The Long Body of My Life

1. Belief Systems

To begin, it helps to define some parameters. If my belief is that the movements of the planetary bodies are integral to understanding myself and others, then my sun sign—what, in common parlance, is deemed simply my “astrology sign”—is going to be very important to me. If, on the other hand, I think astrology is bunk, then I’m barely going to know how to pronounce the name of my sign, let alone remember what it is supposed to represent about me.

Most people fall somewhere on a spectrum. Many of even the most dedicated astrology fiends will tell you it’s more about self-inquiry than about mysticism, and plenty of people who are quick to insist that astrology is bogus have looked into their own supposedly fated personality traits. Most likely, there is a correlation between an interest in astrology and a liking for your own sun sign. After all, if what is supposedly in your stars sounds nothing like you, analyzing yourself through that lens is going to be made difficult, if not impossible.

This begs an entirely separate question: How well do we know ourselves?

I respect the importance of physical space and time and its effects on each person and event, without going so far to say that Saturn is going to have an influence on how my Wednesday will go. How much of astrology is sheer commercialization? How much of all of today’s mainstream spiritualist culture is just money changing hands? Yet, how much wonder still sleeps in everything. In the air after a heavy rain, the smell of wet dirt, a daffodil opening its mouth towards the sun. It’s no coincidence that mysticism has recently wrestled its way into the mainstream. We look at our phones, we look out our windows, towards the sky. We’re hoping that all of this means something, anything. We seek to blame something for our sense of needless suffering, the ruthlessness of time, our tiredness, our emptiness, the creeping feeling of mediocrity and shame.

We sleep, we wake—and realize, after all, today will be different. Venus is in my fifth house. Something good is coming my way. The wheel of fortune is turning.

2. A Misunderstanding of Self

I was not interested in astrology for most of my life. I can make up any kind of reason—science, disagreeableness, sheer disinterest—but in fact it’s probably because I’m a Capricorn. If you are a person interested in astrology, or a Capricorn yourself, you will understand why. For the layperson, Capricorn is not a very fun sign. The period it denotes, December 22nd to January 19th, is the dead of winter. It is associated with old age, as winter often is. The planet that rules Capricorn, Saturn, is associated with obligation, discipline, restriction, and law. The characteristics typically ascribed to Capricorns are ambition, practicality, responsibility, conservatism, discipline, and a propensity for hard work. Careers in business are recommended. The tarot card associated with Capricorn is The Devil, the interpretations of which include sexual deviancy, addiction, fear, temptation, violence, and especially materialism.

Materialism does not just mean excessive wealth and consumption, but also, in the language of philosophy as well as esoterica, materialism refers to the belief that nothing exists beyond the physical processes of nature, including the mind and the spirit. Essentially, that what you see is what there is, and nothing lies beyond the veil. If the world, the great expanse of the past and with it the future, look bleak to you, it is because they are. Nothing is truly mysterious, and salvation is not possible in any form, personal or societal. This is the doctrine of the tarot’s Devil.

I identified with barely anything I read or was told about Capricorns for most of life. How could I? I’m a high school drop-out from a family of writers and artists, a dedicated writer from adolescence on, sensitive, silly, clumsy, and extremely talkative, with a loathing for systems of all kinds, a distrust in institutions, an eye for the particulars. I believe in ghosts. I wear bright red lingerie, press flowers into books, feed the jays and crows in my front yard peanuts each morning. If you had told me I was a Pisces or a Sagittarius, then I would have been all ears for astrology. I would have loved it. Even a Cancer, a Taurus, a Scorpio. Just give me something to like about myself.

My sister has always insisted that Capricorn fits me well. Her argument is that I am, after all, hard-working and rigorous. This is true of my writing, and only my writing. I have no wish to give anything more than a lukewarm 60% to the capitalist machine that chews up my labor and spits out minimum wage.

“I’m not a Capricorn,” I’d insist. “Trust me, I know myself.”

“Spoken,” she’d say, “like a true Capricorn.”

Ultimately, I had little to no interest in astrology before I started reading Tarot. I had no knowledge of the astrological associations of any of the cards, but when I began to do readings for myself, I found that I would draw certain cards much more often than others, and one in particular would show up all the time.

It was, of course, The Devil.

3. Recovery

I have a friend who is a recovering alcoholic, and has been recovering for years. That’s how he defines it: his recovery is ongoing. It’s not just to do with not drinking, it’s in everything. Recovery is a constant rethinking of your relationship with yourself and with life. This friend is also a Capricorn. We’re born a week apart, and he, like me, does not fit into the business suit. He’s bubbly, disorganized, funny and vain, just as I am. The most deeply Capricorn that either of us gets is in our pain, that from which we have a need to recover, and our lifelong dedication to the process.

I mentioned above that I dropped out of high school. I was fifteen, about to turn sixteen. It was the dead of winter. I started crying in world history class and couldn’t stop. At home, I locked myself in the bathroom and still couldn’t stop. It was like that for years before and for years after. At times it is still like that now. I’m not usually depressed. In fact, I’m mostly in high spirits, joking, singing under my breath, writing poems in my head, dancing, trying on clothes and taking them off. Cooking, planting and picking flowers, talking aloud to the cat.

Then, it comes, and the color is sapped from the world, my whole personality is suddenly absent. I’ll cry so hard that I can’t get out of bed, so hard my body aches, my head throbs and I can’t breathe. I’ll say I want to be killed, I’m dying. I feel death settling over me, I’m walking through death. Then it passes, in a day or a few. I’m back in myself, my hips sway as I move, I smile as I speak. I’ve lived in cycles like this for almost my whole life. Slowly, the lows have gotten milder. I have an infrastructure and a support system through which to weather the storms of physically debilitating depression.

Is that Saturn hanging over me? Was I born under a bad sign? Is Capricorn, a sign that resonates with me more or less only in my worst stare, my sun sign because I have spent so much of my life being in that state? The crux of my life has been untangling this pain, finding where it resides within my body and learning to love it as well as all the rest. It is so tempting to think that our essential self is our best qualities, the things we like about ourselves and wish to showcase to others. But are we not equally our pain, our fear, our helplessness, the failings of our minds and of our bodies? Or is it more about the interplay between these things, the journey from Saturn outward into the rest of the sky?

Since I have spoken about The Devil at some length, I’ll tell you now about The Devil reversed. In a tarot reading, when a card appears upside down, the meaning that is often taken is the card’s reversed meaning. A reversal is not a negation or an opposite of the card’s upright meaning, but rather an inverse or expansion of it, like looking at the same thing from a different angle. If The Devil is bondage to the material world, The Devil reversed represents release from that bondage. If The Devil’s outlook on life is that of emptiness, stagnation, meaninglessness and fear, then in reverse that outlook is one of belief in the beauty and strength of simple things, of the innate wonder of existence, the pleasure of eating food, watching the seasons change, feeling the warmth of someone’s skin. The knowledge that the bleakness you see is only a trick of light and shadow, and life simply has what meaning you assign it.

If you worship life, that is enough.

4. The Long Body of My Life

The most important aspect of Capricorn, for my purposes, is the focus on old age. It is commonly said that Capricorns age backwards, and if that means starting off bitter and petrified of experiencing the world, then I am on track to live out my destiny, so to speak. I find myself, in my mid-twenties, thawing out, as winter thaws away in spring, and at last discovering that I am alive, a body, part of a living system of interconnected beings, human and non-human, and that the value of the world itself has nothing to do with my own particular value.

A decisive characteristic of Capricorns is their capacity for investment. I know what you’re thinking—business again? Not necessarily that kind of investment. It’s one thing to see yourself as you are now and say you know yourself, but, in actuality, we are our whole lives, our childhoods and our last years, our worst downward spirals and our moments in the sun. A Capricorn’s outlook is not to next week, or even next year, but towards forever. I write not because it is going to get me anywhere fast but because, over time, the body of work I will amass will be animated with its own life, occupying its own space and time. My work is the body of my life, and with it, as my sister reminds me, I am ambitious, disciplined, and hardworking, a full-fledged Capricorn on the page, if nowhere else.