Real Chaos Astrology, vol. 10: Stab ’Em in the Front
I’m pretty sure that Linda Goodman’s classic book on astrology makes the following claim: a Libra can melt a chocolate bar with their smile at thirty paces. And I’m almost as sure that it notes that a Libra can tell you they hate you with a smile on their face and somehow you won’t even be offended.
Neither of these statements is false. Libras are legendary for their grace and charm, for their beauty and willingness to please. But all that really means is that those born under this sign are legendary for their facility with illusion. If you actually look at an agglomeration of Libras, they’re no prettier than anyone else. They’re just better at projecting an image of prettiness. Where a Virgo will wear clothes that are just slightly the wrong color and a size too small and look kind of frumpy and unflattering and an Aries will wear, oh, a pile of garbage or a gown made of raw meat or their kid sibling’s camp t-shirt and transcend the question of pretty, where a Pisces will somehow assemble an outfit that looks like mermaid sea tentacles and look in their element and a Leo will come in hairsprayed to the nines and looking glam AF but maybe slightly intimidating and/or brassy and a Capricorn will maybe just have decided on a uniform of chinos and polo shirts and a Gemini will have some fetishized cutesy detail that adds a lot of charm (or something), a Libra will show up in socks that are carefully accessorized to their eye color/French manicure/underwear lace and somehow manage to look both unstudied and decorous, like they were just born that put together and harmonious. And yes, Libra is all about harmony. Sometimes this can make them seem like a next-level aesthetic genius, and sometimes this can make them seem like an insufferably superficial yea-saying ho (Libra is also legendary for telling people what they want to hear). It’s Libra’s gift and curse: they just know what’s easy and pretty and they just naturally go that way and if they tweak your color scheme or adjust your angles you should probably let them, unless you’re an Aries, in which case, by all means, keep on rockin’ and shockin’ (Aries is Libra’s opposite, kind of like a Taser is the opposite of a memory foam pillow).
We don’t even do it on purpose (yes, I am of the sign of the superficial yea-saying ho or, as I like to phrase it, the “dream hooker”— for Libra’s effortless and impersonal compulsion to transform itself into your ideal object of desire as it prances around in a tiny apron proffering espresso and matcha). We just live in a place where beauty and pleasure and comfort are necessary components of life rather that superfluous extras. The French Republic is a Libra, and its culture of joie de vivre and art de vivre and paying attention to the nuance of beauty makes Paris the most visited city on earth. France, like Libras everywhere, understands that appearance is not a distraction from the thing; appearance is the thing (and blames the Puritans for why Americans don’t get this). But Libra gets it. Libra gets that reality lies in that space within both appearance and essence. Libra gets that the spectacle determines our understanding, but that our understanding is not necessarily the thing. (Some of you may not get it, but trust me, Libra was born knowing.)
Small wonder, then, that Libra is often dismissed (most usually by itself) as being frivolous, flaky, superficial, silly. This is not an unjustified characterization, but it is an incomplete one. Libra will let you stay on the surface forever if that’s where you want to be. Librans will let you objectify them — hell, they’ll objectify themselves and hand it to you all wrapped up in a color-coordinated bow. But Libra, if they care to find it, tends to have a kind of steel core. A basic Libra will never get to it amid all the layers of marshmallow. A slightly more evolved Libra will occasionally have it burst out and slash things, like Wolverine’s claws, doing themselves and others damage in the process. But the(rare) next-level Libra was born to both please and stun, and will wield that velvet-gloved fist with adroit skill and little apparent effort. (Margaret Thatcher is a Libra and has gone through all these stages. John Lennon was a Libra and the progression is clear. Gandhi was a Libra and was born Version 2.0. And lest you think I’m bragging about Libras, so, ignominiously enough, is Cardi B, and that girl is stuck on beta. Clearly, there is work to be done. There’s a vast array of Libra fuckery and it all falls along the lines of petty, small-minded, vain faux ideology, cattiness, and cowardice — literal or figurative back-stabbing.)
Back-stabbing is not a Libra trait, but it is a Libra weakness, mostly because Libras hate confrontation and love gossip and trash talk. Those awful voices at the beginning of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”? Libras. They know the size of someone else’s butt ain’t none of their nevermind and they do not care; they will just keep flapping their yaps in smug complacency for, like, ever. My best Libra pal shared with me a meme that claimed something like 90% of Libran conversation is remarking on the tiresomeness of reality, the ungainliness of others, and the fact that hot people are hot. Having now spent a few weeks tabulating our conversations, I have to say that he’s, sadly, not wrong.
But cattiness is not the hallmark of all Libras. The better ones learn to be transparent as their native air and follow the edict of the famously arch, stylish, and saucy Libra Oscar Wilde: “A good friend will always stab you in the front.” And Libra is, perhaps surprisingly, a good friend (terrible lover, maybe, prone to unreasonable demands, petulance and vanity, and temper tantrums, but excellent friend). And as a good friend, Libra knows that trust is the bedrock. Thus it is Libra’s job to evolve from a backstabber to a front-stabber, and to know how to stab judiciously. It’s Libra’s job to evolve from the beta (“Hot ppl r hot!”) to the meta (Maggie T: “It used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone”) to the next-level (Gandhi: “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong”). And Libra is uniquely disposed in this direction: the direction of absolute justice and pitiless, beautiful truth. The attributes of the strong.
Don’t forget: Libra is a cardinal sign, traditionally the ones with the most forward motion in the Zodiac. The cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) begin each season, ushering us into a new rhythm. And while Libra’s air is a whole lot harder to spot than the firestorm of Aries or the flood of Cancer, Libra at its best is both pitiless and compassionate, both disarmingly frank and charmingly agile, mastering both style and substance to bring us an image that reflects for us, not the world we thought we knew, but the world as we wish to come to understand it. As we need to understand it.
It is this impetus toward revelatory truth that lives in all Libras, and it’s the reason so many of them bury their potential for insight in a preoccupation with fashion, baked goods, gossip, and manicures. But when Libra allows that impetus to propel them, they’re like nuclear reactors. All that seemingly harmless hydrogen one moment, the power to fuel a thousand cities (or destroy them) the next. The feat, for Libra, is to channel the reaction.
Such a feat also occurs in Sally Wen Mao’s forthcoming Oculus (Greywolf, 2019), a book consumed first and foremost with the impact of the spectacle on those of us for whom representation is both rare and often rapacious: women of color. In a sequence of poems that flays out the flaws and violences of representation, Mao uses magical realism, sleight of hand, trenchant imagery, and an overwhelmingly clear awareness of what is at stake — the self (an agglomeration of selves that become a people), turning the eye of the objectified back on itself and on the lenses that have appropriated it; Mao’s poems both confront and explore appropriation, depersonalization, distortion, and rejection of our images and our selves, ultimately taking back the camera and turning it on those purveyors of our images who have assumed the right to wield it, turning it also in the mirror to see through our own eyes.
The book begins with two epigraphs, one from Yoko Tawada (“The eye sees nothing for the camera has already robbed it of vision…”) and the other from Anne Anlin Cheng (“It is on the stage of contaminated desires that we are most pressed to consider the politics of recognition”). These two thoughts orbit each other, interrogating both the privilege and the process of seeing, reminding us, as John Berger wrote, that “soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen.” And in fact, Mao launches into a deep investigation of that moment of awareness through the portrayal of the array of cultural presumptions and precepts that confine us. Sometimes her address is direct: “The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates/in our libraries, in our bloodstreams” or “The stories about our lives do not have faces.” Sometimes it is narrative: “That was the last/time I trusted a body that touched me.” But always it, like a shifting series of lenses, like the machine at the optometrist’s where the circles of glass click into place, offering now sharpness, now blur, aimed at the glaring screen of how we see ourselves, how we allow us to be seen, and how and where the spirit survives within that. The implicit question: who has made the image that defines us? Who owns it?
Mao’s language is both unadorned and plaintive: in the first poem, “Ghost Story,” the ghost speaker murmurs, “When I lived, I wanted to be seen.” This line sums up a central preoccupation of the book, expressed in a later sequence of poems from the point of view of film star Anna May Wong, who was born in Los Angeles and made the face of the dragon lady, who retired from films at age 35 in disgust with the Hollywood image factory. Wong’s voice here is nostalgic, plaintive, or critical by turns, remarking in the poem “Anna May Wong on Silent Films,” with both deft and irony, “The narrative was enchanting/enough to make me believe/I, too, could live in a white/palace…”
The poems are rife with quips like these, specific and universal critiques, or bald statements of the despair one must feel at realizing that one’s image has been hijacked to represent a seductive vice caricature (as every Asian American woman realizes at puberty) that is both desired and reviled by the country we live in. “I’ve tried so hard to erase myself,” Wong intones, lamenting “all my life I’ve been minor, played the strumpet, the starved one,” wishing for a “the future, where surely I’ll play/some girl from L.A….” But this future, as Mao knows (and perhaps it is clearer from the vantage point of a writer born outside the U.S.) has not come.
Several of the poems in the Anna May Wong series address the issue of legacy, of inheritors, of progeny, pairing Wong with Bruce Lee (she admonishes him, when he suggests they live together in the future, “It’s not ours to keep”), sending Wong searching for a mark she can keep making: “There is no second generation for actors like me.” In Mao’s hands, Wong’s legacy is the legacy of emptiness, of having left a mark that keeps replicating and yet never evolves.
The latter section of the book takes the reader traveling (Bogota, Jakarta, and various places in Mao’s natal China — Beijing, Wuhan, Taiyuan and Guiyu Village), no longer an exoticized celluloid doll but grayed-out observer: “Behold how I tend to disappearance,” the speaker quips, and maybe this is the central puzzle of Oculus: only by seeing the invisible can we see the truth, of course, which is why Justice is blindfolded, which is why the quieter lyrics of this section nevertheless contain the more meditative, less shiny, more universal truths: “America cannot orient/itself without an opposite” will echo long after you’ve turned the page, and “Today I wave a torn/pennant for my sisters who stammer” is the flag planted squarely in this territory: Mao’s re-visioning of ourselves and our symbols, Mao’s revoking of the cloak that allows us to be walked over, walked past, cut in front of, talked over, papered and painted over, decked out like the gilded Victorian homes of San Francisco they called “painted ladies,” all while our load-bearing beams rot; the habits that normalize “how a face conceals its intentions/like a woman conceals her name.”
Oculus ends like a drumroll or a shattering of glass, dancing with Libran agility from manifesto to pop culture critique and tying the two together with implacable sangfroid, as in this poem on the much-debated 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell, written in the voice of Motoko Kusanagi: “I do not comply. You can bedevil me with fabrication, but I/transmit the truth.” That is the purpose of this book, as it is the purpose of Libra: the ability to transmit truth.
Happy birthday, Libra. Be ye not bedeviled with fabrication (or gossip, or someone else’s unfortunate fashion choices). Remember, as Mao’s final, beautiful “Resurrection” offers: “If I can recognize/her face under this tunnel of endless shadows/against the luminance of all/ that is extinct and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.”
You own it, Libra. You are not a stranger here. You are here to recognize what is real underneath its layers of chimera and subterfuge, against all that is extinct and oncoming. You are here to know that truth, as Libran poet ee cummings has it, “aflame with dreams/incredible is.”
