2 posts tagged “saturn”

... and the reel rolls in the film starring Sean Penn as Mars conjunct Pluto.

Enter Saturn square Mars (in 3rd & 11th houses, respectively). Played by Kathy Bates.

Kathy’s a driven workaholic. The glue that holds together the social agency where she works. An underling of two or three but you’d never know it by the workload she carries or the responsibilities she ticks off hoisted her way by her superiors and most of the staff. She’s extremely capable and everyone knows it. When there’s a last-minute assignment to process, paper to file or administrative task to complete, they know Kathy’s their man, the oxen of the bunch who tills the soil for five and pulls the cart to boot.

To her, relaxation means a Sunday off. Most Saturdays she can be found at the office for at least half the day. “Best day of the week to get things accomplished,” she says. “No ringing phones, no interruptions, no harried clients or panicking parents screaming at the top of their lungs ‘you have no right to take my child!’ ”

“Yes we do, when the parent’s too hooked on crank to notice that there’s no been milk in the fridge for a week. Dumb-ass doped-up parents.”

Born to a set of military parents, Kathy’s familiar with instability, transitions and a new school every year, if not six months. The only girl in a clan of four kids, the parents paid her gender no nevermind. “Everyone’s created equal,” they’d say, instilling in her a drive, pledge and devotion to achieve and do her best. Anything less than that was not allowed to take root.

So when the top-level administrative position on paper -- agency assistant director off paper -- came available, she had to go for it. She couldn’t not go for it. The jump in salary was incentive too. She’s built a nest egg for the condo this side of the Jersey line. A home means security and achievement, even if she’s never there to enjoy it.

In her home, plants die from lack of water. She tried an acquarium once, thinking of fish as low-maintenace. She was wrong. Within a few weeks, two were sick; within four, all were dead. There was more to tending an acquarium than sprinkling granules into a tank, she reckoned, like temperature, algae control, the right acquatic plants.

Sighing as she flushes the last lifeless critter down the toilet, she concludes that with the hours she keeps, tending an animal or plant isn't in their best interest and renews her subscription to two magazines and adds a third.

Like Clydesdales wearing blinders, Kathy knows she's ambitious, even driven, but can’t see past the sphere of serving the needs of her group, the families and kids, god the kids who so need the help.

Her social life suffers, becomes the occasional meeting for drinks after work with the clan at the insistence of a coworker who compassionately scolds, “You spend way too much time here, you know.” About half the time Kathy accepts the invitation, usually only after the coworker physically takes the paperwork out of Kathy’s hands, wheels her seated self back from the desk and yanks her into standing position under the armpits. “You're coming with us. End of discussion.”

Kathy’s trapped by her own skills, her capacity to produce like a workhorse and manage with high-level yang energy a ship singlehandedly if need be. Because Mars square Saturn gets things done. It comes with a price.

The price for her is happiness and a balanced, well-rounded life. She knows little of life outside the office anymore with her efforts, focus and constructive, productive energies poured the needs of the collective and the kids.

One night she senses something amiss. Unable to sleep, which is rare, usually she's out like a light on exhaustion, she climbs out of bed robed in her practical nightgown and seats herself in a padded chair by the window of her fifth-story apartment overlooking the streets of New York. Sipping branding to soft classical tunes, she catches sight across the way of a couple silhouetted by a low lamp intimately slow dancing. With a twang of pain played by her heart, she asks herself when she last had  a date.

One ... two ... three ... three and a half years ago, she counts. Not that it was much of a date. It was a fruitless effort on the part of the compassionate coworker to play matchmaker. Turns out it was a work-mate lothario with another notch on the bedpost in mind despite his liquored-up lies promising otherwise. Kathy said bye-bye with a firm handshake. Within a week, her output doubled, and there it's remained since.

She swallows the last of the brandy, shifts her eyes from the lovers to red digits on a clock reading 2:45 a.m. Wide awake, she rises from her chair, slips out of the nightgown into loose-fitting trousers, a long-sleeved buttoned classic shirt and jacket and heads out the door in the very direction, coincidentally, of an all-night meat market, where a man (Sean Penn) is with teary eyes being reminded of his dream.

Astrology’s like a fine and elegant European chocolate torte. Each step, every detail, from melting of the butter at the proper temperature to the tempering of the chocolate, combine to form the complex and creative union that is the torte.

Astrologically, a few planetary configurations under way have not escaped my detection. Specifically, for those who are astro-friendly or curious, transiting Saturn’s sitting smack on my natal Pluto AND concurrently squaring my Mars.

That certainly explains a lot, to me. Probably not to you, though, which is perfectly understandable.

So, the other day when Saturn was at the exact degree of conjunction and square, I was contemplating the aspects individually and holistically and wishing to blog on it yet realizing the complexities did not lend themselves to a single posting. Then it occurred to me. The planetary energies and aspects could be captured and expressed in a story, a movie. So as the camera rolls in my head, I invite you to roll along. The first character you'll meet is:

Saturn conjunct Pluto

Played by Sean Penn. Intense, brooding, dark, sexual, passionate. Frustrated by constraints and limitations, rigidities and habits of the past and present.

The son of a southern European immigrant family. He works in the family bakery in New York (i.e., Little Italy?) started by his great-grandfather as have all generations of men, along with some of their women and children.

He dislikes baking. Has grown increasingly edgy, frustrated, bored by loaves and loaves by the gazillions all day. His dream since boyhood was to open a meat market. He loves the textures, smells, sights. He closes his eyes and the visions and smells dance before him. Dreamt of creating the best meat market in the neighborhood and the best sandwiches too, especially pastrami and ham.

Any time he mentions a meat market, the family slams the door shut. Reminds him of grandfather so-and-so leaving the homeland and traveling the great seas in a shaky vessel to provide a better future for his sons and his sons’ sons. The bakery is the pride of the family and ticket to guilt land.

Insert flashback: Sean as a boy (about 7) on the ritual weekend neighborhood stroll with family, his hand tucked into a relative’s. He stops at the window of a meat market, magnetized, eyes opened wide. Tugged by the hand, he jogs back the adult’s side. “I wanna be that!” he exclaims, eyes lit up, turning and pointing back to the window.

“A butcher?! Don’t be silly,” responds the relative. “We’re bakers. You’ll one day you’ll grow up to be a baker too just like your papa and uncle so-and-so and grandpa so-and-so ...” Then a gentle reminder of history and the great-grandfather and how he journeyed across the seas on a ship to provide a better future and how the bakery was started from loose change in a pocket, blah blah.

He files his passions, dreams away and bakes to the wild support and applause of family and neighborhood. “Best bread in the district,” customers agree. “In all of New York,” another chimes in. Wide grins everywhere. Even Sean smiles when handing loaves over; everyone knows one another. “There you go, Mrs. So and So.” Pause. “And you too have a glorious afternoon, Mrs. So-and-So. Don’t overtoast that pumpernickel now,” he quips with a bye-bye wave of a hand, referencing the tale she still likes to tell about her toaster "without rhyme or reason" shooting off sparks and turning bread to blackened smithereens. (The reason of which she's never informed is the rewiring handiwork of two curious prankster sons.)

Deep down he’d rather be punching dough in the back. Or a bag in the ring where the boxers practice.

He begins suffering sleepless nights that erupt into full-on insomnia. He takes up liquor; not strong enough so he turns to drugs. Loses weight, looks scrawny, malnourished, underfed. “How can that be so with all the bread around!?” his family exclaims, concerned and shocked at his gradual demise.

“Eat eat!” the family encourages, shoving plates of their best breads toward him. He can’t stand the sight. Someone might as well be handing him a gun with a single bullet in a game of Russian roulette.

Sean becomes irritable, short-tempered, raging. Can’t drop the drugs but can’t cope without ‘em either. Frustration eats away at him.

Kept awake by insomnia and the reduced effect of the Ambien on up and unable to stomach one more bad B movie or offers of useless gadgets on the Shopping Network, he dresses and strolls the streets of New York with the weirdos, hookers, pimps and passes an all-night meat market. Looks through the window. Sees the butcher laughing, smiling while handing a white papered bundle to a female over the counter, who receives it with both hands outstretched, a cheerful comment and small laugh. Tears rise in Sean’s eyes.

He knows in that tender momentary flash that his dream is still alive inside.

Change scene.

Enter Saturn square Mars.

Played by Kathy Bates.

To be continued.