Horoscope for January 20 - 26, 2025

"Do I Stay or Do I Go?"

Christian Petzold’s Transit is available for free on Tubi.

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In 1940, author Anna Seghers fled her native Germany for Mexico City. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers’ work was dedicated — from the overt to the more ponderous and thematic — to the resistance of fascism. Seghers was arrested by the Nazis for her first ever novel, a story of various fictional communist resistance fighters entitled Die Gefärhten, as early as 1932. Despite this the remainder of her oeuvre is no less obsessive in its explorations of the devastation of war and fascism; the ways that they work together to dull the senses, shorten lives into bookends of tragic fate, and encircle us into a temporal paddock of moment-to-moment living wherein we are neither able to process the past nor see our futures.

In 2019, Seghers’ novel Transit was adapted into a film by the same name by German director Christian Petzold. Transit is the story of lone-wolf Gregor who escapes Paris by the skin of his teeth before the Germans descend on the city, but not before discovering the manuscript, transit visa, and dead body of a writer named Weidel in a Paris hotel room. Travelling on Weidel’s identity, Gregor makes it to the port city of Marseille where he plans to use the author’s transit pass for Mexico to depart. Instead, Gregor is confronted with Marseille’s byzantine and illegible immigration system, inundated with desperate refugees and dictated by petty bureaucrats with little humanity and huge amounts of material power. He also falls in love with Weidel’s wife, Marie, who roams the city streets searching for a husband who will never materialize except for on paper and through rumors from consulate offices.

Petzold and Seghers’ Gregor begins his journey as a miserly and individualistic survivor, ensuring his own continued safety through quick movements and loose ties. He is judgemental, angry, and apolitical save for when expressing allegiances might work to his advantage. This begins to change when he reads Weidel’s manuscript. It changes more when he meets Weidel’s wife and becomes fond of a friend’s young son. The film ends with (and I’ve been accused of spoiling without prior warning so here it is — WARNING: spoilers for Transit) Franz Rogowski (Gregor) staying in Marseille in hopes of seeing the now certainly-dead Marie again. In the novel, Seghers’ Gregor stays in the country to work on a peach farm and join the French Resistance.

I can see how such a sweeping and, frankly, Aquarian resolution as “joining the resistance” might be a little tough to pull off cinematically, which is why I don’t fault Petzold for making the more sentimental choice. Petzold’s ending also honors Seghers’ and the novel’s overarching philosophy (and what could be Seghers’ literary thesis writ-large), which is somewhere in the territory of “if anything is going to save us, it’s our ability to relate”. Heavy emphasis on if, with Seghers, though her central characters often seem to get there. Whether political or sentimental, the end remains the same: Gregor lets Marie leave on a ship and gives away his visa. He stays; Marseille falls to the Germans.

Last week Los Angeles caught on fire. In the immediate aftermath I was struck with a strange feeling of despair as I watched person after person pick up sticks and leave town for homes and families in other states. I had forgotten that Los Angeles is made up in large part by transplants. I guess the same can be said for most major American cities; Los Angeles is not unique in this aspect. I do not fault anyone for leaving because had it been me stuck in a foreign city threatening to burn to the ground I would have done the same.

I couldn’t this time. I’m from Los Angeles. I grew up in the middle of the city in the house I live in now, the house I’ve spent only 6-odd years of my adult life not living in (Cancer moon). This city is landmined with meaning for me both personal and impersonal in the form of friends, schools, homes, apartments, exes, essays, films, television, history, myth. It’s the city of Didion, Mike Davis, Eve Babitz, Charles Burnett, Theosophy, Scientology, Noir, Heat, Body Double. Also: riots, earthquakes, the Santa Anas, Point Break, Angelyne, William Mulholland, pornography. I don’t need to extol the virtues of Los Angeles — everybody knows it’s a perfect city. All this to say: I had never before been confronted with the prospect of going down with a ship. I had not considered the deep, LA patriotism that would rise within my chest and shudder at the idea of leaving. I had, too, underestimated the swiftness with which I would start looking up “how do you fly with a cat”.

Seghers wrote Transit, the story of a man who stays, while she was living in Mexico City after having navigated the exact same escape route from Marseille that Gregor forgoes at the end of the book. One wonders if Seghers felt guilty for leaving without fighting as Gregor claims he plans to. Climate disaster will make refugees of us all in the coming years, enough that we will all be forced to confront, to one degree or another, this question of staying. It’s an impossible and heartbreaking choice.

If we can take anything from Seghers, it is that you do not have corporeal survival without a sense of humanity and we don’t have humanity without vulnerability and relationship. This is the philosophy, too, of this week’s transits: a Sun/Pluto conjunction in Aquarius speaking to solidarity under authoritarianism and a gentle Pisces Venus trine to Mars in Cancer detailing the shape of that solidarity, which is through sentiment. Politics and sentiment are not separate instincts, just as the instinct to survive via distance is not better or worse than the one to go all in at the table as the floor tilts starboard-side. Whatever you do, do it with friends.

NOTES FOR THE WEEK

Monday, January 20

Acute awareness of your position as one of many, as an oppressed class with a powerful enemy. We are here at the same time for a reason.

Tuesday, January 21

Lack of water, lack of food, lack of coordinates. All conspire to make you smarter and kinder and more capable than you ever thought possible.

Wednesday, January 22

Moving backwards and in silence while grabbing each other’s shoulders for balance.

Thursday, January 23

A plan emerges from an unlikely and reckless source.

Friday, January 24

Swiftness and felicity; good, old-fashioned luck.

Saturday, January 25

Moving fast and quick thinking doesn’t work after it has been acknowledged that time is nonlinear. A salmon swimming upstream.

Sunday, January 26

Possibility & shared resources.