On Reading my Horoscope: Being and Nothingness and Virgo

I’ve added an embarrassing daily habit to my Indianapolis routine. Every morning, I scan the newspapers delivered at my parents’ houses (the WSJ and Indianapolis Star at my dad’s; the Indpls Star at my mom’s) while I eat my cereal and drink some coffee. The papers shield me from pre-caffeinated morning small-talk, and they feed my infomania. The accumulation of knowledge, newsbites, trivia and gossip staves a certain modern desperation, I think… But the confession I’m dragging toward is this: after reading the latest on health reform, Obama’s Mideast peace overtures and latenight comedy appearances, and Indy’s asinine resistance to public transportation, I make my chagrined way to the middle of the Extra section in the Star, and I read my horoscope. Yesterday, according to Holiday Mathis (the "Rock 'n' Roll Astrologer"), I was typically funny and finally getting recognition for my wit; today, in a turnabout, I’m dangerously obsessive. On my birthday, I was told that I’d (finally!) find love and financial success, some time between now and December. Sounds like the stars are promising an auspicious love affair with a young Viscount in England. Perhaps he’ll come from a family of book publishers, too.

Now, I don’t really believe in horoscopes or astrology. I don’t quite believe in “free will,” either, but my sense of the nature/nurture soup of predestination doesn’t accommodate the additional ingredient of celestial gradients. The most appealing element of so-called natal, sun-sign astrology is its foundation of something called the “Law of Beginnings,” which declares that all forces and events that will act on a being are present in the moment of that being’s birth. I can embrace this notion if I look at it as a sort of philosophical collapsing of time, a view that time is not simply linear. If you’re an “Eternalist,” you believe that all things that have already happened, that are presently happening, and that will happen in the future, are equally real. Time does not flow in a single direction, gobbling up the past and rendering it obsolete. And the fact that we have not yet subjectively experienced the future toward which time hurtles us does nothing to change the content of that future. Our ignorance doesn’t invalidate that of which we are ignorant. The future is contained in the present, as is the past, the present is also in the future, which will become the present, etc.

In a certain sense, an Eternalist could believe in the potential for fortune telling. What if there were a way for us to become unbounded by space-time, dislodged from the prison of subjectivity and able to perceive a “truth” not corralled by human perception?

And human perception isn’t exactly linear, either. The narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time demonstrates as much with his flashback-inducing Madeleine. The magical cake dipped in tea sends him into his childhoods in Combray, into rambling walks with his parents, his cravings for his mother’s attention, his fear of sleeping alone, and his glimpse of the aspect of a church steeple. And just like the immortal Marcel, you might yourself be driving down Pennsylvania Avenue with the radio on, thinking about the people you’re headed to meet or the email you need to send, when a song from your College glory days comes into the car, and suddenly you’re flushed with the emotions of senior year, when you drank gallons of Carlo Rossi with your best friends and heard the song incessantly because your roommate was one of those people who plays a favorite song on a continual, exhausting but wonderful loop. Or you might be visiting your parents’ house for Thanksgiving, and you escape the potato-mashing frenzy in the kitchen for a stroll around the block, and you think you see your old neighborhood crush on his fixed-gear bike, and your heart pounds as though you haven’t fallen in and out of love with numerous other people since that autumn of bicycle expeditions and chocolate chip cookies. We often exist somewhere other than the present, and understanding this obscurity of time doesn’t require SyFy-worthy allowances of credibility.

Although time doesn’t appear to be a solid, fixed, arrow-like entity, we still experience events linearly, even if they swim wildly in the disarray of our minds after the fact. And according to my skeptical metaphysics, we certainly don’t have the ability to release ourselves from the chain of experience and catch premature glimpses of the links to come. Moreover, the notion that details about future-links are hinted in the angles the stars made at the moments of our births strikes me as particularly unreasonable.

So, why do I read what Holiday Mathis has to say every morning? And why did President Reagan plan his schedule according to recommendations from an astrologer? (that second question is a more perilous one than I’ll undertake here)

A response comes serendipitously to me through my headphones. Josh Ritter just sang to me, “You need faith for the same reasons that it’s so hard to find.” I’ve turned down most varieties of faith, but I’m still an animal with a need, and there’s something exquisitely pleasing about a watered-down spiritualism I can absorb passively and with smirking irony. The horoscope is there in the paper, and I don’t need to jump any hoops to seek its prophesies, so I can allow a bit of self-deception and pretend that my perusal of this notable strip of the newspaper doesn’t contradict my hyper-educated suspicion of irrational belief systems. In those columns, I get the boon of ceding some personal responsibility (Holiday tells us that of course we play a role in our destinies, but I’d welcome the implied celestial nudge toward the fulfillment of my quixotic fantasies; come on, retrograde Mercury, please?). And everyone loves a spiritualism that implies some central significance to our wit and our obsessions, our romantic and financial prospects. We’re the protagonists in the narratives of the zodiac, and that consoles both our vanity and our fear of the absurd.

One interpretation of our impulse to consult horoscopes that especially interests me comes from the old Frankfurter, Theodor Adorno, in his 1953 essay “The Stars Down to Earth.” Adorno did a close reading of three months of daily horoscopes published in the LA Times, and decided (characteristically) that these pieces of “commercialized occult” were part of the totalitarian capitalist culture industry, footsoldiers in the seductions of capitalism, reinforcements to the general mythology required to sustain the marginalizing economic status quo. Adorno agrees with me, Josh Ritter, Satre et al., that we human beasts are at a loss in the world, but he doesn’t chalk this up to standard existential dread. He says it’s because we subject ourselves more-or-less willfully to a system that contradicts our own interests, and that exerts control over our lives in a bewildering, alienating way. We enroll for the subjections and degradations of enterprise because we buy into the mythology that goes along with Big Business: the American Dream. If you just work hard, you too might end up with the corner office and your own CrackBerry and Starbucks Gold Card. Adorno argued that the language used in horoscopes reinforces this mythology of the American Dream by addressing a “vice presidential” reader: the little descriptions and forecasts appeal to the reader as though s/he is moving up the corporate ladder, is important, but not quite sovereign (else, why would s/he be reading a horoscope?). Horoscopes, Adorno said, provide an underlying message to comfort people in the midst of working malaise and reassure them that the system is to their benefit. Endure your current state of helpless dread, because there’s a scheme that you need to conform to, and if you follow some simple celestial suggestions and stay within the lines of the design, you’ll advance into the ranks of the designers.

So is Holiday Mathis really The Man? And how should we interpret the namesake of Reaganomics deferring to his wife’s favorite astrologer when deciding the precise moment to meet with that pinko, Gobachev?

I think I’m most aligned with the sentiment of Josh Ritter’s speck of poetry. We’re animals in need of faith because of our evolved self-consciousness and advanced analytic capacities, because of our love of stories and our fear of meaninglessness; and the self-consciousness and analytic capacities are responsible for making us suspicious of the things those faculties make us crave. And yes, the feeling of angst probably spills past our metaphysical views and into other areas of our lives, like work. I lean pinko, so I'll even say that I've felt alienated by labor, resentful and mystified by the transformation of my self into a means of enhancing corporate productivity. I’ve felt simultaneous waves of existentialist and Marxist nausea when making copies, listening to the melodies of telephone holds, and contemplating who I should include in my “cc” line in an email to the person whose nonchalant approach to replacing my boss’ malfunctioning BlackBerry was making my day particularly miserable. I wasn’t especially screened from these gusts of dread by Holiday’s promises of recognition at work, but maybe I kept reading those promises because I thought they might yet offer some consolation. Plus, I got to sneer at the vague language and feel (il)logically superior to both Holiday and her credulous disciples, and that’s fun.

Tomorrow, I’ll read my horoscope again. But first I’ll read the parts of the paper that talk about Senator Baucus, President Ahmadinejad, Ben Bernanke, environmental reform and the UN, which are more pertinent – though complex – hints about the shape of the future.