A Catalogue of Scars: Real Chaos Astrology, vol. 14
I need to apologize to my Cancers.
You know how you always remember every slight, every grievance, and I roll my eyes? You know how I always tell you you hold on too tightly to your emotional problems? How you don’t update your emotional files so you’re still bringing up that bad fashion choice someone upset you with or that moral judgment you made in 1996? You know how you can’t resist telling me you knew or know whatever it was when the odds were fifty-fifty and you just like to say “I told you so,” and I complain about you to our other friends, who also roll their eyes and sigh because, well, could you just get over it already, and only Pisces (out of compassion), and maybe Virgo (because they also never get over anything), defends you?
I’m sorry.
Not because I’m wrong, dear Cancers. We both know I’m not wrong. Y’all can be tedious AF with your never-ending nitpicky Mental Scar Registry and the degree to which you inflict it on others. From the point of view of a Libra/Scorpio (that’s “don’t remember and don’t care”/“already burned that shit to the ground if it really mattered and if not, I’m not petty”), your tendency to bring up minor slights months or years later seems like watching you empty a double-barreled shotgun slowly into both of your feet. Oh, and that secret terrible behavior you do that you think know one knows about…
We know, Cancer. We know. Sometimes we let you think we don’t know because we accept you in all your failings and frailties, even when you don’t accept yourself. But we know.
And still, I’m sorry. Because, as factually relevant as all my criticisms may be, the more pertinent fact remains that criticism is not the way to treat Cancer. You all torture yourselves enough (I see you hunched over that pan of enchiladas in the fridge at midnight! I see you loading up one more Nectar cartridge and telling yourself dulling the edge is probably a good thing! I see you missing your plane in service of a regrettable foreign love affair or tattoo! I see you convincing yourself that you can handle the stress/sleep dep/aggravation/emotional insecurity and then silently imploding! And I know, Cancer, that all that suffering you self-inflict is part of your deep black molten core of love/hate for yourself, life, and the human condition). You don’t need criticism from me, and you can’t hear it (Cancer is somehow even better than Taurus at ignoring valid critical commentary, and additionally manages to interpret is as emotional persecution). What you need is love, and you deserve it.
Yes, I mean that. I have too many Cancers in my life not to know how important you are. The earth is 71% water, and Cancer is Cardinal Water for a reason. Cancer is what heralds us into the world of emotions, their fluidity, their permanence. Cancer is what teaches us that it is necessary, if painful, to learn to breathe underwater. And it is a rude awakening. After the lightness of Gemini, its flexibility, its charm, its ease of movement, sprite-like, through the mutable air, the solstice comes and tips us into Cancer…
…which can feel like mud. But don’t wipe it off, people. Mud is good for your skin. Mud is where nutrients foment. Mud is where everything that has already been lived breaks down and becomes rich soil for everything that is yet to be. And that is the work of Cancer. Cancer keeps track of everything that has come before. Cancer is the great cataloguer of wounds, the keeper of griefs, and the bearer of old bruises (maybe you all sometimes make those old bruises new on purpose, but we can appreciate the iterative nature of that). And Cancer is also the great defender and nurturer of the wounded. Cancer is the person who comes and picks you up when your life has just exploded. Cancer is the person who adopts abused animals and turns them into…semi-socialized animals with persistent behavioral issues (but who have hearts of gold! I see you, Cancer). Cancer is the person who keeps going, despite bleeding from multiple wounds, and shares those wounds with posterity so that we can learn (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was a Cancer. So was Anthony Bourdain). Wole Soyinka is a Cancer, and sums it up: “Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity.” Yes, air signs, this is hard 4 u 2 comprehend. That is because you are in the service of something other than humanity. Humanity is messy. It decomposes and stinks. It is also the source of all our greatest triumphs and pleasures. Cancer knows that, and Cancer is toiling in the service of humanity, even when it’s unpleasant, even when it seems unnecessary to us more ethereal souls.
So: as we float to the end of the airy unicorn that is Gemini and prepare to be pushed off the diving board into the murky and fertile pool that is Cancer, get ready. Get ready to confront, as Cancer does, the Catalogue of Scars. Get ready to understand how they, more than the happinesses, have shaped you. How, as Cancerian Jhumpa Lahiri, remarks, “…things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
Yes, Cancer, you often get bogged down in this, to your own detriment. And yet, Cancer, you are not wrong. You are performing an essential duty in service of humanity. You are examining the wounds. And in that careful scrutiny lies your power.
Steven Dunn’s genre-defying novel water & power (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2018) is the book we all need to survive the Gemini/Cancer transition, to be both lulled and discomfited into awareness of what July has in mind for us. It is a pitilessly exacting catalogue of the military experience, interspersing a nameless protagonist’s personal narrative with “Subject Interviews” that give voice to different experiences of the Navy, and which starts with an explicit and explicitly vague set of queries that are worthy of Cancer: “I am interested in the submersion of individuals within the military. I am also interested in the breach.”
The book is, like Dunn’s previous novel (Potted Meat, 2016), written in segments. Unlike it, the segments vary in form and theme, including collage, photograph, concrete poetry, documentary, interview, lament. It is a both literally and ideologically heavier book, the ‘individual” of its query struggling like some confused Atlas to both lift and examine their burden.
At the book’s heart is Dunn’s strength in narrative structure, which comprises a wisdom to start at the beginning despite the book’s many facets and directions, and which, like all good storytelling, carries the reader into sympathy before the breaches and cracks are revealed. It starts with the Oath of Enlistment and pulls no punches from there: every dirty joke, every dirty moment, every dirty conscience examined: every toilet accident or unsightly residue revealed before being scrubbed. There is an equilibrium between the dirtying and cleaning of ideas and persons; there is no softening of what Khadijah Queen calls the “aggressive disconnection the armed forces demands,” but there is, in Dunn’s “Participation” sections, a consciousness that is trying to achieve conflicting goals: survival and connection, and that ultimately will only do so by disconnecting from the military itself. This is what Cancer does: stays put, collects, experiences, suffers. This is also what Cancer does: when it severs, it severs completely. No one is as done as a Cancer who’s done (and that is why it happens so rarely; most Cancers have a hard time growing up enough to take this step, leaving a series of doors half-cracked behind them). Cancer is not afraid to hold contradictions in both hands, the way water & power contrasts “Thank you for your service,” with a page of etymologies of the words serve/service that underscore its proximity to “slave” (a particular irony in light of the “Brief History of Recruiting Posters for Target Markets” the book includes, including one that reads “THE NAVY: You can study black history or you can go out and make it”).
Cancer isn’t going to resolve this for you, dear reader. Cancer is going to lay it at your feet and let you (or make you) work it out. Get ready.
water & power is full of tone shifts and format shifts. It is not a particularly organized book, but it manages to remain a deliberate one. One “Subject Interview” contain the interviewer’s voice, in arch sotto voce italics, holding us accountable, bringing us back to one of the central preoccupations of this work, the ethical impact of our presence in foreign places or on foreign beings: “We lost a lot of good men over there./Were any bad men lost?” That seems to be one of Dunn’s central questions, the one of ethics, the one of intent and of aftermath, the question of the weight of our deeds as both individuals and a national body and how often it ends up too great. The question, as the book crescendos to a conclusion that is half j’accuse and half in memoriam, of who we are and how we justify it:
In the military we watch a lot of movies about ourselves. […] True, there are those caricatures. But we are also apathetic, ashamed, terrified, un-patriotic, vulnerable, anti-heroic, math geniuses, dope-dealers, preachers, coke-sniffers, painters, wife-beaters, pedophiles, stand-up cats, and no-good motherfuckers.
Warning: you will not be let off the hook. Of a blast aftermath, Dunn writes in a series of obvious but poignant double entendres: “I want to kneel and (s)weep/their ashes into a manila/envelope…” and the blank spaces on these pages speak too: “Bodies are currency.” And then: “My country says you did something wrong. I will tell myself that until I feel better. I will tell myself that…” and finally, “I will tell you that until”
No answer. No resolution. This is what Cancer knows: that sometimes there is no resolution to be had, only the meticulous work of sifting through history and memory until it fills us all to bursting. Until we expand again. And so this book ends with a list of names and relationships, entitled “Cast,” all playing the role of “KILLED [Nationality] CIVILIAN.” This is Cancer’s lot: to retain the details of our painful legacy. To count the losses we have caused. To sweep the ashes, to catalogue them, to keep them. This is the power Cancer holds: the power of water, the power to encompass in memory and, eventually, to transform loss into nourishment.
It’s a lot, as every Cancer knows. But take heart. This solstice, it is all our responsibility to shoulder the load. It is all our charge (but especially you Geminis) to move out of the ease-seeking of Gemini, to sluff off the air’s wish for pretty and simple, and to seek the wound. Starting, of course, in the mirror.
