There is, as the meme goes, a direct connection between the events of 9/11 and the existence of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. The legend is this: witnessing the towers fall spurred Gerard Way into finally taking his dream of making music seriously, My Chemical Romance inspired Stephanie Meyer in her writing of Twilight, of which Fifty Shades was a work of fan fiction in its original form. This piece of cultural lore as told in meme usually manifests as a presentation of two to four of the above elements with the story omitted but the connection implied, which either prompts in the viewer a fleeting sense of superiority or sends them off to google ‘9/11 fifty shades’. (Actually, there’s another version of this meme that connects 9/11 with the demise of The Ellen Show and I’ll let you do the deciphering yourself on that one).
Within that story is woven a few interconnected layers of 21st Century mythmaking practices. One layer is the meme itself performing a meme’s function, which is to represent a piece of arcane knowledge and in the act of representing, render the representation itself a cultural symbol. Anyway. The second practice is connecting everything to 9/11 which is at this point an American pasttime. The last thing, the thing I want to focus on, is the cultural influence of fandoms.
As all but one of the inner planets (and one outer, Jupiter) move steadily into Gemini I find myself increasingly struck by the power and mobility of references as a means of creating worlds. We exist in a reality that is completely and totally mediated and experienced via our own interpretations of that reality. References are a viable tool towards self-actualization. We see it in the rise of ‘cores’, in the dense semiotic language of memes, in the idea of echo chambers. Our sense of identity is, in many ways, synonymous with our interpretations. Usually when this sentiment is expressed it is as a lamentation. We have, the lamenter implies, lost touch with some ineffable, essential thing by intertwining the self with the internet. We are lost in a forest of referentiality and it’s ruining society or something.
This week the Venus Cazimi goes exact in Gemini. Venus Cazimis are something of a ritualistic transit; Venus, the brightest star in the sky, has held a place in our collective imaginations going back to the Romans, who memorialized Venus passing through the light of the Sun as the myth of Babylonian goddess Innana passing through the underworld. A Venus Cazimi marks the transition of Venus from a morning star to an evening star, and vice versa. The morning/evening transition presents Venus as a planet with two sides (befitting the ruler of Libra): Athena, the warrior (Venus as a morning star), and the languid love goddess Venus (evening). And what was all that if not fan fiction?
“What saves astrology from itself today is that it works like the fandom world. It is a community-created subculture that takes what has been mass-produced and digests it” writes Alice Sparkly Kat in Postcolonial Astrology, “After a certain magical point, fandoms are no longer dependent on the canon and function quite well on their own.” Like astrology, fan fiction — a phenomenon arguably borne of and existing within this current iteration of the internet and social engagement therein — is an engagement with existing references that transcends the bounds of its original form and morphs into something only recognizable by archetypal principles. The Saturn interpreted by an astrologer in 2024 would only be recognizable to an ancient Roman astrologer in its most archetypal form. Twilight is only really recognizable in Fifty Shades by its exploration of how restriction accelerates desire.
Venus is the planet, if we’re being archetypal, of love. Love is a blanket word for Venus’ endless significations: connection, beauty, comfort, spirit, tactility, etc. Fan fiction is an act of love. How often have we built worlds out of scraps — of attention, of observed details, images burned into our brains by an optimal cast of sunlight? And then how often have those worlds taken on a life all their own, the origin of those references forgotten a while back? This Venus Cazimi feels like a celebration of our strange and deeply human obsession with culling existing works and forging new and separate worlds with them.
I revisited Against Interpretation as I was writing this week’s horoscope because I thought it might be informative. What I came away with is I really wish Susan Sontag had been around to see the internet and she definitely would have hated fan fiction. However, I would like to selectively deploy her final line of this essay to illustrate what I feel is the true spirit of Venus Cazimi in Gemini: “In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
NOTES FOR THE WEEK:
Monday, June 3
When all else fails, there is talking your way out of it. Any deficit in beauty, money, and circumstance can be made whole if you’re good enough with words.
Tuesday, June 4
The slogan that mobilizes a crowd towards and into history; the time traveling performed when we read wartime letters from behind museum glass and realize that we’re being implicated. Telling the same story again and again until it distills into logo.
Wednesday, June 5
Feelings unfurl like a banner at the rally or a national headline.
Thursday, June 6
New Moon in Gemini. Seeds of doubt. Old confusions and murky memories of losses invate the cocoon of the new language you use to talk about relationships, art, and affection. Pain doesn’t actually ever go away — there will always be new and old injuries, even and especially when we start to talk about the things we love.
Friday, June 7
Bed rest!
Saturday, June 8
Is loneliness… sexy? Isn’t it kind of entrancing be or to encounter someone desperate for connection? The failure to seduce becomes a seduction in itself; attempting to flirt spirals out into oversharing, gut-spilling, total embarrassment. The good news is only cowards and the terminally cynical can resist the erotics of a cracked façade.
Sunday, June 9
When stubbornness fights pride there are no winners.
I look forward to Astro weather every week sooo good
I think fan fiction has existed for many centuries in different contexts - like in lots of Romantic poetry a lot of the work to understand what the poet is trying to say is in learning the myths they’re referencing and how they were relevant to people when the poem was written. Or even the Oedipal complex. That’s kind of fan fiction. Freud used Greek tragedy as a reference point for diagnostic terms probably because most people in his circles would be familiar enough with Greek tragedy to get the gist from just the combination of those two words. If Freud were alive today and doing that work maybe it would be the Jacob complex, you know?