Reading Asterios Polyp's Chart

In my "Future of English Studies" course this week we read David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp.  It's a wonderful graphic novel that you should go read.  Then you can come back and read this post.  I'll do my best, as always, to explain my astrological analysis in non-astrological terms.

Doing a natal chart for a fictional character is always tricky business, but in the case of Asterios Polyp I feel justified.  The book itself draws attention to Asterios's birthday and sign, as one of his key companions in the story is a self-proclaimed "Goddess" who studies astrology and, hilariously, lets Asterios know not to worry "if you fall in love with me, everyone does."  She's a Pisces, we're told, but she must be an Aquarius cusp or a Leo rising the way she comes across in the book.  She's, uh, forward.  And one of only two other characters as opinionated as Asterios.

While Asterios, as a rational thinker, dismisses astrology and its nebulous determinations and interpretations, I thought it might be interesting to see whether his chart tells us anything more about him than "he's a Cancer-Gemini cusp."  Now, the book tells us a few things - birth date, and a number of significant life events - but it gives no time or place, so we have to do a little rectification.  Guessing at place is easy enough.  Asterios lives and works in New York, and his parents are immigrants from Eastern Europe (hence the "Polyp," a shortening of a longer, presumably Greek, name).  Assuming that Asterios was born in New York City seems safe enough.

Time is a little trickier.  I ended up deciding on 5AM, for a number of reasons.  First off, we learn that Asterios is born a twin - his brother dies - after a 30+ hour labor.  For whatever reason, I imagine the doctor's decision to perform a c-section as happening at the end of a second long night of labor.  As for astrological reasons, the first argument for this birth time is that it puts most of Asterios's planets on the Eastern side of his chart.  Asterios is a fairly self-absorbed character who, moreover, is an architect used to shaping his own world.  That jives better with Eastern hemisphere of self-determination than Western.  Moreover, we learn that Asterios has not yet designed something that was actually built, so he's more of a theoretical architect.  That his Northern hemisphere is stronger than his Southern with a 5AM birth time supports this facet of his personality: despite his vociferousness and manifest brilliance, much of his work (Saturn) remains below the horizon (in the fourth house).

The other virtues of a 5AM birth time include a Piscean midheaven, supported by the positive and, I think, transformative relationship he has with our aforementioned Goddess and her family.  Also, Sagittarius - the sign of philosophy and higher education - fills most of the 6th house of work, another sensible configuration given that Asterios works in Academia.  Finally, and most importantly, this birth time puts his Sun in Cancer in the first house, but keeps his ascendant as Gemini.  The book as a whole is largely concerned with how Asterios deals with duality, and so a Gemini ascendant makes sense, as does a first house Sun, as Asterios is extremely self-absorbed for much of the book (it is worth noting that he is a progressed Leo, too, making him something of a showman).

Ultimately, we can't rely too heavily on the houses here, despite how sensible the rectified chart looks.  Nevertheless, they can serve as guideposts for interpreting the signs and planets.

Without further ado, here's the chart.

Asterios Polyp Rectified Chart - Generated by OpenAstro

I won't go into too much detail here.  There's a lot here and, to even my surprise, it fits Asterios extremely well.  Indeed, the chart's correlation to what we know about Asterios as a character is strong enough that I wonder whether Mazzucchelli consulted an astrologer while he was writing.  Anyway, let's look at the highlights.  What really jumps out here?

Short (technical) answer: T-Squares.  Big, messy t-squares.  Mercury in Gemini squares a Saturn-Moon Conjunction, Squares Chairon.  Indeed, throw in Jupiter and you're on the verge of a Grand Cross.

Non-technical answer: Asterios has serious conflict and difficult in his chart.  His workmanlike attitude belies the difficulty he has in translating his work into reality.  Nevertheless, he's so deeply invested in what he does that he makes it a part of his home.  He has a strong aesthetic that he must see realized in his home, and even slight deviation from his expected and desired order of things is profoundly upsetting to him.

This quality he has a hard time expressing and understanding, tending to overwhelm his interlocutors precisely because he's not as self-assured as he seems.  He struggles to communicate how deeply he is what he does and says.  That is, ideas are not merely ideas to Asterios, but are rather a core part of his personality.  This multi-faceted sense of self is so upsetting to Asterios that he subsumes it in his subconscious, refusing to realize that the way he lives is peculiar and personal, instead externalizing it as a philosophical position.

Because of this internal conflict, duality takes the place of complexity in Asterios's thought.  In a beautiful piece of astrological serendipity, Chairon sets off both the internal and external senses of self with a deep, personal wound.  For Asterios, this wound is his dead brother.  Indeed, his splitting the world into dualities is his attempt to heal the loss of his twin.  Not only that, in healing himself - so he thinks - he finds a means by which he might heal others.  That is, he can bring them a simplifying dualism.

That Asterios does not understand that dualism is, of course, the irony at the heart of his character, and the quality that sets the plot in motion.  The story is very much an effort by Asterios to better connect with complexity.  Fittingly, this is represented by the place to which his t-cross opens up: Pisces in the 10th house.  Asterios has Jupiter - a planet of growth - in Pisces, and it is no surprise that his growth throughout the book is both Piscean - in the sense of embracing emotional complexity - and social, as signified by the 10th house.

There are other interesting aspects in Asterios's chart, but this t-cross (which is nearly a grand cross) is really the heart of the thing.  How well it fits perhaps raises a question: how much am I mapping the book onto the chart, and how much am I mapping the chart onto the book?  That is, which is prior?

The answer, of course, is neither.  Yes, my familiarity with Asterios as a character colors my reading of his chart, but should I know nothing about him, I would come to similar, if more abstract, conclusions.  The forces at work here - the important planets, signs, and houses - have very broad meanings that, nevertheless, are narrow enough to allow only particular interpretations.  That the events of Asterios Polyp fit so well with that interpretive baseline, yielding a rich, specific chart seems to me no accident.

Now, the question is, does this tell us anything about Asterios we didn't already know?  Perhaps not.  But it does give me a different language through which I might explain the things I sensed in reading.  Just like writing a reflection on a text, doing a chart might open up linguistic and artistic interpretive pathways that would otherwise stay closed.

To the skeptic, then, that opening up of new pathways is the value of astrology.  It is not about fate.  It is about understanding.

Watching Myself Read

For my "Future of English" course this week we were asked to watch ourselves read and to reflect on the process.  This is my result.

In trying to watch myself read, I was surprised to find that I already do watch myself read. That is, I sat down to read and said "ok, now to watch myself read" and found that, as I started to read, I was reading exactly the way I always do. So, really, that wasn't what surprised me, actually. What surprised me was that I didn't realize that I always watch myself read. You could say I haven't watched myself watching myself read.

This continuously self-aware division into reader and watching-reader leads to interesting contradictions. I am an extremely critical reader, on the one hand. I am an extremely agreeable reader, on the other. I naturally filter what I read through the lens of other familiar texts, but I am often hard-pressed to say just exactly which text I am filtering my understanding through, or even if I actually am filtering at all. I have a sophisticated and refined interpretive ideology, and yet strive to adopt the ideology of the text I am reading.

In short, I know my reading extremely well on a surface, procedural, level, but understand it almost not at all at a deeper, existential level. That is, I know how I read, but I don't know exactly who the I is that is doing the reading. It's not the I that eats dinner with my wife, that's for certain. Indeed, that dinner-eating I often spends much of those dinners trying to understand what the reader I has just experienced, appropriating the readerly experience and reinterpreting it for my real life, synthesizing and analyzing, arguing and explaining.

As an almost schizophrenic reader, it is not uncommon for me to generate a lot of ideas as I read, and especially shortly after or whenever I pause to take a (mental) breath, often by glancing at the clock or leafing through the upcoming pages or checking my Twitter feed. In these times of pause, the more familiar, more argumentative, more discursive I interposes on the receptive, reader I. This is the I that has always watched the reader I. This is the I that is critical. This is the I that searches for connections. This is the I that is consciously ideological. This is the I that is always the same.

The reader I, on the other hand, is much more mysterious, despite how conscious my bifurcation is. I find myself reading texts back-to-back that contradict each other, and, at the reader level, agreeing with both. My reader-self will follow even the most dubious argument to its conclusion, nodding in assent the whole way. Nevertheless, the reader-I is not wholly passive. It is the reader part, not the interpretive part, that shifts voices as an author does, that can tell whether Eagleton is speaking his own opinion or is rehashing the views of someone else.

In observing my reader I this week, an interesting phrase occurred to me. It is this: "the audience of your reading." My reader reads, while the interpretive I asks questions like "who is the audience of your reading?" I might as well say, while I am reading, a part of me is always writing - or preparing to write - also. Whether that writing ends up actually written is immaterial, I engage in mental preparation for it either way.

I would not go so far as to say that, for me, reading is writing. Rather, that they are different is exactly why my reading process is so bifurcated. Then again, the reader I and the writer I almost always coexist. They are not, perhaps, so schizophrenic after all. Rather they are like Aristophanes's lovers (from Plato's Symposium), amorphous blobs meant to be together. Indeed, they are not only meant to be together, but incapable of surviving without each other.

Perhaps the true challenge of this assignment, however, is not in recognizing this dichotomy. Rather, it has been in getting the reader I to read itself. The writer I is used to interpreting the transmissions of the reader, and the writer I is used to looking at and analyzing itself. The reader, however, never really gets a chance to turn that equation in the other direction*. Because this reader I is so impossibly anti-ideological and anti-interpretive, its voice in the process is non-existent. It is, after all, the writer within me that writes this very reflection. Even when I read my own writing, the reader I adopts its traditional role, treating the text as if it is not my own, letting the interpretive I do the interpretive work.

* Except, perhaps, when I'm doing astrology, but that involves the procedural trick of placing myself outside myself in a system of formal codes.

Reflection is a telling word, in fact. When I look in the mirror, what I see is not myself, but a reflection of myself. In trying to turn the interpretive mirror on myself, what I discover, above all, is that the same interpreter that interprets my reading also interprets myself. This could be maddening, but in fact it bothers me not at all. The system, it seems to me, works. I see no occasion for dramatized crisis. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe and articulate this strange division-cum-non-division, and it is surprising to me that I had never noticed something so fundamental to my own reading before.

When Doing Poorly on an Assignment is a Crisis

I knew, when I decided to come to Stanford, that there would be days I would wish I had gone to UCSD instead (just as the reverse would have been true).  I did not expect that one of those days would come so early.

Those that know me know that I care little for grades.  I am perfectly capable of assessing my own learning.  What I desire, instead, is feedback, constructive criticism, helpful advice.  Harsh doesn't hurt.  On the contrary, the more direct the feedback, the more specific the criticism, the better.  I want to be a better writer, a better thinker, a more skilled lover of wisdom.

In one (or two) of my courses this quarter, however, I'm feeling something of a crisis of purpose.  The course is a core requirement for all Stanford PhD students, a course that, in principle anyway, is at the heart of what we're doing and learning as future researchers.  The course is a methods course, an introduction to research methodology and thinking.

It is in this course that we recently read a piece by Jerome Kagan.  The piece was the first chapter of his "The Three Cultures," and, frankly, it's one of the worst pieces of writing I've read in a long time.  Its point - that different research methodologies* have different cultures - was blindingly obvious, but its construction was totally inane, ranging from disorganized to grossly oversimplified to needlessly complex.  Phrases like "the critical point is" appeared over and over, often referring to disparate ideas, while the phrase "to put it simply" appeared in front of one of the most complex formulations in the text.  A single paragraph mentioned algae, bees, and ferrets in an effort to make a point about language, but the point got lost in the bestiary. 

* That is, the hard sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

All of this was prefaced by two inexcusable writing decisions.  The first was a table that shouldn't have been a table. The table charted "dimensions of research cultures" against those cultures, with the horrifying result that some cells contained whole sentences formatted like bad poems.  Note to self: anytime you put a 20 word sentence in a table, try to make the cells wide enough so that you do not to have one word per line.

The other decision - perhaps graver - was an invocation of Ludwig Wittgenstein near the opening of the text.  Wittgenstein, if you don't know, is famous for destabilizing theories of language and meaning with his not-always-clear, fragmentary texts.  He challenged the assumption that words meant the same thing all the time, and ultimately convinced everyone from philosophers to linguists to social scientists that context is really important - perhaps the only thing that is important - to meaning.

Kagan uses Wittgenstein, then, to begin his treatise on the three cultures.  His citation of the philosopher is made to preface his own observation that, within different research paradigms, different words have different meanings.  Fear, for example, means a different thing to an English professor than to a Behavioral Psychologist.

Which is all well and good, of course, if blindingly obvious.  No, the offense here was pointing to Wittgenstein as the divider of the disciplines.  It perhaps did not strike Kagan as supremely ironic that Wittgenstein himself probably would not have been all that excited by the theoretical division of the "three cultures" of modern academic research, that Wittgenstein's ways of thinking were in equal part scientific, social, and humanistic, that his methodology was not easy to categorize by the very system that Kagan found Wittgenstein to be the father of.

Behind my disgust at reading page after page (after page) of the drivel in "The Three Cultures"* was a lurking fear.  You see, this was not something I was reading on my own.  No, this was one of the first pieces that I was meant to read as a PhD student at Stanford University.  In some sense, this was canonical, brilliant, an important work for me to contemplate and consider.

* I prefer to be a generous reader, but in this case I cannot think of a single redeeming quality of the piece.

With even greater horror I turned to my assignment: I must summarize this monster and, what's more, apply its reasoning to my own potential research interests.  The written summary is, I think, a poor piece of pedagogy and assessment as is, but it's doubly hard when the work in question is of such poor quality.

Being the contrarian that I am (nicht diese tone, after all), I decided to write a poem.  I suspected this might get me in trouble, to a degree, but I have always tested academic limits (often to my benefit) throughout my time as a student.  This was not, for example, the first poem I've turned in on a non-poetry assignment, and historically my assessors have appreciated the change of pace, as well as the effort at creative insight.  Some have leveled a warranted "don't do that again" at me, as well, but at least there was respect for the process.

In this case, I borrowed some of Kagan's language, inserted a one-sentence statement of the simple fact - that different research cultures are different, basically - and ended with the observation that "somebody misappropriated the Wittgenstein."  It was, in my opinion, a funny but not inaccurate piece of analytical and synthetic work considering the quite dull material with which I was presented.  It was not a good poem, but it was not meant to be.  Good poems (and perhaps good writing of any kind) need subject matter worth writing about.  Of course I could have, in less time and probably with better results - at least from the Professorial point of view - done a traditional summary, but if I'm going to spend hours reading a piece of drivel, I intend not to bore myself by writing the same kind of drivel in response.*

* It is worth noting that the Kagan piece was poor writing by academic standards as well.  It was flowery and full of needless metaphors.  It was organized so that multiple and unclear ideas populated each sentence.  It was a mess.

In response to my poem (and, for the other reading, an interpolation of the reading into Plato's Meno; another, I thought, interesting and synthetic attempt to summarize the work without driving myself totally mad at the grade-school-book-reportiness of it all), I received a "check-minus" with a note that I did not summarize Kagan, and that I should look at my classmate's example passages for help.

Hence my crisis.  I know how to summarize a piece of writing.  I can write a clear and concise sentence when it is worth writing.  But I am not here to learn how to regurgitate simple information poorly presented.  And yet, increasingly, that is how I feel my classes are designed.  Classes taught ostensibly by critical pedagogues - who believe in student-run classrooms and dialogue and activity - are two-hour lectures.*  Courses in research methodology involve no training in research or methodology, but rather middle-school level assignments that ask primarily that I demonstrate not that I understand the ideas of a text or am striving to make them my own, but rather that I have done the reading, and am able to copy and paste important ideas into equally vapid academic jargon.**

* A fact that would amuse me were it not so sad.  It is a shocking revelation that the people who teach teachers to teach (and teach education researchers to assess good teaching) - that is, School of Education Professors - are such poor teachers.

** Perhaps that is "methodology" to the modern researcher?  If so, academia is in worse trouble than I thought.

Perhaps I was mistaken in thinking that Education research was open to people who value ideas as much as research, people who value creativity, process, and inspiration as much as method and practice.  It is not that I discount research, method, or practice, it is rather that I see so little of the other stuff that I'm beginning to wonder, well, whether wonder is a part of the equation at all.

Again, I don't really care about grades.  I could get a check-double-minus or a D or whatever and that wouldn't bother me.  No, what bothers me is that the feedback I received misses the point entirely.  It bothers me that the conversation is one way.  That the pedagogy is so deeply flawed.  That the underlying philosophy is so undemocratic.  That the value system is so blindly accepted that it cannot see that, maybe, a whimsical, irreverent, and sarcastic spark might have merit beyond "not being a summary."  Of course it wasn't a summary; it was a condemnation.

If a summary had been worth writing, I would have written one.  Give me an assignment worth doing, an article worth reading, a conversation to have (instead of a lecture to attend to), and I will produce high quality work.*  Give me a class worth taking - do not waste my time for three hours at a time with your pontificating and your holier-than-thou elitism (tenure alone does not make you interesting).  I, too, am an intellectual.  I, too, love ideas, perhaps more than you would believe.  I, too, can speak and listen.  I, in my own way, am well-read.  I have stood in front of students and shut myself up so that they might speak, and it was wondrous.  Yet, if no such thing can happen even here, at Stanford University, in a PhD program, in Education, can we hope for it to happen anywhere else?

* I might as well say the same for any and every student, and yet this lesson learned so well in research has not been learned in practice even by the very researchers who teach it.

It is not my assignment that makes me wonder about all of this.  That is but a small and ultimately meaningless symptom of a much deeper problem.  Nevertheless, it is an indicative example of the bigger picture: a case in which, it now seems obvious to me, the result was destined both because of how I was inevitably to respond to the assignment, and how the assignment, so to speak, was going to respond back to me.  And so the deeper culture becomes the question, and leaves me with an exhortation.

Instead of demanding that I fit into your narrow boxes, academia, you would do well to invite and celebrate your radicals, your creative thinkers, your irreverent teachers, your trouble-makers.  I know that UCSD does, and yet I chose Stanford, in part, because I believed that it did as well.  Now I'm not so sure.