiographical, even though poems are almost always autobiographical. (Most novels are at least partly autobiographical, too, by the way, but I didn’t know that until I was already up to my neck in one.) So, in writing workshops we all pretended that the poem about the heartbreaking breakup actually had nothing to do with anyone in the room while the person reading the poem tried to smoothly deal with something in their eye while avoiding the menacing glares of a Certain Someone across the table.

The charade might seem silly from the outside, but, for writers, the illusion of fiction is important. Aside from the fact that it is almost impossible to weave a poem or novel out of nothing but words and air, the illusion of fiction gives poets the license to distill life into a substance that is satisfying enough to be consumed in small doses, and it gives novelists enough raw material to keep you in your chair with one of their books for a week. You can chug a novel like grape juice. Poetry is brandy. Both grape juice and brandy need a ton of the grapes—by which I mean, personal experience—to be worth consuming.

I knew all of this, and yet, I could not write poetry with enough experience in it to satisfy myself or my professors.

“Where are you in this?!” My second semester advisor bellowed every time I turned in a poem.

His tone was questionable, but his question was deathly important. When a poem (or a poet) lacks experience, the only recourse is abstraction. Abstraction is distance, and distance in a poem is unacceptable.

When a poet is too far from the subject of the poem, it is too easy to fall into talking about “universals” that are universal only to the people the poet knows. There is no such thing as truly universal truth. Seemingly universal truths are always universal only to a particular group of people, a group that is almost always smaller than we assume. Attempting to apply in-group universals to everyone is dangerous for all kinds of reasons, and they make a poem as boring as the lecture on postmodernism and meta-narrative I am dancing around.

”Don’t talk about roses,” I was taught. “Talk about this rose. The closer you are to the rose, the more particular your description, the more likely you are, ironically, to write something someone else can relate to.”

I knew this, yet I couldn’t answer my advisor. Every time I tried to write myself into a poem, the words came out as an incoherent scream. I couldn’t bring myself to learn to write language poetry, so I hid myself behind a torrent of words and narrative and claimed that my poem was becoming a novel.

It is easier to write about other people in novels, so I was able to get away with writing fiction about programmers in Silicon Valley, even though my laughable attempts to learn JavaScript almost sent my laptop careening out the window and into the neighbors’ Mariachi band.

In the end, I was allowed to leave school with a degree in fiction because I was incapable of talking about myself and telling the truth.

Love, Atlantis, Abstraction

For almost a decade, I told myself that the reason I was unable to show up in my work was because the truth was simply too painful. I said this while keeping a copy of Atlantis by Mark Doty on the shelf, a book I was assigned during my first semester in the MFA program, back when I thought I was a poet.

Atlantis is a collection of poems that centers around Mark Doty’s experience caring for a friend dying of AIDS. It has the same narrative structure as a horror movie. The first half of the book is about ordinary life, funny and idyllic, as if he means to gain your trust and disarm you. Then, when you’ve gotten far enough into the book to have forgotten that you’re reading a horror story, the dog gets hit by a car.

Like any good horror story, there are clues about the true nature of the book’s universe along the way that only become apparent in retrospect. Death gleams like a jewel in a display of mackerel on ice and a green crab’s shell, and yet the dog is so endearing we can forget that he and his owner are so old they can barely walk anymore.

Mark Doty is generous in the way that true teachers are generous. He not only foreshadows the content of the book, Atlantis’s introductory poem (”Description”) explains how he was able to write—not only coherently, but beautifully—about such difficult material in the first place.

He begins by discarding the received wisdom of poetry writing. He uses abstraction in his poem. He doesn’t just use abstraction, he revels in it, and, in case you don’t notice that he’s breaking the rules, he gets meta with it:

“But I’m not so sure it’s true,

what I was taught, that through

the particular’s the way

to the universal.”

He loves abstraction, “swell and curve, shift / and blur of boundary,” and love, he claims, is the thing that gives him the license to get away with using abstraction in his poems. Abstraction is not a technique for creating distance for Mark Doty. Abstraction moves him, and he trusts that empathy will allow us to be moved by his abstract language, too—that, and the willingness to tell stories that give him a language of metaphors. A salt marsh becomes jewelry, and we know it’s poetry, even if it is full of “dazzled horizontals.”

Whether I Like It or Not, Astrology Is Still Math

The abstraction of astrology is one of the things I have found hardest to teach, especially the abstractions of signs. Astrology may not be wedded to math anymore, but it is still a discipline that deals largely in abstractions.

I don’t like abstractions for the same reasons I don’t like math, so I bring abstractions down to earth whenever I can. It helps when I’m trying to explain difficult concepts because it helps me create metaphors—like comparing aspects to a clock—but there are times when the drive toward concreteness creates problems.

The signs are archetypes, and archetypes are not personal. We might recognize archetypes in people, but no person is ever so abstract that they can be mistaken for an archetype.

One of the worst habits an astrologer can develop is confusing Virgo the sign with a person who has a lot of Virgo in their chart. I cringe whenever I read things like, “Virgos are anal and picky.” Statements like that are false universals. Not all Virgos are “anal and picky,” so statements like that alienate Virgos who would otherwise be interested in astrology but aren’t “anal and picky,” and the acceptance of statements like that turns astrology into a discipline where prejudice is acceptable.

If you replace “Virgo” in a sentence with the words “black people,” and the sentence becomes racist, it shouldn’t be acceptable to say.

Yet, I realize, often, that I am terrible at drawing a stark enough line between the signs and the people who carry them because I don’t like to deal with the signs as abstractions.

Another problem is, like Mark Doty, I’ve found abstractions that I love. I love the signs. I talk about Virgo and Pisces as if they are people. I have gotten to know them so deeply, they feel like spirits of their own to me, yet, the more I personalize them, the more I am modeling this conflation between the symbol and the people who carry it.

The solution I’ve found to this problem, ironically, is making it personal.

The Astrologer Is Present

Jo Gleason wrote a blog post recently about her journey toward allowing her personal experience into her work as an astrologer. From the beginning of her practice, she says, she was determined to be impartial.

I don’t know Jo’s background, but I know that I have gotten the message from the astrology community that the only things worth saying about astrological symbols are the things that apply to everyone. An experience of a symbol isn’t valid, I have heard the community say, unless you can find it in a book or have rigorously surveyed as many people as possible to prove that the experience is (close to) universal.

In time, Jo learned that impartiality is impossible, and it isn’t even desirable:

Your exact experience may not be everyone’s, but your experience may give you potent insight into the nature of that symbolism; and speaking to that symbolism in your unique voice may be the way others are led to touch that which is so much bigger than themselves, yet connected to their personal experience. This, I believe, is the greatest gift astrology has to offer humans.

She seems to have come to this realization on her own, brava for her.

Personally, I needed some help.

I Am Here

One of the best things I’ve done in my astrology practice was create a tier on Patreon where my patrons can influence what I write and teach. Some of my best work has been “by request,” and knowing that people are waiting for it has done more than I can say to get my work out the door.

I anticipated those benefits when I decided to create the patron benefit, but I never could have anticipated exactly what my patrons would ask for.

Recently, I was flabbergasted when my patrons started asking me to share my personal experience.

“You seem embarrassed when you talk about yourself,” they said, “You shouldn’t. We want to hear more of it.”

For a moment, I was back in graduate school with my exasperated professor, but then I realized that, without knowing it, I had learned to do as an astrologer what I had failed to do as a poet.

I remembered a post I wrote long ago about my experience with a transit, before I learned that the personal “doesn’t belong in a serious astrological practice.” I wrote it because I had been helped by another rebel astrologer (and artist, incidentally, which may have been why she dared) who wrote about her experience of that transit.

That post was the only one I wrote before I learned that writing about your own experience is unacceptable, but it was the most popular post on my blog at the time. And it was the post that brought in clients. Because I was willing to be vulnerable with my experience, other people felt safe to talk with me about their own fragile places.

Astrology Should Be a Language of Empathy and Understanding

I coined the term “narrative astrology” back at the beginning of my professional practice because I had an instinct that my work as an astrologer and my work as a writer belonged together.

I am only now coming to realize that some of the essential work of narrative astrology is to celebrate astrology as a language to tell stories about ourselves and our lives the way Mark Doty uses the vocabulary of jewelry to talk about the death of his friend.

I don’t think I was (just) a novice poet when I couldn’t look at my experience straight on without screaming. I just didn’t know that the very tools of language that can create distance can also be used to make it safe enough to speak. Just like the lie that poetry is fiction creates the privacy necessary for poets to tell the truth, the abstract language of astrology makes it possible for people to talk about some of the most difficult experiences of our lives.

When I say Pluto in 4th house Scorpio, I am suggesting a universe of stories.

If you understand the language of astrology, you will read those symbols through the lens of your own 4th house, Pluto, and Scorpio.

You and I may not have the exact same experience of that abyss. We may not be like two violins resonating with the same note, but, through the terms/symbols, we find experiences that harmonize. Through the harmony of common experience, we connect and converse each other. Through conversation and mutual sharing, we find the places in both of us that contain, in the words of Mark Doty, “a little, / the brightness” of empathy and understanding.

And I refuse to tolerate the idea that anything that builds empathy and understanding is unacceptable.