april 30th, 20xx

dear fledgling occultist,

welcome to the first installment of your correspondence course in natal astrology! astrology is a difficult subject to learn, largely because it is near impossible to teach. i promise to be as patient with your shortcomings as you are with mine. 

on that subject, i have included a list of your presumed shortcomings:

➧ a lack of “the gift.” born astrologers are just that. they don’t require correspondence courses to learn their craft. they see and know where the rest of us only stammer blindly, using words planted in our minds by alien beings. but take heart. most of us don’t have it. but we struggle on. we tuck up, stiffen our spines and figure it out. folks like you and me, we haven’t the benefit of seeing it. we can only feel it, passing beneath us in the dark like schools of fish.

➧ too much imagination. consider the alternative: a husband sleeping alone wakes in panic from a horrible nightmare. dreamt his wife stretched across their wedding bed, ligaments spooled into bloody threads. gasping and awake, he calls the hotel she’s staying at, but the line in her room only rings rings rings. so he calls the local sheriff's office but can’t get through. an hour later, he gets a call back from the sheriff: sir, something horrible has happened. we need you to come down to the station…

now an uninspired person looks at that and says, well that’s just cruel fate, that is. perhaps a chilling coincidence. to the sentimental and religious alike, the story of this man and his lamentable dream dwells in an opaque black box. nothing illuminates it. nothing opens it, for first and foremost, it must be contained. but folks like you and me, we're willing to peak inside. for nothing in nature is beyond itself.

➧ too much time. well you’re not a brain surgeon, now are you? or a corporate lawyer or a fancy college professor. busy people don’t take correspondence courses in natal astrology. even moderately preoccupied people leave it alone. let’s just say, you’ve some “free time” on your hands. you’re a little short all earthly ambition. do you know what an opportunity cost is? it's the price of your not doing something else, anything else really: saving lives, filing patents, making money, making babies. 

thing is, you wake up at thirty-six with a sense that the costs are suddenly infinite. that life is hemorrhaging opportunity. 

i know how long these letters take to write. i can only imagine how long they take to read. you indulge an old man.

and now, tit for tat, a summary list of my shortcomings:

➧ i began this letter to you back in january when i was in much better spirits. but spring has entered the room, so i’ve gone away again. a sentence comes and i put it down, and then days of silence. a week later i might do two more, followed by a winter’s worth of chronic inattention. i can sit in this chair for hours, for days, and stare out the window. seconds pass through me like bubbles through a bottle of soda. you’ll see: i pull away quite easily. 

you should know that the word “planet” evolved from the greek word planētai, meaning “wanderers.” but a star doesn't drift away like that. the planets, they’re never where they’re supposed to be. they go this way and that and then circle back before zooming off again. they are not as constant or true as stars, but you can always spot a planet in the night sky.

➧ sometimes when i remember all the stupid things i’ve said and all the awkard things i’ve done in my life, i twitch a bit, spasm even, and sometimes i let out this little whimper, like a rabbit in a snare trap. the moment of recollection is so painful, it comes on me so strongly, only a physical convulsion can release it. some people feel happiness, others fear, some still jealousy or anger. me? i feel failure. if sadness is blue and rage red, then failure is a gelatinous brick of warm puce. 

what i tell people when they offer to call me a doctor is that failure is not like any other feeling. it’s not here one minute and then gone the next. it’s stitched into the folds of the skin. it’s where you meet your skin. it is your skin, in that it’s the outer limits of you. failure sets boundaries, defines reach. without failure, we would be gods: formless, shapeless, gaseous old gods. so when people ask, i say i am fine, only that my skin’s a little tight around the neck.

➧ i can’t remember the details of my friend’s lives. how many sisters they have, where they went to college, whether their parents are still alive. but not just that boring sort of stuff. in a lot of cases, i don’t remember where we met or what we did having done so. really i just sort of wake up to find people sitting next to me, as though stirring from a nap on the crosstown bus. 

i open my eyes and there we are, and it’s been fifteen years and you’re married and pregnant and i’m balding and still at the same old job and i know you and i were persons before this whole mess, but goddamit, i don’t remember who those persons were, where they came from, where they had intended to go. 

but i can remember the ascendent over your horizon and phase of the moon on the day you were born. that’s why i’m here, i suppose. for people are nice and all, but the stars, they’re much brighter.

so now that i know you and you know me, let’s talk basics: let’s discuss the only thing that matters for astrology really, and that’s it’s worldview. astrology believes the earth is the center of the universe, and although you and i know that not to be the case, for astrology’s sake, we shall indulge and withhold our skepticism. 

after all, there’s little distinction between what is at the center of the universe and what we put there. you and i, for example, put nothing at the center of the universe: not the earth, not the moon, not the milky way or the andromeda galaxy. to us and to science, the universe is flat and we don’t even know if its shape is finite or in-finite. and so nothing sits at the center of it but what we choose to put there, and astrology puts us at the center of it, us and all our petty foibles, our ridiculous little problems, our small ambitions and outsized self-conceits. us who mean nothing and spin nowhere.

astrology is on our side, you see. the fixed stars are lumps of light and molten rock billions of miles away, lifeless, motionless and even now already dark. what’s important is what astrology chooses to wrap its arms around: the changing of the seasons, cycles of birth and loss, that which returns to us.

until next time, my fledgling occultist.

yours truly,

x