KARMIC NON-BEING: A Syllabus of Pisces-family Karma

What happens when Pisces, the 12th house and/or Neptune are part of the karmic story? How do writers with this karmic configuration deal with habits of self-loss, escapism, self-numbing, flights of fancy that threaten to become a flight into light, dreaminess, illness, addiction issues, vagueness, withdrawal, sensitivity, delusion, madness, imagination, psychic perception, and susceptibility to glamour or enchantment?

Diving  into the works of writers with Pisces-family karma, we experience with them an immersion in the transcendent and discover how they reach toward their dharma, translating non-being into form, transforming enchantment into substance. 

EMILY DICKINSON (4th house South Node in Pisces, opposed by Saturn in Virgo)

Essential Poems:

"I'm nobody! Who are you?"

"Could I but ride indefinite"

Selected Letters:

Letter to Abiah Root, 7 & 17 May 1850

• Dickinson's struggle with duty, confinement, forced domesticity, intense inner spiritual life that she longs to speak of.

JAMES JOYCE (the ruler of his South Node, Mercury, is in Pisces)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

• Stephen Dedalus is a semi-autobiographical expression of a fluid, creative intelligence that disappears, like a ghost in the gloom, unable to participate in the world around him. "His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games." (65). Inert passivity is almost an addiction, like opium or lotus eating, opening a mental hatch into escape and numbness: "He seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it the echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father's voice. He could scarcely recognize his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself: I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork..." (88). Pulling himself out of this vacancy is the project of the entire book, and of Joyce's life.

D.H. LAWRENCE (South Node in Pisces in 5th house; South Node rulers Neptune in 7th house Taurus and Jupiter in 11th house Virgo): like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, Lawrence pulls lasting literature out of this 'terrible ecstasy of the consciousness that I am life!" (Dreams Old and Nascent). But his method is not magic. It's Virgo: detailed attention to a craft. In his essay, "Demon and craftsman: On D.H. Lawrence," James Longenback writes that every Lawrence poem is "a scrupulously made thing."

Sons and Lovers

• Paul describes the hazy, dreaminess of DH Lawrence's SN in Pisces in the 5th house as feeling like a 'sort of disseminated consciousness, that's all there is of me. I feel as if my body were lying empty, as if I were in the other things — clouds and water."

Selected Poetry

• "Tortoise Shout:" the loss of self - martyrdom - in acts of pleasure: "Why were we crucified into sex?"

Studies in Classic American Literature

• Attuned to Poe's mania for spiritual union with the Other: in his essay Edgar Allan Poe, Lawrence writes, "Poe had experienced the ecstasies of extreme spiritual love... He wanted that great gratification, the sense of flowing, the sense of unison, the sense of heightening into life... Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hand on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on."

WALKER PERCY (South Node conjunct Neptune in Leo): You can never isolate the symbols from the whole, so Neptune blurs identity, but Percy's karmic habit is always that of losing the self in the applause of others until he discovers his authentic, unconditioned self.

The Moviegoer

• "Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes he may find himself No one and Nowhere."

The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 97, Summer 1987

• Percy: "What interests me as a novelist is not the malevolence of man—so what else is new?—but his looniness. The looniness, that is to say, of the 'normal' denizen of the Western world who, I think it fair to say, doesn't know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing."

PATTI SMITH (South Node in Sagittarius in 12th house): often in her writing, Smith is working through her beliefs about magic.

Bread of Angels

• "I always believed in the magical properties of things. Before I had speech, I grasped for them."

Just Kids

• "In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer."

Gloria

VIRGINIA WOOLF (South Node in Gemini in 12th house)

Moments of Being: A Sketch of the Past

• Being and non-being

To the Lighthouse

• Mrs. Ramsay spends necessary time in non-being. Alone, knitting, “she could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone… one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience… but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity…” (Lighthouse 54-5)

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

• On holiday with Adrian in 1907, Woolf describes looking at the moon and being overtaken by a feeling of “dreadful weariness” at the thought of “wandering not quite alive, nor yet suffered to die, in this pale light.” (Lee 222)