Transiting Sun Opposing My Natal Pluto: The Whole World's Out to Get Me

...or is it that I'm out to get the whole world? This topsy-turvy logic may make more sense, and it may not even be that weird; after all, Pluto Rising, c'est moi.

First of all, has anyone out there in astrology-lovin' cyberspace missed me? It's been something like five weeks since my last post. What's changed in those five weeks? Simple, really: I got a part-time (technically freelance) job that feels like a full-time one due to a long commute and fine print attached ("You must demonstrate the same degree of commitment and general gung-ho-osity as this company's full-timers, including but not limited to checking work email early on weekend mornings in order that you may resolve the sphincter-spasming issue of a PM's not receiving a file you sent late last night in order to meet a crucial deadline. Oh, and if you are not a technical wizard, you had better either become one or pray that nothing seriously goes awry after our tech ninjas leave the building for the day. And did we mention you will need to stay late again tonight?")

This is what I wanted, even prayed and burned candles for: steady work. Now I've got it and while there are some definite positives (a steady paycheck that will launch me a notch or two above what NYC considers piss-poor; a cool, laid-back supervisor who answers my many questions with amazing patience; a very nice fellow evening-shift colleague), I am also stressed-out, constantly tired yet too wired to relax, and perhaps most upsetting of all, supremely uncreative. It wasn't too long ago that I was that magic combination of imagination and discipline. Now...fuggedaboutit.

I was really hoping that today would be different; that I'd be able to get some Creative Time in. But with the Sun opposing my Pluto (and, by the way, poised to enter my 7th House later this evening), my laptop became infected with a virus that somehow infiltrated my trusty (Ed) Norton Internet Security, and had to be fixed via remote technician to the tune of $89.98.

And somehow, it's gotten to be almost five o'clock Brooklyn Time. Fuck. If I manage to put away all the laundry I did yesterday before work and get to the grocery store to pick up a few staples, I may still have a chance.

And maybe once the Sun leaves my 6th House and begins to trine my Mars, Mercury, and Neptune from my 7th House over the next few days, life won't seem as bleak, and the Cult of Work that's been up in my grille for the past month or so will ebb at least somewhat.

I can only hope.

Progressed Moon in Cancer: A Poem

Poised in the 10th house of the public eye
My pearly ambition will strike crabwise--
Indirect, subtle, soft as moonlight.
The world won't know what hit it
Or pinched it
But I will feel in my stomach
What the world needs
Before it does.
I will make it at long last, on my own terms;
I will finally make the kind of home I need;
I will cook more;
And I will probably wear more push-up bras.

Lennon-McCartney and Harrison: In the Crow's Nest of the Sixties

(This article appears in abbreviated form in Eric Francis's Planet Waves newsletter: today's special issue, "Yesterday and Today," commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Beatles landing in America. Yeah, yeah, yeah!)

“We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.” --John Lennon

So much has been written about the significance of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the mid-1960s that it has overshadowed the meaning of Neptune in Scorpio (1956–70). If Neptune rules music, drugs, mystery, and the collective imagination, and Scorpio immediately brings to mind sex, power, and the underworld, put the two together and what do you get? Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.

And if the Beatles were situated in “the crow’s nest,” they did not all see, or report, identical findings to their youthful baby boomer generation.

The songwriting team of Lennon-McCartney was a formidable force. John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s Suns were both in the communicative air element (John’s in Libra, Paul’s in Gemini). The trine between the two musicians’ Suns manifested in mutual inspiration and what Beatles producer George Martin deemed “a healthy competition.” John and Paul rarely wrote songs together—but often wrote in each other’s presence, sought out each other’s feedback, and helped each other with lyrics. Their mutual agreement was that whoever wrote most of a song sang the lead (with the exceptions of songs expressly written for their band mates). The finest Lennon-McCartney composition, “A Day in the Life,” was the result of two separate, unfinished songs grafted together into pure genius. This song also perfectly symbolizes the opposition between their Moons: John, the explosive “teddy boy” and drug-oriented, intellectual iconoclast, had an Aquarius Moon; Paul, the magnanimous, regal, pop-oriented showman, had a Leo Moon. This lunar opposition magnetized John and Paul to each other from the day they met and formed the duo’s backbone--first in a positive way (riding to what John called “the toppermost of the poppermost” together) and later in bitter, backbiting enmity.

George Harrison was also in the crow’s nest--but he was in his own private corner, as one might expect from a Pisces Sun and Scorpio Moon. On Beatles albums George was a hapless victim of what John referred to as “the Lennon-McCartney carve-up.” In the early days of the Beatles success, when the rest of the band was able to tolerate Beatlemania, George hated it--and wrote the sulky “Don’t Bother Me” to underline his repulsion. In 1965, during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, George first came across the sitar. Through his subsequent study of this difficult instrument and Eastern philosophy, was responsible for bringing the East to the attention of the “new world” of hip sixties Western culture—-and he continued to support the Maharishi even after his band mates became disenchanted with the yogi. Apropos of his Scorpio Moon, George was also the first Beatle to explicitly reference sex in a song: on Revolver’s “Love You To” (1966). He and John bonded over many LSD trips when Paul abstained, yet this bond did not translate into a Lennon-Harrison songwriting team. George’s water-sign vision, which ranged from cynical (“Taxman”; “Piggies”) to mystical to just plain beautiful (“Something”), continued to be overshadowed by the Lennon-McCartney duo. When the Beatles began to bicker during the White Album sessions, George brought in a fellow Moon in Scorpio, Eric Clapton, to play on his impressive "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." However, George and Ringo, the two sensitive water signs, both took turns walking out of an increasingly tense studio atmosphere dominated by Paul's perfectionism and John's growing heroin addiction and his insisting on keeping Yoko not just in the studio, but next to him at all times. To the rest of the world in 1968, the Beatles were still together, but the rot was setting in. As George's songwriting efforts grew more confident and prolific, he felt so stymied by the Lennon-McCartney fortress that his first solo effort, All Things Must Pass, was a triple album.

It is no coincidence that the Beatles tenure in the crow’s nest ended in 1970, the same year Neptune left Scorpio. There was no longer a deep, unfathomable ocean to traverse; Neptune in Sagittarius was more akin to a spaceship.