Trump delivers levels of dissonance that scramble the most entrenched and loyal parts of the American psyche. It's a nightmare, but it's in keeping with how radical change occurs.
This is a superb and fun poke at modern life and especially the rogue rump who just lives for the next five minutes according.to.those who have witnessed his tilting.at windmills.
Trump is a terrible manifestation of the picaresque mode -- and as a Gemini himself, it's all doubly awful. But when you get a lemon, make something of it that resembles a cherry pie. And then get on with whatever time you have left.
Love it! I'm feeling every word and sentiment you've expressed and/or channeled in this piece and it gives me great relief. Your analogies are priceless 😅 I just want to flow from now to the end. Thanks for the permission and encouragement 💗
What I didn't mention in this piece is that staying in the present and 'flowing' is, involves a complete rewiring of the brain. It takes effort, the biggest hurdle is unplugging to some degree from the glut of electronic life. It's such an addiction.
Agreed. It is all too much and highly addictive. I have curated what content I see on Facebook as best I can. I have not gone over to Blue sky yet but are looking at that option among others. I am an air sign third house Aquarius Sun Saturn conjunction.... Was I born for this age? I guess we all were that are here. I consume a lot of content and would like to balance it with production. Very difficult to do when you are consuming so much. In any case I really admire your ability to create content and Flow it out to all of us. Bravo👏
I loved this piece and affirm essentially.vanity.all.is vanity. I also recommend .a healthy dose of hedonism to sustain oneself thru the mania/stunned cycles.
Ha! Well said. And the 'mania' is real. But so are the positive takes when we turn the dial this way and that to find the frequency that's a good 'fit.'
Thank you, Pamela...it's funny how this essay 'appeared.' I'd been casually reading an article that mentioned the key talking points and then immediately started riffing of off it on my notepad. Too, Hillman does that to me whenever I encounter his thoughts.
Oh boy did this get all the wheels turning in my brain. First of all, I'm a double Gemini with Aquarius rising so by nature perhaps a bit picaresque? Second, I wrote my French master's thesis 35 years ago on Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels called Molloy, Malone Meurt and L'Innommable (English: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) and while I was reading your piece, I was rethinking those novels in light of your ideas... and while it's not really a fit, the structure of the novels, social critique, survival themes and characters present as picaresque before descending into modern existential goo rather than continuing to flit or flow along in a picaresque fashion. But there's something I'm trying to name that links the two (and if my brain were 35 years younger maybe it would be obvious). It's like how team trump embraces corruption and the picaresque while team blue self-flagellates with one hand and does corrupt shit with the other all the while bemoaning the demise of the tragicomic narrative. Are you familiar with these novels?
I'm only familiar with Thakery's Vanity Fair, which I'd always considered quintessential picaresqueness.
Over the years, thanks to the internet, my deep dives into literature, sadly, started to dwindle. But your thesis sounds fascinating, Camille. And your insights about Trump and the Dems is spot on.
Both narratives are intertwined in the strangest way now, with one morphing into the other and vice versa, as is the way, I think, with all 'hard' opposites. They switch places, and the story starts up all over again.
Well done. Definitely will read this again as the shift of Pluto in Aquarius and the other outer planets into fire and air make their way into our collective consciousness. Thank you for this perspective.
Enjoying the Picaresque, and appreciating your take on the Air element.
“Even a Saturn-ruled sign like Aquarius can be as maddeningly discursive as Gemini”
I cannot help but consider the Prince of Swords, ruling the last 10° of Capricorn to the first 20° of Aquarius: capricious creation and destruction of ideas, committing to nothing of depth; no real plan; a picture of an unfocused mind. Yet, I would add, Aquarius being the stabilization of Air is the energy responsible for the unbearable lightness of maintaining its triplicity element. Fun tangent: my good friend is an Aquarius with Libra rising. I refuse to argue with him about… anything. We once went on an eight hour walk, the majority of which he spent arguing the surface minutiae of a romantic and humanitarian idea that was inherently and empirically bankrupt (as I saw it anyway). The result was that we got… nowhere, except for home (thank goodness!) I also gained a newfound respect for my friend’s detached yet relentless inflexibility.
Ah, yes, the remarkable objectivity and *detachment* of the air signs--that can often be maddening. As my chart's 80% water, they usually feel alien to me.
And what a spot-on delineation of the Prince of Swords (sounds like Crowley's take rather than Waites').
It's interesting how the big power punchers within the US presidency have been air signs (Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, etc., and a not-properly-lauded-enough until he died, Carter).
Read your brilliant essay after reading a poignant piece in the FT musing about the "tragicomic" demise of Walter Benjamin in today's dawn of postmodern autocracy. https://on.ft.com/4h7b9KA It made for an interesting resonant counterpoint. In the end, we always returns to Lao Tzu, don't we, and always as a beginner 😉, which I guess amounts to being a picaro, just as you suggest.
I don't know if I should thank you or complain about alerting me to Walter Benjamin. After reading the FT feature, I just ordered two of his books from the library. Interestingly enough, we share the same birthday.
After reading the FT article, I recognized his traits, habits, and interests as purely Cancerian—probably the most infuriatingly kaleidoscopic sign of the zodiac. The old saying about 'containing multitudes' applies. (I guess each one is a phase of the Moon.)
And I see what you mean about counterpoint (or amplifier even); in some ways, Benjamin's life could be considered picaresque (the struggle to keep surviving while effortlessly moving from one interest to another to another.) Wow.
Well, talk about synchronicity! I would have thought you were well acquainted with Walter, who played a fundamental role in my intellectual education. So, too, his best buddy, Gershom Sholem, who resurrected (pardon the Christian imagery) the Kabbalah for the world! Back in the day, when I first read them as a college student, I could never have imagined that the cultural apocalypse that defined their lives (and destroyed WB) would be repeated, in rhyming form, in my lifetime. I am grateful for your musings about the greater planetary design behind all of this, because dedicated Taoist though I am, I am having a VERY hard time coping as we slouch toward January 20th. And as a writer, and in an earlier incarnation a boisterous "opinionator," in this new age of idiot social media influencers/creators, all I want to do is ground myself in silence, much like the Buddhist literati painters, whom curiously I studied co-currently with Walter and Gershom. So this was a rare utterance that gratifyingly hit the mark.
You provide many things to think about in this post. I concur with you and those you quoted—to an extent. But…I found so many reasons to depart from the idea that more of us would adopt a picaresque approach to life, and profoundly(or naively) hope that few people will.
This quote from your piece implies that people have the capacity to navigate between the tragic/comedy and picaresque models.
“Hillman argued that the picaresque offers a wider range of narrative possibilities, including the tragic and the comic. The goal is not to choose one model over the other but to have them equally available for exploration—or to partake of none.”
My current and admittedly jaded perspective of humanity is that most humans lack the will and knowledge to be happy explorers in their lives. This is due in large part to the reasons you point out in your post. But if we humans can’t figure out how to be happy, the task of deciding which story arc to follow (and when) would be a Herculean task. Few people would actually “decide.” They default to the easiest and then cry and whine.
My worst nightmare would be that more people like trump would be creating chaos and walking away from their creations without a backward glance. I do absolutely believe that attitude amplified would mark the end of civilization. There would be so little civility we couldn’t survive.
I soothed my angst about the possibility of picaresque replacing fate and consequences in the Aquarian age by reminding myself that a community of archetypal characters has existed since the beginning of our human history. And the Fool is one of them. I personally like the tarot Fool as I understand it. And while the Fool does serve a purpose, it isn’t more powerful than the other archetypes. Pluto in Aquarius show us that society will be transformed, but it’ll happen in accordance with Saturn and Uranus’s rules.
I will also hope (perhaps naively) that a “wider range of narratives” will default to more humanitarian attitudes and an elevated sense of responsibility rather than more ego-centric behavior and more picaresqueness (is that a word?).
Sharon, your comment highlights a cogent array of insights. Thank you for articulating all of them so clearly.
The tragic-comic arc is so male or rather phallocentric. Men with their erections ‘rising’ and ‘collapsing’…LOL. I’m burned out on it. As is the collective.
Another way of responding to reality's woof and warp is necessary. Otherwise, we are constantly trapped in cycles that repeat themselves. For something to start rising again, it needs the terror of the collapse (and all of the collateral damage it causes) to turn everything to rubble. How many times can history experience (and repeat) this?
I'll be bald-eyed and frank and say: I’ve little faith in humanity. But I've unlimited faith in individuals. Like him, the Gurdjieffian in me sees that the masses are sleepwalking through life and, at heart, are not responsible for their actions (as Christ said while hanging from the cross).
As Gurdjieff put it: “One planet gets too close to another planet, and then groups go insane on Earth and start killing each other.” (He was pretty clued into astrology.)
“Awakening begins,” said Gurdjieff, “when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.” When we find ourselves in a state of bewilderment or disorientation, we tend to be more open to new ideas and possibilities. At such opportune moments some kind of action or intervention on the part of the master is needed so that we are not lulled back to sleep by everyday life.”
Thank you for emphasizing Gurdjieff in your response. I was not familiar with him or his work, but I found much that I agree with in my reading about him and his work this morning.
I too have faith in individual humans being normal (not average) in our world. They’re doing the work whether or not they’re aware of it. I wonder though how much and how many will be destroyed, how much chaos and outright cruelty will it take, before people rise high enough above the fray—so the work of being normal happens on a wider scale.
Thank you for being different, and I say that respectfully. I appreciate your work.
Bravo Frederick! You're helping my understanding of Mercury in Aries in mutual reception with Mars in Gemini. I have admired such notable acquaintances reaching heights, attaining goals while I fleet from stuff to stuff meandering throughout close to 70 years. With this wonderful essay you put a name for what I was told was a character flaw, a moral fault .
Nora Ephron wrote "everything is copy" Baudelaire coined the term "le Spleen" When friends ask what are you up to, I can only say I cook and I clean. Overall dissatisfaction with the often tragedy of life, I'll make some peanut butter cookies and listen to some Cohen as images of a possible ceasefire ticker away on a screen
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.
Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
"The picaresque style allows for curiosity. One devotes thought to each moment and circumstance as it arrives, then moves on to see what appears next—and then—you’re dead."
I laughed like a loon.
Thank you for another one of your wild salvos. This essay will take me a day or two to fully 'metabolize.'
Well, damn... that didn't take long but it was just long enough for me to forget both what I just read and what I was going to write in response. Sigh... that's my poor, old, tired brain for ya'... can't help but wonder if my need to stay sane by forgetting childhood abuse didn't just give my brain an excuse not to remember much that isn't critical. It was good... your piece... I remember your words feeling vividly accurate. I'll just have to read it again to see what they were! Thanks!!!
Picaresque... Thank you for this post! It feels true and right.
It has my brain firing too fast to follow all the thoughts, so I'm going to let it settle down and see where it ends up.
That's a highly recommended approach, Angie.
This is a superb and fun poke at modern life and especially the rogue rump who just lives for the next five minutes according.to.those who have witnessed his tilting.at windmills.
Trump is a terrible manifestation of the picaresque mode -- and as a Gemini himself, it's all doubly awful. But when you get a lemon, make something of it that resembles a cherry pie. And then get on with whatever time you have left.
Love it! I'm feeling every word and sentiment you've expressed and/or channeled in this piece and it gives me great relief. Your analogies are priceless 😅 I just want to flow from now to the end. Thanks for the permission and encouragement 💗
What I didn't mention in this piece is that staying in the present and 'flowing' is, involves a complete rewiring of the brain. It takes effort, the biggest hurdle is unplugging to some degree from the glut of electronic life. It's such an addiction.
Agreed. It is all too much and highly addictive. I have curated what content I see on Facebook as best I can. I have not gone over to Blue sky yet but are looking at that option among others. I am an air sign third house Aquarius Sun Saturn conjunction.... Was I born for this age? I guess we all were that are here. I consume a lot of content and would like to balance it with production. Very difficult to do when you are consuming so much. In any case I really admire your ability to create content and Flow it out to all of us. Bravo👏
I loved this piece and affirm essentially.vanity.all.is vanity. I also recommend .a healthy dose of hedonism to sustain oneself thru the mania/stunned cycles.
All things in moderation...the old Delphi axiom. Yes.
Thank you for adding a positive spin to my current mania.
Ha! Well said. And the 'mania' is real. But so are the positive takes when we turn the dial this way and that to find the frequency that's a good 'fit.'
This made me truly wake up and focus. I feel the need to make notes and follow your leads. Thank you for my early morning read. Brilliant stuff.
Thank you, Pamela...it's funny how this essay 'appeared.' I'd been casually reading an article that mentioned the key talking points and then immediately started riffing of off it on my notepad. Too, Hillman does that to me whenever I encounter his thoughts.
Oh boy did this get all the wheels turning in my brain. First of all, I'm a double Gemini with Aquarius rising so by nature perhaps a bit picaresque? Second, I wrote my French master's thesis 35 years ago on Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels called Molloy, Malone Meurt and L'Innommable (English: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) and while I was reading your piece, I was rethinking those novels in light of your ideas... and while it's not really a fit, the structure of the novels, social critique, survival themes and characters present as picaresque before descending into modern existential goo rather than continuing to flit or flow along in a picaresque fashion. But there's something I'm trying to name that links the two (and if my brain were 35 years younger maybe it would be obvious). It's like how team trump embraces corruption and the picaresque while team blue self-flagellates with one hand and does corrupt shit with the other all the while bemoaning the demise of the tragicomic narrative. Are you familiar with these novels?
I'm only familiar with Thakery's Vanity Fair, which I'd always considered quintessential picaresqueness.
Over the years, thanks to the internet, my deep dives into literature, sadly, started to dwindle. But your thesis sounds fascinating, Camille. And your insights about Trump and the Dems is spot on.
Both narratives are intertwined in the strangest way now, with one morphing into the other and vice versa, as is the way, I think, with all 'hard' opposites. They switch places, and the story starts up all over again.
Thank you for your comment.
Well thank you for the thought provoking piece! 😁
Well done. Definitely will read this again as the shift of Pluto in Aquarius and the other outer planets into fire and air make their way into our collective consciousness. Thank you for this perspective.
Glad it touched a chord, Heidi. Thank you for your comment.
Brilllllliant
Wonderful. Thank you, Luciana.
Sometimes you're brilliant, Frederick. This is one of those times.
Ha! Thanks Victoria, glad I hit a home run.
Enjoying the Picaresque, and appreciating your take on the Air element.
“Even a Saturn-ruled sign like Aquarius can be as maddeningly discursive as Gemini”
I cannot help but consider the Prince of Swords, ruling the last 10° of Capricorn to the first 20° of Aquarius: capricious creation and destruction of ideas, committing to nothing of depth; no real plan; a picture of an unfocused mind. Yet, I would add, Aquarius being the stabilization of Air is the energy responsible for the unbearable lightness of maintaining its triplicity element. Fun tangent: my good friend is an Aquarius with Libra rising. I refuse to argue with him about… anything. We once went on an eight hour walk, the majority of which he spent arguing the surface minutiae of a romantic and humanitarian idea that was inherently and empirically bankrupt (as I saw it anyway). The result was that we got… nowhere, except for home (thank goodness!) I also gained a newfound respect for my friend’s detached yet relentless inflexibility.
Ah, yes, the remarkable objectivity and *detachment* of the air signs--that can often be maddening. As my chart's 80% water, they usually feel alien to me.
And what a spot-on delineation of the Prince of Swords (sounds like Crowley's take rather than Waites').
It's interesting how the big power punchers within the US presidency have been air signs (Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, etc., and a not-properly-lauded-enough until he died, Carter).
Read your brilliant essay after reading a poignant piece in the FT musing about the "tragicomic" demise of Walter Benjamin in today's dawn of postmodern autocracy. https://on.ft.com/4h7b9KA It made for an interesting resonant counterpoint. In the end, we always returns to Lao Tzu, don't we, and always as a beginner 😉, which I guess amounts to being a picaro, just as you suggest.
Hi Marisa
I don't know if I should thank you or complain about alerting me to Walter Benjamin. After reading the FT feature, I just ordered two of his books from the library. Interestingly enough, we share the same birthday.
After reading the FT article, I recognized his traits, habits, and interests as purely Cancerian—probably the most infuriatingly kaleidoscopic sign of the zodiac. The old saying about 'containing multitudes' applies. (I guess each one is a phase of the Moon.)
And I see what you mean about counterpoint (or amplifier even); in some ways, Benjamin's life could be considered picaresque (the struggle to keep surviving while effortlessly moving from one interest to another to another.) Wow.
Thank you for your comment.
Well, talk about synchronicity! I would have thought you were well acquainted with Walter, who played a fundamental role in my intellectual education. So, too, his best buddy, Gershom Sholem, who resurrected (pardon the Christian imagery) the Kabbalah for the world! Back in the day, when I first read them as a college student, I could never have imagined that the cultural apocalypse that defined their lives (and destroyed WB) would be repeated, in rhyming form, in my lifetime. I am grateful for your musings about the greater planetary design behind all of this, because dedicated Taoist though I am, I am having a VERY hard time coping as we slouch toward January 20th. And as a writer, and in an earlier incarnation a boisterous "opinionator," in this new age of idiot social media influencers/creators, all I want to do is ground myself in silence, much like the Buddhist literati painters, whom curiously I studied co-currently with Walter and Gershom. So this was a rare utterance that gratifyingly hit the mark.
You provide many things to think about in this post. I concur with you and those you quoted—to an extent. But…I found so many reasons to depart from the idea that more of us would adopt a picaresque approach to life, and profoundly(or naively) hope that few people will.
This quote from your piece implies that people have the capacity to navigate between the tragic/comedy and picaresque models.
“Hillman argued that the picaresque offers a wider range of narrative possibilities, including the tragic and the comic. The goal is not to choose one model over the other but to have them equally available for exploration—or to partake of none.”
My current and admittedly jaded perspective of humanity is that most humans lack the will and knowledge to be happy explorers in their lives. This is due in large part to the reasons you point out in your post. But if we humans can’t figure out how to be happy, the task of deciding which story arc to follow (and when) would be a Herculean task. Few people would actually “decide.” They default to the easiest and then cry and whine.
My worst nightmare would be that more people like trump would be creating chaos and walking away from their creations without a backward glance. I do absolutely believe that attitude amplified would mark the end of civilization. There would be so little civility we couldn’t survive.
I soothed my angst about the possibility of picaresque replacing fate and consequences in the Aquarian age by reminding myself that a community of archetypal characters has existed since the beginning of our human history. And the Fool is one of them. I personally like the tarot Fool as I understand it. And while the Fool does serve a purpose, it isn’t more powerful than the other archetypes. Pluto in Aquarius show us that society will be transformed, but it’ll happen in accordance with Saturn and Uranus’s rules.
I will also hope (perhaps naively) that a “wider range of narratives” will default to more humanitarian attitudes and an elevated sense of responsibility rather than more ego-centric behavior and more picaresqueness (is that a word?).
Sharon, your comment highlights a cogent array of insights. Thank you for articulating all of them so clearly.
The tragic-comic arc is so male or rather phallocentric. Men with their erections ‘rising’ and ‘collapsing’…LOL. I’m burned out on it. As is the collective.
Another way of responding to reality's woof and warp is necessary. Otherwise, we are constantly trapped in cycles that repeat themselves. For something to start rising again, it needs the terror of the collapse (and all of the collateral damage it causes) to turn everything to rubble. How many times can history experience (and repeat) this?
I'll be bald-eyed and frank and say: I’ve little faith in humanity. But I've unlimited faith in individuals. Like him, the Gurdjieffian in me sees that the masses are sleepwalking through life and, at heart, are not responsible for their actions (as Christ said while hanging from the cross).
As Gurdjieff put it: “One planet gets too close to another planet, and then groups go insane on Earth and start killing each other.” (He was pretty clued into astrology.)
Again, thank you for a great comment.
“Awakening begins,” said Gurdjieff, “when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.” When we find ourselves in a state of bewilderment or disorientation, we tend to be more open to new ideas and possibilities. At such opportune moments some kind of action or intervention on the part of the master is needed so that we are not lulled back to sleep by everyday life.”
Thank you for emphasizing Gurdjieff in your response. I was not familiar with him or his work, but I found much that I agree with in my reading about him and his work this morning.
I too have faith in individual humans being normal (not average) in our world. They’re doing the work whether or not they’re aware of it. I wonder though how much and how many will be destroyed, how much chaos and outright cruelty will it take, before people rise high enough above the fray—so the work of being normal happens on a wider scale.
Thank you for being different, and I say that respectfully. I appreciate your work.
I will also hope...
Bravo Frederick! You're helping my understanding of Mercury in Aries in mutual reception with Mars in Gemini. I have admired such notable acquaintances reaching heights, attaining goals while I fleet from stuff to stuff meandering throughout close to 70 years. With this wonderful essay you put a name for what I was told was a character flaw, a moral fault .
Nora Ephron wrote "everything is copy" Baudelaire coined the term "le Spleen" When friends ask what are you up to, I can only say I cook and I clean. Overall dissatisfaction with the often tragedy of life, I'll make some peanut butter cookies and listen to some Cohen as images of a possible ceasefire ticker away on a screen
And yet, I can sense the fiery part of your curiosity and its ability to overturn rocks to see what hides beneath. That's everything.
To me, when curiosity dies, they might as well fire up the cremation gear. I'm outta here.
Thank you, Jo-Ann for a fun and thoughtful observation.
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.
Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Truthfully, when I landed on:
"The picaresque style allows for curiosity. One devotes thought to each moment and circumstance as it arrives, then moves on to see what appears next—and then—you’re dead."
I laughed like a loon.
Thank you for another one of your wild salvos. This essay will take me a day or two to fully 'metabolize.'
When I was re-reading it before posting I started laughing too. Thought I'd remove it but then said, 'fuck it.' Thanks, Marie!
Well, damn... that didn't take long but it was just long enough for me to forget both what I just read and what I was going to write in response. Sigh... that's my poor, old, tired brain for ya'... can't help but wonder if my need to stay sane by forgetting childhood abuse didn't just give my brain an excuse not to remember much that isn't critical. It was good... your piece... I remember your words feeling vividly accurate. I'll just have to read it again to see what they were! Thanks!!!
Imagine my poor tired brain attempting to write that. IOW, I hear ya. 😂