A Meditation for the Maelstrom

Today, for our many snowed-in subscribers, we’re pleased to offer a moment’s reflection on this hinge point of the year, via the literary & astrological stylings of the inimitable .

Later this week we’ll wrap up our serialization of Matthew Gasda’s novel Seasons Clear, and Awe. Catch up with the previous chapters here.

Submissions for our next contest are open until this Wednesday, January 28th, after which we’ll introduce a new round of Finalists among whose excerpts our subscribers will vote to select the next novel we’ll serialize in full at PILCROW. Do please spread the word.

Stay safe out there in the maelstrom.

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To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry….

-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Astrology tells us about time’s qualities. The planets and their angles bespeak textures, atmospheres, and light that might be likely to hold certain sorts of events. It’s a weird and trippy task to attempt to read the astrology of a whole year ahead. (Who knows WTF is going to happen?!!) And January 1 is not the astrological beginning, anyway. The zodiacal wheel starts with Aries in late March—early spring, first fire, high sun. Even so, January feels like a psychological restart. A psychoactive mix of daunting, exciting, and comforting to see the calendar dates and ephemeris spread out before me as I try to read the year ahead.

Speaking of Aries: the biggest (?!) celestial event of the year—the Saturn Neptune conjunction—is unfolding at the very first degree, the zero point, of Aries, which also happens to be the first degree of the zodiac. (“Where is the summer, the unimaginable zero summer?” T.S. Eliot asks in Four Quartets.) On February 20^th, Saturn and Neptune will conjoin, join forces, come together. They haven’t done this since 1989. Saturn, lord of time and winter, is associated with structures and limits—the hard edges of so-called reality, and Neptune with oceanic dissolve, cinematic imagination, and redemption. Most astrologers talk about Saturn and Neptune as contraries, and about their upcoming meeting as a sign that longstanding structures—literal and figurative—will dissolving. (The last time Saturn and Neptune were together was 1989—around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall…)

Aries, host of this once-every-thirty-six-years happening, rules the head, as we come into the world headfirst. Aries—the emboldened,