Real Chaos Astrology, vol. 11: How Soon Is Now?
Scorpio is misunderstood.
People say Scorpio is like a heat-seeking missile of sexy, dangerous mind control. People say Scorpio is vengeful, vindictive, vixenish. People say Scorpio is obsessed with the dark side. People say Scorpio plays to win and to the death. People say Scorpio will sting you when you’re not looking and they will always know exactly where you’re most vulnerable (this is because Scorpio gathers intel like Aquarius gathers knickknacks). People say Scorpio can’t be trusted.
None of these things are, strictly speaking, incorrect. Except for the last one. You can trust Scorpio, if Scorpio deems you’re worthy of being trusted — and if Scorpio has learned to trust themself. You can trust Scorpio with your life if Scorpio lets you in. Scorpio is not for the faint of heart, nor is Scorpio for the trifling, in the words of the late great Gemini Prince, whose song “Pussy Control” is definitely about a Scorpio. Scorpio is guarded, Scorpio is strategic, and Scorpio will make you act like you know. That is its gift to the rest of us (air signs, I’m looking at you): the impetus to not be trifling. Scorpio’s exacting standards challenge us not to be the two-bit fools we might otherwise allow ourselves to be. The challenge for Scorpio is different: become someone you yourself can trust. Examine the rationale for those exacting standards (and then maintain them). Lower the shields in a timely fashion (and then offer of yourself). Learn to absorb the occasional hit rather than deflecting it (and then learn from it). Learn to affront aggression with compassion (and then transcend it). And figure out how not to lead with your heart (your passionate, jealous, furtive, powerful heart, bursting, as it always is, with twin desires to both nurture and destroy — learn not to let its fears and impulses rule — and then reintegrate it).
In other words: Scorpio, you’re already powerful. But you’ll be a lot more powerful when you start demanding that complete honesty and loyalty you exact from others — from yourself. When you start living the pain and joy (and pain) of life rather than armoring yourself against it, waving that errant tail and plunging into anyone you can (yes, you, Scorpio. This sentence is your mirror). It will be painful, yes, and you are genetically designed for the avoidance of pain. But it is the only way you can cross from amoral arthropod into phoenix, the other emblem of the sign. To be reborn, to take flight, Scorpio, you have to do something every bit of you has been designed to avoid. You have to give in. You have to die. Metaphorically speaking. You have to give up control (which most of you would rather die than do. Funny how that works).
The opposite of Libra, who somehow manages to create an impression of prettiness and balance no matter what they actually look like, Scorpio has A Look. A beetle-eyed, drawn-browed, intense and crabby look that nevertheless pulls you in. You can always tell as Scorpio because they seem to be looking right through you and you kinda like it (or maybe that’s just my Libra VersaHo coming thru. Doubt it, though: most Libras flee this sign). Like a Picasso (who was a Scorpio), they trade balance for imbalance and mesmerize you with it. Like Marie Antoinette (Scorpio), they say spectacularly cutthroat things that people misquote for all of history whilst drinking out of champagne cups modeled after their much-praised breasts. Put another way, you know that game “Date, Marry, F***” ? Scorpio always starts in Category Three. The rest comes after.
Other Scorpios who exemplify the sign (keen-sighted control freaks with a pathological need to protect against vulnerability and an amazing understanding of human nature): Marie Curie. Voltaire. Theodore Roosevelt. Sylvia Plath. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Jan Vermeer. Hillary Clinton. RuPaul. I know, I know, that candidate gets on your last nerve. And should — Manifest Destiny was a terrible doctrine. But here’s the thing: Scorpio is polarizing and they don’t care. Scorpio is not for the faint of heart and they don’t care. Scorpio is gonna do what Scorpio is gonna do and a lot of the time you should probably just get your trifling ass out the way. I say that with love. But Scorpio tends to attract a lot of hate, too, and that’s Scorpio’s Achilles heel: they want to defeat the haters rather than float like a butterfly, and it takes them down some long, lonely, rocky side trails (Scorpio should listen to Capricorn Muhammad Ali and learn to float like that butterfly, but nobody listens to Cap because 90% of the time Cap forgets to make it sexy. Them’s the breaks).
Emily Jungmin Yoon’s debut collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018) lives in the space where Scorpio struggles: to let go of past injury and atrocity, to lay down their arms and live, to find a way to live with rather than against or in spite of. And the gravity of this book is worthy of Scorpio: sex, death, suffering, war, man’s darkest and most horrible moments, contextualized in the voices of Korean comfort women conscripted by the Japanese into lives whose lack of control, whose excoriating exposure, we cannot imagine. Yoon takes the Scorpionic tendency to find the ugliest and most fearsome acts of which humanity is capable — the cruelties special to our species — and gives them voice, now through the segments marked “ An Ordinary Misfortune,” which hearken to her similarly-named chapbook (Ordinary Misfortunes, Tupelo 2017), prose poems that narrative in elegant swoops and arcs through a history of suffering, that investigate the language of suffering and wounds: “She will be girl, girl is gravel and history will skip her lie stone over water,” now through first-person lyrics in the voices of actual comfort women, their names giving title to their poems, to their testimonies, pungent and plangent with plain truth: “hit my stomach with fists/I failed/I named him Young-ju/left him at an orphanage,” or, finally: “I should forget and forgive/but I cannot/When my head turns toward Japan/I curse her/I want to find solace/but I cannot.”
Yoon’s various voices contrast and comment, always lilting and sometimes lamenting: “it rains/for the children they bore. For the children/they could not bear. For the children/they were.” And sometimes asking the larger questions that must drive our understanding of this terrible history: “What is a body in a stolen country.”
I want to find solace/but I cannot. This is the line Scorpio is always walking. I should let go, but I cannot. I should move past the fury and the pain, but I could not. I want to find solace. Maybe it is the line we all are always walking, these days in America, these days in the world. Maybe all of us need, like Scorpio, to lay down the arms we have made of our wounds. To find solace. The thing is, we have to remove our venomous stinger from our foe first. Solace is not compatible with the lack of compassion to which we are now accustomed, to which, Yoon shows us in this book, we have always tended.
I have a particular relationship to the word “solace” because my father, immigrant whose family left a city built on what was once Korea, and which was variously occupied by the Russians and the Japanese, semi-orphan who learned English at a home for boys in California after he was six, whose unaccented American voice smoothed over decades of caverns and crevasses into which and history language had fallen, once defined it thus when a younger sibling asked: “What does solace mean, Dad?”
“Being alone,” he said after thinking a minute. “It means being alone.”
At the time I was a precocious ten-year-old and knew immediately the mistake he made, but I was also precocious enough to appreciate it and its logic. And this, too, is the line Scorpio walks: the one where the urge to resist vulnerability and retain control means that inside oneself is a Fortress of Solitude where you can be perfect and safe and supreme and utterly, utterly lonely. Still, my sister was going to flunk her vocabulary test, so the correction had to be made.
“It means comfort,” I said then, and my father blinked twice and said nothing, the lens shifting behind his eyes. No one protested. It was my birthright, not his. This is a hierarchy we have always known, those of us who care to remember it.
Comfort/solace/solitude/Scorpio. A history of savagery. Yoon knows that no one is exempt: “we have/ you and I, our histories of hunting/ and being the beast.” And neither can we escape the desire for our enemies to be punished, for our wounds to be inflicted upon them, for each man who harms us “to be brought/ to swift justice for my sake.”
But no matter how swift the justice, it does not heal. Remember that, Scorpio. Remember, in the unbearable pain, in the dehumanizing fear, in the moments when you are once again articulate enough to wonder, “My heart kicks on my skin,” remember that justice does not heal wounds. We can only find solace for that. Remember that when Plath writes in Ariel “And I/am the arrow,” she is still in the place of destroying, “suicidal,” and not in that of being born.
This is what you need to know about Scorpio: every wound leaves a scar. Every scar is carried forever.
This is what Scorpio needs to know about itself: those scars are stories, not swords. The song that titles this review is the refrain we all must remember, that somewhere there is the need to be loved, no matter how staved off, no matter how guarded against (and yes, we’re talking about the Love Spit Love cover, and yes, Prue from Charmed was a Scorpio. Of course. How else could she be so fierce and so loving. How else could she be such a piece of work).
In A Cruelty Special to Our Species, Emily Jungmin Yoon performs the alchemical feat of transforming pain into grace, of finding a path out of the darkness of permanent damage: “Let us have/ our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,/ our shamans and our sacred books.” Absorbs all the damage and transmogrifies us into a beautiful thing. The final poem, “Time, in Whales,” chants lullingly at us: “And yes, so perhaps the world will end in water, taking with it/all loving things. And yes, in grace. Only song, only buoyancy.” And maybe Scorpio is also about learning time, this time we live in, with its various weaknesses and wounds: learning to live with and in this time, and yet to be eternal, as Paul Valéry (possibly the best of the Scorpios) has it: “We walk in time/and our radiant bodies/…are imprinted in fable…”
Happy birthday, Scorpio. You are not the weapon. Nor are you the wound. “Solace” does not mean impenetrable solitude.
Remember to bear your scars without wielding them. Remember that, when you stop lashing back, when you burst from that fiery egg, and rise, as Eagle, as Phoenix: “You alone illuminate the sky.”
