pisces: the embrace of the siren
a mother full of memory
Telegram:
the King is dead. Aquarian crisis of faith.
Old knowledge revealed to be insufficient — inadequate.
What do we do now?
Response:
Rework epistemology.
Open door to new ways of knowing1.
King dead.
People and world still alive.
A script:
INT - a girl at her door, open. We see her back to the camera. A post-man can be seen walking off in the distance.
The camera steadily moves closer to her back. She turns around stiffly. She holds a telegram.
The girl looks up, directly into the camera. A beat. She runs at the camera with the telegram clutched in her hand to write a –
- poem.
So the girl does:
when something lives
too long
without an enemy, it becomes
a god.
when will my hunger have a coronation?
what throne will it ascend?
On another continent, a response2:
Chapter soundtrack:
Naoko Yasutani3 clicks on her AO3 draft. Outside the window, it’s dusk. The file loads, blinking balefully at her from where she last updated it 2 months ago. Her story about Naoko Takeuchi4, a dumpling-headed girl hoping to be a manga artist, is going nowhere because Naoko the writer experiencing the greatest known calamity to all writers: a block.
So Naoko the artist must suffer too.
Naoko the writer sighs. Her roommate, Makoto5, is singing Anata no Sei ja Nai6 again. Damn right, it’s not her fault. How can you write about anything when your creative lit teacher keeps saying racist shit to you, telling you to dig into your past as if the past is a commodity she’s selling on this Culture Market where there’s no other way to be valuable except as a token minority? How can you write when half your run-on sentences have been cut out in your assignment like it’s haram to sing in text, to run like water, to pool like a spring? How can you write in this godawful university that’s obsessed with telling you the right way to do things when the right ways are all obsessed with thinking so they can stay safe from feeling?
Why can’t Naoko just doodle when words aren’t enough? Why can’t Naoko step outside of other people’s narrow ideas of time and love and art and worth? Why are they punishing her for their misery? Why can’t she do wild multi-media projects without being afraid that she either won’t qualify for a grant or lose readers for not being simple and straight-forward enough to understand? All these hours of perfecting her craft on AO3 that won’t even count as experience on her resume because fanfiction isn’t considered real writing. What pitiful ideas of real.
Why won’t the world realize how small its imagination has become? Would it kill this planet to be bigger and less afraid of its own shadow? Would it kill these companies and readers to have a broader mind instead of always wanting relatability and agreement and easy entertainment? Would it kill everyone to be less afraid of their fantasies and what they could guide them to? Why won’t her readers try harder to meet her where she is?
And where is she? Maybe Atlantis. Maybe eternal twilight. Wherever the walls can’t hold because the water erodes them into dust. Where carrying your history is easier because of helping hands. Wherever discomfort is easier and everyone’s responsibility, where the gods are wilder and those who tell stories about them are wilder still. Naoko wishes she could live in the heart of the ocean. Naoko wishes she didn't have to watch potential die every day. Naoko wishes the water would dissolve all the maps ever drawn, all the instruction manuals, all the catalogs that box beauty up into a check-list. Naoko wishes the world made it easier for her to be herself. Naoko wishes she made it easier for herself to be herself, wishes limits didn’t chafe against her like this.
Naoko wishes she lived on Jupiter wished she lived on something big enough for her bigness wished she lived through time instead on its sidelines.
Below the terra of the anger is the sloshing of grief about the realities we’ve been robbed of, about all the other ways we could have related to each other in the water if we didn't so desperately want power, if we didn’t dream of power in such sorry ways.
Dream with me, Naoko. Dream with me of the day we reject legitimacy and the limits we impose in the name of safety; I know it’s coming because it always has. Dream with me of us choosing to protect what's sacred to us and sharing it instead of giving it away to be legitimized. Realize with me that begging for legitimacy is dangerous, even though we haven’t realized it yet. You’re inviting the colonizer to your table in a clear position of superiority. You cannot connect with someone above you. Today, you install the guard-rails. Tomorrow, you'll chafe against them.
These people don’t know how to hold the past. They understand only possession, not reverence. They know how to preserve it or how to deride it but not how to hold it so it may stretch in your arms as it rolls over in its sleep, so it may beg to be put down so it can run around, so it may explore. We learn the duality of our desires each time and then we forget. Here, safety and everything we've known. There, adventure and a horizon like a mouth. In the middle, us - two fish straining towards both.
What does the lunar expression of a day benefic look like? A kernel nut? A surprise? The ruler of Pisces, Jupiter, falls in Capricorn, Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole and meeting the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar. When you build a wall around a dream to protect it, you might have kept the enemies out but you sealed the dream in. Away from the light and the air, it shrinks. Still water breeds illness; still dreams do the same. All these countries with their borders, all these truths with their rules, all these universities — they were new once. They’re old now because of their walls. Everything that needs defending against an Other needs definition so you can claim and own it as your own, so you can exclude what and whom you don’t like.
As it’s defined, the dream deflates. Dreams are greedy things: greedy for more, greedy for freedom. When they’re limited, they die. A chrysalis is as terrifying as a kernel; when the door closes behind you, you never know when it may open again. Put the corpses of your dream and your god and your people in your crypt and defend it until the end of time. After we’re all gone, the water will claim it again.
Venus rejoices in Pisces, Jupiter’s appetite matched by hers. Behold the swell of benefic hunger. Behold the rush of song and child. She rises from the wave, foam knitting into flesh. Venus becomes double-bodied, one foot in the winter and one in spring. On the other side, Mars holds his hand out, waiting. Soaked in water, a dream is such a heavy weight. It tugs at your ankles, pulling you back, pulling you in. Pisces is the intersection of benefic longing and dreaming, of benefic greed.
In Taurus, Venus lives with the Other, gossiping with them over the fire of the stove. In Libra, Venus speaks to the Other, sharing ideas. In Pisces, she becomes the Other, sharing body, the harm to Uranus becoming the birth of Venus the god: human and deity, tide and shore, dead and alive, sky and sea. And because Venus comes from no one, she belongs to no one. In Pisces, our ideas of belonging dissolve. We spin in one circle, so dizzy that all the faces blur into one haze.
Everything gets buried and folded into the water. The baptism and the ship burial — it is all the same. The world begins and ends in a flood. In Pisces, we learn nothing ever dies. It only goes to sleep on the ocean-floor to rise again.
Dream with me about the sacral staying clawed, stayed fanged, staying beautiful and dangerous and bloody and out of institutes that would find something to prune even about water. Dream with me about what it means for the god of love to come from blood and violence, to come from the the mystery of the sea onto the known of the land, to come from no one and to belong to no one but to be beloved by all.
Dream with me about the wildness of Venus and her penchant for war, about the subsuming greed of compassion, about the terror and beauty of the deep sea. In Venus, humanity as stardust and space, sure, the debris of the ether spat out onto this planet. But what about us as water, like Venus? What about the memory of the tide that made us? What about giving in to the desire to return to what we came from, to wait until we feel like leaving again?
Mercury falls in Pisces. An over-watered plant wilts; greed doesn't become Nature. Wisdom is felt in snatches, not built towards or held onto forever. Wisdom realizes the worthlessness of consistency in a world where nearly nothing aligns. Today, I know how to help. Tomorrow, it rains and I get there too late. The healer is wise in relation to those who ask for their help, lost in relation to their teachers.
Today, the water moves with me. It waters my fields. Tomorrow, it looks past me and floods my house. In Pisces, the liminality of trying to understand something that rolls in and out. In Pisces, the liminality of finally moving with it, of surrender to everything you will never know, to acceptance that you will get everything wrong. In Pisces, the awareness that the dream is dead when you explain it but it’s felt across time, shared by a look. Loss does not kill the dream. It only makes room for something else.
Naoko the artist makes Makoto taller than the rest, so tall that she can’t find a uniform to fit. Makoto is an eternal romantic, with as many loves as there are stars in the sky7.
In Pisces, the Jupiterian greed for everything, the excess after Saturnian deprivation. How do we liberate desire by feeling it instead of naming it? How do we liberate Venus by letting her tear through our landscape with her full force? How would she speak through us if we let go? Longing isn’t longing if it’s not tender, if you’re not startled by how something so big exists in something as small as your body, if you don’t realize you’re only a portal through which the universe responds to itself and giggles at its own wit and profundity. Mercury speaks in color; the rules are all written in a dead language.
In Pisces, the scatter and us learning to break with it, the truth in the grain. In Pisces, the fragmentation of the universe into you, me, us, Naoko the artist Naoko the writer Makoto the character Makoto the roommate Uranus now Venus Venus now double-bodied. In Pisces, the scatter falling into the water and coalescing into something new, another new being dragging itself onto the shore and learning to walk so everything may begin again.
![Sailor Moon Trivia on Twitter: "Of the five core characters, Ami and Makoto are deemed the best dancers in episode 37. The two display their dancing skills again in episode 147. #SailorMoon #](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3igR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1216e85-e765-4af8-b6a7-6d54a73476d5_1200x900.jpeg "Sailor Moon Trivia on Twitter: "Of the five core characters, Ami and Makoto are deemed the best dancers in episode 37. The two display their dancing skills again in episode 147. #SailorMoon #")
Gramsci said, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” Venus is freest when she’s allowed to be a double-bodied monster. From Now to Naoko, from birth to death, from surviving the monsters raising you to enjoying the monsters you've raised.
In Pisces, the mess of wanting so much, the fear of boundaries. Find the divine in the highs of the mountains the sea carved and the lows of its floors, all the places where your body can’t handle the pressure except through sheer longing, all the places we’re not meant to be. What wildness did we give up from fear of its muchness? What did we forget when we broke off from the sea? In Pisces, the siren song of the lost. The longing to return to what we left behind.
Find a longing that you love enough to free, that you allow to be itself. Viciousness and compassion come from the same place, like a howl and a laugh. The place is always deep within.
to book a tarot reading or a birth chart consultation, please send an email to ranniazorya@gmail.com or contact me at @ranniazorya
In talk with Chris Brennan (Pluto in Astrology - The Astrology Podcast), Richard Tarnas talked about 'rigor in imagination', about a generation whose epistemology isn't preventing them from dreaming because they're reconfiguring it. After the Aquarian realization of our marginalization, the epiphany that abuse is the backbone of our civilization, what comes next? Everything we know and believe is rotten. All our ideas have maggots in the core.
After the shadow of suffering cast on our lives, what do we reach for? As Tarnas discusses, we move towards a new epistemology, new ways of knowing and dreaming and feeling.
NOTE: as always, credit your lineage. the piscean lesson is that we exist in conversation with each other, across disciplines and time and space. no idea is new. speak proudly of the richness of your sources and the history that moved you. claim your descent.
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.
A character from A Tale for the Time Being who wrote in her diary about her teenaged life, which the author’s character found. Why I chose her makes sense if you read the book. Her story is very Piscean. Please read this book. It might change your life.
The creator of Sailor Moon and a Pisces whose work I found to be very Piscean as well. I chose her because I think the nature of Pisces is to bend Saturnian things like order, time, death.
Takeuchi was born several years in the real world before Yasutani was born in the fictional world. Takeuchi is a real person while Yasutani isn’t but it’s the reverse here. Yasutani is the writer but also she isn't, because I'm the writer, writing fanfiction about a character who’s writing fanfiction about her character. Yasutani the real person becomes Yasutani the character again, even as she's defying it. In both iterations, she's always a writer because she's always a maker. The lesson is that she's both a person and a character.
Sailor Jupiter’s name.
Sailor Jupiter’s song. Translates to ‘It’s Not Your Fault’. Found here: https://www.youtube.(SPACE)com/watch?v=wQKXe-p_M8Y&ab_channel=SailorSong (deliberately put a space between youtube. and com because the formatting looked terrible; you just have to erase it to use the link).
A lyric from the same song Makoto the roommate was singing. It's Piscean to love widely and deeply.
general piscean images and notes:
"It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn't born into a void."
- Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
“Was that life? Well then! Once more!” - Friedrich Nietzsche, for the Aries courage to rise from the Piscean death and go through everything all over again, to swim back into infinity
the subject line ‘a mother full of memory’ comes All Is Found (Frozen 2).
the images are of Makoto/Sailor Jupiter (the tall brown-haired girl) and Ami/Sailor Mercury (the short blue-haired girl).