A quick note: I have been shocked by how efficient this Jupiter/Saturn square that started in June has been at throwing me off my schedule. Thanks for the two week-and-one-day break! I am back now.
Does it matter who I am? Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar starts (as a lot of Ramsay films do, god bless her) with a shocking death. The film opens on Samantha Morton’s titular Morvern returning home to her dingy Glasgow apartment to find that her boyfriend has taken his own life. In his wake is an unpublished manuscript along with instructions for Morvern to send the manuscript to a publishing contact. Morvern replaces his name on the front page of the manuscript with her own, sends it, and buries the body herself without calling authorities. She spends the rest of the film on a lurching and hedonistic Spanish vacation with a friend, the lie and her boyfriend’s death humming ominously around the sun-drenched weekend. Morvern never tells her friend, or anyone else, what happened.
Every summer from now until 2043, the planets that move into Leo will oppose Pluto in Aquarius. On Thursday, Venus leaves Cancer and ingresses into Leo, where it will oppose Pluto for the first part of the weekend. Leo and Aquarius are the axis of individuality, but in different parts of the kingdom. Leo, ruled by the Sun, is a sign that speaks to centralized power, the reign of kings, and the triumph of the spirit. Aquarius, ruled by Saturn, is the hermit outside the city walls, the harsh reality of shared experience, the system of networks that a king could not rule without. Right now (and for the next two decades), Aquarius topics loom large and the Leo experience will be largely defined by the contrasts it reveals. In this dreaded pre-election period when systemic breakdown is a constant existential threat, how are we supposed to conceive of ourselves? In a culture that orients self-esteem around individual accomplishment, what does it mean to feel one’s personal history as inextricably bound to the fate of the collective? What if we pretended we were artists anyway?
Morvern never gets caught. She successfully convinces a gaggle of impressed publishers of her authorship and accepts their hefty advance. Check in hand, she turns on a heel and leaves Scotland once again for Spain. This story might have been about the emotional fallout of denial and the complications that arise from maintaining a lie. Instead it’s a story about the obscurity of grief and identity and how obscurity can be a weird detour to the sublime. Planets in Leo opposite Pluto in Aquarius toe a similar line — struggle against the tide of reality, or give in? There are worse things than being obscure.
NOTES FOR THE WEEK:
Tuesday, July 9
An empty church; a stare-off with a small animal.
Wednesday, July 10
The Adventures of a Tradwife. Finding the freedom inherent in simplicity while also taking into account the simplicity’s inherent friction with the values posited by modern society. Playing within confines and playing with the confines themselves.
Thursday, July 11
Floating because the government decided your previous identity wasn’t real and that you’d be better off classified as Ether.
Friday, July 12
Discussions around fairness, gender politics, how much something really ‘matters’. A breakup occurs because one party became a political fanatic, was swept up in the wave of a protest, never to be seen again.
Saturday, July 13
“I don’t feel like it”.
Sunday, July 14
“That’s ugly”.