Real Chaos Astrology, vol. 9: Particular Miseries
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” You remember the line. It’s Tolstoy, the Virgo-iest of Virgo writers, he of the interminable and minute descriptions, he also of the pithy and blinding truths. This is Virgo. Like that old saw about the Inuit having 36 words for snow, Virgo has 36 words for discomfort, each precisely and clearly defined, and woe betide ye who choose the wrong one, unless you enjoy A Helpful and Exhaustive Dissertation on Why That Is Not Quite Exactly It. (This is the hallmark of the Virgo who has not yet reached Tolstoy’s level of mastery; to be fair, a high bar.)
The Virgos in the audience are wondering why this post is late. They’re thinking: maybe you don’t love us. Maybe you don’t value us. Maybe you don’t see how much we bring to the table, how carefully we prepare to help you, how we live to be of service, how we arrange things just so in order to please you. Maybe you’re going to give us short shrift in your review. We’re used to it. (Virgo is second only to Cancer in its capacity for spontaneous, self-igniting martyrdom.)
Bitch, please. I was raised by a Virgo. I live with two Virgos, and one of them has the moon in Cancer. My plate is FULL.
For those who lack my lifelong study of the Virgo, here is what I can tell you: the Virgo is your most loyal friend and supporter. The Virgo is your most constant critic. The Virgo can be depended on, temperamentally, more than any other sign (except possibly Cap). Virgo will always be there for you 100%. Of course, Scorpio will be there for you 190% if they haven’t decided you’re a complete shit of a human being (50% odds), and TBH, the 30% you’ll get from Aries or Leo might take you farther, considering. Even Gemini or Libra’s sparkly and effervescent 15% could really be the wind beneath your wings, because Virgo is not the wind beneath your wings. Virgo is more like the heavy, woolly mattress you land on when your wings fail. It is not always glamorous. It very often smells slightly funky (with the possible exception of my Virgo parent, whom I have literally never known to smell bad, Virgo is prone to letting the finer details of personal hygiene go. For all its reputation as a fastidious creature, Virgo is actually a filthy beast, and that can come in handy). But the funky, unwieldy mattress will be there, and it will even do some furious repositioning as you fall to make sure it catches you. It can’t help it. That is what Virgo does.
Here is what Virgo doesn’t do: cushion its own falls. Virgos are notoriously broken. They are so focused on Being of Service to You that they not only can’t cushion their own falls, or avoid having falls, or maybe take a route that doesn’t go along a cliff with hairpin turns. They just can’t. A Virgo I know once moved across the country to be in the same town as her brother because she wanted a closer relationship with him. After she’d been failing at this for a year, morosely hanging around his house organizing his Tupperware while he drank and caroused and ignored her, I broke her down (Scorpio moon is helpful for this) and got her to admit that this was without a doubt the stupidest life decision ever, that it was a total failure, and that “Maybe I should grow a spine.”
Ten years later, that hasn’t happened, and the Virgo in question has developed a chronic health issue (as Virgos do). Virgos is the nursemaid of the zodiac. Virgos nurse grudges, they nurse desires, they nurse people, and they nurse ailments. Partially, they think there’s some virtue in suffering, and partially, they’re realistic enough to know that suffering cannot be escaped. This is the curse and the gift of Virgo. When in balance, they are the great and compassionate realists of the world. When off-kilter, they’re whiny babies with absolutely no sense of proportion.
Here is what you Virgos do when off-kilter: eat too much and become obese and never look in the mirror and train yourself not to notice your ever-expanding clothes sizes and avoid doing exercise and avoid thinking about it and work really really hard at something else, like becoming a slave to your job and feeling super martyred about how much effort you put in when others don’t, in order to never never never notice the fact that you’re falling the fuck apart. Drink too much and do inappropriate things, like driving off, drunk, after your boyfriend who walked out of your drag show and who you’re cheating on and making miserable and knowingly exposing to deadly diseases and, when you find him, crashing his car up on to the curb, wig askew, incoherent and abject and enraged. Live in a shithole covered with literal shit because your dogs shit on the actual floor and you are somehow not empowered to change that and so you spend hours obsessively organizing the silverware as things rot and crumble around you.
Forget how many houses you have and publicly betray that in a way that basically tanks the campaign for you (John McCain was a Virgo).
Throw objects or beings that you don’t actually want to damage, damage them, and feel horrible afterwards (a Virgo who claims they have never thrown shit in anger is lying).
Live in a place you call Neverland and call yourself Peter Pan and lose all resemblance to your actual face to a series of increasingly crazy plastic surgeries (Michael Jackson was a Virgo).
Join the RAF and crash-land in the desert and literally break your face open (Roald Dahl was a Virgo).
Here is the thing: Virgo always thinks it can take risks or do crazy things or forget important details and get away with it, but Virgo always gets caught. Virgo can’t help getting caught. It’s what Virgo does. They’re the opposite of Libra, who has a gift for discretion and subtlety and making canary feathers look like lipstick, or Aquarius, who actually can take risks and do crazy things and get away with it. Virgo is the guy who walks out of the restroom trailing, unwitting, a partial toilet seat cover. Why, you ask? Because Virgo lacks self-awareness; Virgo’s awareness (and sense of self-worth) is all about others. This is why a Virgo will literally wear pants a size too small and belt them two holes too tight and look ridiculous and be in total denial of this fact and split the seat halfway through the day and be astonished and feel betrayed by the pants. This is why a Virgo will literally allow themselves to be cheated on and tell themselves resignedly that nothing is perfect and they just need to suffer through but then be unable to suffer through and become emotionally manipulative and rage-drive a motorcycle around in despondent desperation and date some really questionable hoes (it is a testament to the Virgo-ness of this emergency response to abandonment and betrayal that several of the Virgos in my life, including possibly Beyonce, will think I am specifically and only describing them here).
With Virgos, the pain is felt by all, whether or not they’re trying to make it so, but as my parental Virgo once informed me, if you really loved me, you’d know. Know what? Whatever the Virgo is feeling. I was biking up a hill on Mount Desert Island in Maine last summer with a Virgo, and it was grueling, and we were both suffering, and my ass was super sore, and it was all I could do to stay on the rental bike. But the Virgo was complaining. In four languages. Loudly. Continuously. Virgo does not tend to dwell on the positive. Virgo tends to fret, and if they don’t have something to fret about, they will find something, because the world is fraught with discomfort and they will whip out their Angst and Agita Info Sheet and tell you exactly the type and degree they’re experiencing at any given time.
Of course, this is what makes Virgos such great writers of the horrible, the delicate, the absurd, the mysterious (Stephen King. D.H. Lawrence. Agatha Christie). That attention to the particular flavor and degree of awkwardness or chagrin, of discomfiture or pain. But Virgo can only do this when a certain basic security has been achieved. Virgo needs to be safe. Virgo needs to feel supported. And Virgo needs someone to care for who isn’t on the self-absorbed taker side of the spectrum(Virgo: don’t date a fire sign. No, really; you actually can’t handle it, because they will literally never be able to put you first and you will literally not survive) but who will make caring for the Virgo right back a priority. Because that’s how Virgo expects to roll. They will tuck in your collar and pick off your lint and bustle about doing Helpful Things while telling you everything that might possibly eventually go wrong, and you will hug them and hide those ridiculous pants that are too small and that shirt that looks like an awning where they will never find them (oops!) and take them on walks and pack them healthy snacks. And then Virgo can calm down and come away from the mental place of the Little Match Girl, where they all too frequently end up, and can start using that attention to detail for great things, like Taking the Best Notes and Having the Most Organized Silverware Drawer and portraying in exquisite and heartbreaking detail Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train.
It might seem, from the tales I am telling, that Virgo is bad news, a vale of tears, a constant source of angst. That can be true. It generally has been true, at one point or another, for any Virgo you can name. But that’s not all there is. Virgo is more than just the most codependent bad dresser you ever met. Virgo is, at it core (when its core can be located) surprisingly grounded. Stable. Steady and giving. My chair-throwing, multilingually-complaining Virgo (a highly evolved example of the species, but that’s what coming out with a Sicilian Catholic mom will do for you, evolve you like a Pokemon) once said to me, when I was expressing doubts and insecurity about what we were even doing and why we were even friends, “We’re friends because I think you’re delightful.” And at the moment I understood the mystery of Virgo. It’s all about you, but it’s really all about them. You think they’re serving, but they are driving. At their best, Virgo knows what they wants, and what they want is you, and they will continually affirm and support and nurture that. Virgo always wants to take your call because Virgo loves you, and that love is, as Henry V, who was probably a Virgo, says in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: “the sun and the moon; or rather, the sun, and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly.”
Whether to their joy or detriment, Virgo keeps the course truly. And that’s something few can offer. They may grumble and forget to wash behind their ears, but you can count on them. They will stop complaining to inform you they love you, or to ask how they can help, or you will just find that they went and rearranged the silverware drawer for maximum efficiency and beauty, all because they need to show their constancy and love (every sign has a primary need. Cancer needs to feel the way their gut tells them they need to feel. Aquarius needs to be free to follow their cosmic altruism without inhibition. Taurus needs to have a basic set of comforts and certainties to feel it’s worth it. Libra needs ((things)) to be lovely and pleasing. Virgo needs to keep the course truly, for you). There is no better way to foster Virgo’s happiness than to provide circumstances that allow them to do that. There is no better way to crash-land them in the desert with a broken face than to prevent it.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of embodies Virgo’s careful attention to detail in an exquisite enumeration of all the possible nuances of absence, Virgo’s ability to examine the quality of erasure and loss, the shapes left behind by the missing being. Nguyen’s poems range themselves around this space literally and linearly, from the cutouts of photos of the lost brother to the words that assemble to occupy (but never fill) that same space.
The book structured in sections that each contain a piece called “Triptych,” which springs from a photo of the three children, the family of origin, the origin of completion, the well from which loss is drawn, and this photo becomes a poem through a cutout (the first, “what may exist between appearance and disappearance”) or an intercession like a tear (the second, “you swept and wept within me”) or a slow fade (the third, “ch/ance, discontinuity, di/scontinuity, chance”) of or in the image, until it is lost, until the image of the lost boy is uncertain, reflected in the certain absence in the eyes of his sisters (“Bitter sister, victim! I miss you”).
Another poem title, “Gyotaku,” is stamped upon each of the three sections as well, and this word is the Japanese technique of printing fish, conceived to immortalize a catch, a way to immortalize the dead, and which itself exists in threes: chokusetsu-ho, the easiest and most direct, where the ink is applied directly to the fish; kansetsu-ho, where the fish is covered in silk and the silk itself inked; and tensha-ho, where the fish is inked, printed onto a transfer medium, and then transferred to a harder medium (such as wood or stone), and it is only the last and rarest method where the imprint of the body is not reversed but correctly oriented, as in nature, and it is only in this method that the image can be preserved on a freestanding substance like a wall or a monument, and this is what Nguyen’s book seems to be building, such a lasting monument to this lost body, the poems named for gyotaku colliding and assembling images of the shape of a body that once moved, swam, lived.
The eponymous poem, “Ghost Of,” ushering in the third and final section of the book, slipping from history to myth to superstition to metaphor to hemisphere to folktale, echoing with question: “Nabokov says, ‘the lost glove is happy.’ /Is the lost brother happy?”
A “Reprise” inscribing that unwillingness to let go (you know this unwillingness, Virgo; you wrote it) in tiny, compressed letters (“What if he did not depart — but we who gathered around him?”), asking the question that loss must always ask, not to make room for the next thing, but to be able to live with it (“tell me that what we lost as collateral is also a gift”).
The last poem a final triptych, a set of three rings where one is empty, lilting, dirging, memorializing, carrying the shape of that loss, making it a part of the structure of the whole, “I acclimate to the score; I play the first part then you are silent/…I am growing still and will fill in for you, fill you in u/ntil the end; I will nev/er give you up I will ne/ver give up/I will never…”
And the space of that empty ring taking its own place, its own page in a tight ring of words: “I thoug/ht I saw you…I love from afa/r, end to end, our silho/ettes against the e/xpanse, instant/stillness.”
Keeping the course truly, as Virgo does, remaining faithful as Virgo does, and yet (and this is what you may still need to practice, Virgo) singing a song entirely its own. That is the work of this book —
And I remind you that I cannot encompass all the nuances of Virgo or of this book, for it is too varied, too precise, too lovely, too finely wrought, and you others must take time to visit this intention (of Ghost Of, of Virgo) in which, for both, “there is nothing that is not music.”
Happy birthday, Virgo. You will get caught in storms, the “whole world of [your] body noiselessly shaking against the dust.” You will tell yourself “love attends not to me.” You will finally accept, as Nguyen writes: “I cannot but be.” You will remember: the course you are truest to is your own.
