Planetary influences:
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey PLANETARY INFLUENCES WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR Every now and then I encounter something which makes me feel that the universe is a much sillier, and therefore much...
...as if we were villains on necessity...
...What's her sign...
...Discussions about life's meaning very seldom take moments like this into account...
...She was a bright person, not at all a credulous type...
...A few days later a man who lived a few houses away, someone I had never met, stuck his head through a hole in the hedge and said, "My name's Tinkle...
...Astrology columns are not nearly the threat to our sanity that ordinary commercials are...
...My reaction to my friend's astrological accuracy was that it was interesting, but so what...
...Humor is a hole in any picture we want to have of the world, and it is spiritually important...
...One picture of him snoozing away made me feel cozy, as if everything in the world were ordered and in place...
...A woman came up to me recently in the laundromat, grinning, and said, "Sam...
...I am prepared to admit that there may be something to the possibility that certain symbol-systems can unlock the abilities of some people to see interesting and true things (the patterns having to do with what Jung was getting at when he wrote, in his usual vague way, about synchronicity), though I am not prepared to attribute magic to cards or a determining influence on our lives to the alignments of stars and planets as seen from earth...
...I enjoyed seeing the issue wrestled with on PTL Club, which is still trying to recover from Jim and Tammy Bakker and, if God is just, will be off the airwayes forever before too long...
...She didn't know my wife or me well enough to know our birthdays...
...Now this wasn't the sort of person who does parlor tricks or who wanted to establish a reputation as someone with weird powers...
...The world goes on about all its labors as Icarus plunges into the water, tiny and more or less irrelevant...
...Looking at all this I take comfort in a memory from childhood...
...drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence...
...It is amusing to think that a man as empty as President Reagan has plotted any part of his life (or, consistent with his style everywhere else, allowed his life to be plotted) in this gossamer and silly way...
...She was firm about this...
...I don't have a dog...
...No...
...I said, "All right: you know me a little, but you don't know when I Vas born...
...You've also met Re-gina," I said...
...All is made well by this addled but amiable approach to life: nothing that goes wrong is ever your fault...
...What's my sign...
...There are rumors that people as diverse as Cory Aquino, Indira Gandhi, and Winston Churchill have indulged in the same superstition...
...I happen to have moved from absolute skepticism to a certain agnosticism, where astrology is concerned...
...News items can do it too...
...I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing...
...That was a nice moment, but not as good as the hot evening a man came to my door carrying a large box tied with a ribbon, made into a bow at the top...
...She guessed Taurus, and was right...
...An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star...
...If it were an odd, eccentric seasoning on something more substantial, it would strike us as less alarming than the possibility that it may be the most solid thing on his platter, God help us all...
...Tinkle...
...The editor of a newspaper which gives "the Christian point of view"-there being only one of those, apparently-was asked what he thought of it all, and said that Ronald Reagan had done a lot to bring about a return to' 'traditional moral values" and he was very grateful for Reagan's presidency, but he hoped that someone like Billy Graham would sit down with the Reagans and explain that astrology was forbidden to Christians because it is "of the occult...
...But you have a dog named Sam...
...The romantic era was a definite step down from the view of life which could produce this vision...
...they suffer from what Kierkegaard called' 'an over-belief in the truth...
...Perhaps this is why politicians (and their mates) are inclined to believe in astrology and divination, from Caesar's day to the present...
...this belief came as the result of an impressive astrologer she had met...
...She left, looking puzzled and a little resentful, and said, over her shoulder, "I know I've seen you someplace...
...My favorite recent story is, of course, the revelation of the Reagans' interest in astrology...
...There was a comic book I liked which featured a little wizard with a beard, who wore a tall cap covered with moons and stars...
...These encounters often take the form of unexpected exchanges with strangers1...
...It is probably less harmful to believe an astrology column than it is to believe that buying the right soup mix or insurance policy will make your family love you, or that voting for the right presidential candidate will make much of a difference to the future of the nation...
...You can also judge personality traits and beliefs by facial characteristics...
...My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so it follows that I am rough and lecherous...
...Sometimes it is not the unexpected exchange with strangers which produces a sense of delight in the absurdity of things...
...Brueghel's Landscape with Fall of Icarus could be the most important painting in the Western world, from a spiritual point of view...
...He was wearing a T-shirt and had on a cap with a long bill...
...first impressions are often correct...
...The odds against doing what she was able to do are impressive, if it's all a matter of lucky guesses...
...In any event, the final wisdom on this comes from Shakespeare's King Lear, act 1, scene 2, where Edmund says, ' 'This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey PLANETARY INFLUENCES WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR Every now and then I encounter something which makes me feel that the universe is a much sillier, and therefore much more cbn-genial, place than I usually imagine it to be...
...It is nice to think that President Reagan may have a similar warm feeling about things...
...When I walked over to the screen door he said, "Mr...
...Even if this stuff does bear some relationship to reality, it isn't terribly compelling in any case...
...What makes our laughter at the Reagan situation a little more nervous is that there is not much indication that his life is guided by anything more solid than astrology...
...Humorists and cartoonists have had a great time poking fun, and comparisons have been made between Nancy Reagan's astrologer friend and the last czarina's friend, Rasputin...
...knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance...
...James Thurber did, though, and so have other humorists...
...and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on...
...Not only humor, but also this sort of thing, can teach us that Western deductive logic is limited...
...fools by heavenly compulsion...
...About rabbits...
...I was surprised, but not stunned...
...Do you like rutabagas...
...Whatever thin generalizations can be derived from that are hardly worth staking anything on...
...The scientific method is stretched beyond reasonable bounds by astrology, but it is bypassed completely by our commercial and political culture...
...A case in point: Jiaven't you noticed that some fundamentalists smile the same way Jimmy Swaggart used to...
...A local radio show features an astrologer who is so lame at her trade that she speaks of'' suspicious'' (rather than "auspicious") signs, but she has a list of people whose birthdays fall on any given day, and it was interesting to me that Maureen O'Sullivan and the Ayatollah Khomeini share a birthday...
...Once I was at a party where a woman I had been introduced to before told me that she believed there was something to astrology...
...She guessed Aquarius, and was right once more...
...This is only to say that the reasoning we associate with the scientific method, with observable cause-and-effect, is not sufficient to explain a lot of what we can know...
...So do Queen Victoria and Bob Dylan...
...There are people like the Amazing Randi (an atheistic magician who has done some service debunking a lot of occult nonsense) who seem too threatened by this...
...But whatever that spiritual importance is, it is ruined by trying to talk about it, other than to say that humor gives a better sense of real human scale than anything else I can think of...
Vol. 115 • June 1988 • No. 12
