Madame Clairevoyant's Guide to the Stars by Claire Comstock-Gay

Author:Claire Comstock-Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

THIS IS WHERE VIRGO’S RULING planet, Mercury, comes in. Mercury is the planet of knowledge and language, of communication, the planet of connection with other people. It’s the “with other people” part that’s crucial here. Virgo can project an energy of receptive quietness, of internal solidity, and this can make us forget that Virgo is also, fundamentally, a sign about connection. Virgo’s knowledge, and its language, is rooted in the realities of the world.

In Stone Butch Blues, gender-nonconforming characters are assaulted and beaten—sometimes by the police and sometimes by regular civilian homophobes—with regularity. Some of them die. Some of them vanish. One is institutionalized, retreating so far inside herself that she stops speaking. “How had Al survived?” Jess realizes while visiting. “By forgetting, going to sleep, going away! She went underground, hid for safety.” While it’s a novel, it’s the type of novel that had readers constantly asking Feinberg whether or not it was “true,” whether the events described really happened. “Oh, it’s real all right. So real it bleeds,” Feinberg wrote in 2003. A document of a real time, a real world. A document bearing witness to a real history.

David Wojnarowicz learned he was HIV positive in 1987. He died in 1992. While he was writing, it was from the position of a person in the center of an epidemic, a crisis and a tragedy of such proportions that there was no way for one person to turn it into something orderly, something clear, something just.

Bringing this into a project about astrology at all feels a little bit sacrilegious, as though I’m blithely trying to climb Everest in my cheap parka from H&M, as though I’m cheerfully throwing a birthday party in a haunted house. This kind of pop astrology, the kind I’ve been writing, is supposed to be fun, I can imagine you may be thinking; it’s supposed to be memes and games and lightness; it’s supposed to be contained and personal. It’s supposed to support the idea that we can compartmentalize our higher, enduring selves from the worlds we live in. As though astrology only works in the good times. As though astrology can only be applicable to the safest and least vulnerable among us. If astrology’s going to be worth anything, it needs to have something to offer us, even when the world is awful, and even when that awfulness permeates every last space in our lives.

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