Seagoats

(forewarning: if you're not into astrology or think its a bunch of bullshit because your puny mind can't comprehend the possibility of its reality then you should stop reading now and go do something else. If you are naive (or arrogant) enough to think that you can rule out its possibility because of some kind of factual analysis of this and that then I hate to inform you but you are in possession of the brutal kind of primitive consciousness which limits its understanding of the world in which it lives to things which it can grasp and know by entrapping them in the narrow confines of its own understanding. Really. Go do something else.)

Everyone that really knows me knows I'm really (really really) into astrology; its part of a pathological condition I bear that compels me to need to find patterns in things, everything to be specific. It's not a particularly comforting pathological behavior, one that might bring some kind of satisfaction or comfort or feeling of control like other varieties of compulsive behaviors like cleaning or grooming or having everything in your house perfect. Mine is a compulsion that can be unsettling. Patterns can be disturbing. Maybe my pattern-finding is an attempt to understand and give meaning to existence. Compulsion's answer to existential crisis.

In astrology every zodiac sign has a glyph, a mascot. Most of them are straightforward in their symbology: impatient aries the ram; stubborn, plodding taurus the bull; these are symbols whose meaning the mind grasps intuitively. The symbol for my own sign, Capricorn, has always stumped me though. The Seagoat. What in the hell is a freaking Seagoat? All of the other symbols of the zodiac are tangible things which exist, can be seen and touched in creation. Pisces the two fish swimming in opposite directions, one swimming toward the world and the other swimming away from it. Aquarius the water-bearer. Sagittarius the archer. The scorpion. The scales. The crab. The twins. So just where in the hell does that leave the seagoat? Ten years at least I've been thinking about this. Ten years.

Tonight I saw a movie and as I was walking to my car in the rain afterward, it finally hit me and made me laugh at myself. Symbols are things that reveal innate qualities in the things which they represent; things whose representations reveal something about their nature, right...? I've always attacked the problem in the straightforward manner that I would with any other symbol: trying to decipher its meaning by parsing the essence of the symbol's qualities. But tonight I finally realized that this line of thinking has always been a dead-end because I don't know what a Seagoat is to begin with. So I always thought about it for half-a-second and then dismissed the symbol itself as non-sensical instead of reading a deeper meaning into its lack of sense. I realized that to find its meaning I have to work backwards, in a sense, and think about the qualities of the thing itself BEFORE understanding the meaning of the symbol. In that sense the Seagoat is the anti-symbol. How appropriate in its irony for the contrary capricorn.

So tonight I worked backwards and thought about what astrology believes a capricorn to be. First off, our ruling planet is Saturn. I saw a painting called "Saturn Eats His Young" in the Prado museum in Madrid two times in my life; once when I was a kid and it stood out in my mind so much that years later in my twenties when I went again I had to make a bee-line to go see if it was really real. It's brutal and horrifying and was painted during Goya's period of insanity when he was locked up in a medieval loony bin. In astrology Saturn is the planet of limitation; it rules things which are inherently thwarted. Think dog with three legs. Linda Goodman calls Saturn the karmic accountant; he comes along after long intervals (it takes Saturn 28 Earth-years to orbit the sun) to weigh ones deeds, naughty and nice, and dole out one's destiny. But out of all this weighing and calculation comes transformation and opportunity (if one is inclined to leave one's mind open to the possibility of transformation and opportunity in the face of loss). And if one is dis-inclined... well, there's always next time. But like any good bean-counter will tell you, there's always some interest to be paid when the bill finally comes.

Most people think Capricorns are sturdy, competent, ambitious, and prepared. Being one myself, I also think about Saturn/Capricorn as tenacious, making something out of nothing... about loss and lack of opportunity; but more importantly, about the opportunity IN loss. That's when the lightbulb went on: the surefooted goats' means of survival is its ability to climb the kind of sheer mountainsides that other creatures would prefer to walk around. It's capacity for survival is tied to its ability to do things the hard way; and the only way to get things done the hard way is carefully. Methodically. I was surfing in Kauai a couple years ago and saw a pack of goats literally run right up a huge vertical crumbling cliff. But you take one of those creatures and toss it in the ocean and you have taken away the only reason it still survives on this planet. A Seagoat. A goat in the ocean. Swimming. Of course.