Letter to Parents:

Let's get this straight once and for all:

You need me more than I need you. You need me to take care of your pets, your house, and even yourselves. You have no friends. And you try to blame me for this and delude yourselves that I am in a similar situation. Every day my life is getting better and so far you have only rejoiced when I was miserable and tried to sabotage me when I was successful. You can't even admit that I have been successful; you know pitifully little about me and presume pitifully more. I will no longer accommodate your prejudices trying to impress you. You are awful people and if you want to change that and feel less lonely about yourselves then you can begin by cutting the bull-shit and treating me on my own terms as an adult. I am all ready doing you a huge favour and you behave like ungrateful children. Begin by showing some unconditional love, and then MAY be you'll get some in exchange. I can't promise it, because that would be conditional. And understand that I deliberately leave you out of my life because you have all ways tried to leech off of my success and worsen my failure.

This is all true because it is all I've known since I was born. You can delude yourselves that you can have your own slave that you get to get angry at who does not talk back and is molded in your image. But I am twenty-five and totally self-responsible. This stops now. Take responsibility for others' boundaries and you might learn some thing. Take responsibility for yourselves as parents. Expect nothing in return; this was YOUR decision not mine.

Do NOT text me. I will text you if I need you. Be ready for it, follow through, and then I will believe you care. I don't need any thing material for Christmas so much as I need parents who can treat me as a rational adult and behave rational towards me. It was never my responsibility to meet your arbitrary standards for acceptance, at the expense of my own potentialities. It was YOUR responsibility to accept me in whatever I chose to be. If I think you are awful parents, you are awful parents. If you raised me wrong and left me bitter, that is your doing and no way to escape that. Thankfully MOST people treat me with respect so I like most people. But I would not tolerate abuse from any one. I got home on my own yesterday. If you cared you would be happy to see me in the morning and content to see that I was happy. So quit using me. YOUR behaviour is inadequate. You never treated me as an equal, despite my being your child, so don't start talking to me now about what is or isn't fair. If it's not helping me: it's not fair.

Merry Christmas.
Dmytri.

Dream A.

12-12-2016. Monday.

 

Dream A.

 

The dream was set in a variety of locations. Its progression was practically indiscernable from the conversations of the prior night (Sunday). It was quick-witted and fast-paced, breaking new ground in a variety of familiar places. For instance, the blame game was still operating, if memory serves, yet I surely would have fled the island of its operation. Most noteworthy was that the networking game, which had all ways been held on an elaborate city-wide playground comprised of old vessels (“tiny vessels”, as per the D.C.F.C. song) remodeled to be houses, was an arena that I took successfully by storm. It was reaching a fever pitch and I was at the head of my particular team, though of course I was fundamentally a renegade. This symbol of course represents the Rancho Penasquitos drug culture, particularly the capillary of the drug trade that runs through Carmel Mountain I.A.L. Last night was the night I hung out with Mariah, Derek, and that Irish fellow.

 

Love, romance, betrayal and vengeance oversaw the proceedings in very Scorpio Romantic fashion, with all the Venutian stylings of a Libra or a Taurus.

 

I am thankful at present for my return to Dreamland, in the sense that I have decided to begin this dream record again. Remind me that any one who diverts my attention from its sanctity is bad news.

 

The dream took me to a distant isle where again I had a wife and probably children. We did our best to keep the war at bay. I wonder if C[lever] was in it in form. She certainly hung over it in spirit.

 

Our culture I.A.L. is dominated by the will to power. Yet the Unconscious offers love, compassion, and spiritual redemption. Debaters manipulate words to their credit and then berate philosophy as comparable to their own depravity. Yet mystics understand what the words are meant to refer to: the divine love that manifests in greater subtlety and variety than power ever could, for all its fiery vainglory.

 

Music was central thematically to the dream. I played a variety of instruments in increasingly more luxurious, if still fundamentally humble, venues. Behold the House of Career. What is interesting to note is that most of the intellectual abstraction I experienced (thought IS experience) was set in the Music Rehearsal Hall. (I all most pictured an actual hall when I repeated that pretentious term.) This mirrors the veritable fact that my waking life has put me in the company of those peers for whom thought is musical, expressed in either consonance or dissonance rather than “sense or nonsense”.

 

It would all ways puzzle me that people complained of either music or life when it did not “make sense” to them.

 

Were it not for the mirror, the fact would remain. I would simply have no metaphor to reflect upon.

 

Upon reflection, I am happy. Angst does not need to sadden me so much as it did at first upon sitting down to write this.

 

I am seated before the Christmas display on Avenida Rorras.

 

Dm.A.A.

Public Letter to Rafael Allen Romasanta III:

Despite its abbreviation and the fact that it's a finger pointing, your being in Oklahoma doesn't make a point nor render any thing that happened/that you did OK. That being said, I still will hold you accountable for the Secret of the Golden Flower. You were responsible for my personal belongings, as I could not pick them up from you without encouraging you by so doing to leave without proper notice to the Debate coaches, whose jobs you endangered by choosing to leave any way. You all so got Daniel Mendez into a lot of trouble then, and so it looms ironical that he is your facebook "friend" and not mine. But that is peripheral. You never lent me any of your books on Jung, despite a common interest in his work. Yet far from honoring my own possessions you dispossessed me of that volume, which falls under Jungian literature. Ergo I feel entitled to its return. Johanna offered to mail to me the book of Rilke's poetry that I'd lent to her. You can likewise purchase an other copy of the Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Richard Wilhelm with a section by Jung, and mail it to my address. This seems in order, since you have for a long time had access to a source of money that you did not have to work for (and nor did the provider of that money), and besides as a literature major books have never been hard enough for you to come by. I've been lenient with you. Today I was reminded of an elderly Scorpio woman whom I'd met at a horse race who insisted that I should drive to your home in Temecula and show up to your door to get my belongings back. But we are past that. She all so pointed out that Scorpios come in three varieties and that plenty wind up in a dark place. This latter fact I'd known for a long time, but I am past the point of trying to save people like you or Kresten. I am simply contented to have met Scorpios of the magnanimous variety; you and Kresten are of course of the lesser breed. so be it. I got my old Casio back from him recently, and he stills owes me for three of my books which he had "lost", and plenty of other belongings. Don't think that I'll make the same mistake twice: nothing that you say can really sway me. I learned the first time, from my tragedy with Kresten. No degree of pettiness upon your part can undo the fact that I'd extricated myself from your company long before it could have done the same sort of damage as his had done. I have no regrets. I apologise for nothing. I know how to deal with you now. You all ways demand leverage. So here is mine: I am thankful that you have a reputation. I have none. You can see that. I have nothing to lose. Do good by me, within reasonable limits, and I shall not feel inclined to divulge what I know about you. I would not call this blackmailing, and I do not approve of the degenerate term "snitching". I simply answer to a power higher than yours, and all ways have: the Truth. Had I known its merit earlier I would have saved my self and plenty people that I loved a lot of pain, trouble, heartache, confusion, delusion, misunderstanding, damage, trauma, and disappointment. People are fragile and you must know that in this lifetime you shall not take advantage of their fragility. I trusted you with my heart and you only used what I confided in you against me. You never had the same trust in me, so I cannot be accused of violating it. You were only petty and controlling. But I am free of your controlling pettiness now. And distrust notwithstanding I will not hesitate for Truth to be heard if I do not gain some closure and affirmation of your desire to reform. If indecency persists, I cannot be blamed that it becomes evident to the general public. Though I pray it does not come to that. Happy Holidays. Dmytri A.A

A Tale of Agency:

A Tale of Agency:

I some times wonder about whether or not every one here knows about me and all my exploits. The awkward reactions. I am probably bringing up things they had never thought about before. Tough questions. And then my paranoiac mind fills in the details. Some one found the love note I slipped into your tip jar. It’s hardly the sort of spontaneous gesture of affection that contemporary society smiles upon, but then is “society” not a projection of my most recently conditioned cynicism?

I suppose a natural, thirsting romantic would appreciate a secret admirer more than any one else would. It would be the dream-come-true that you have all ways wanted. You have all ways pretended that your boyfriend at any given moment might live up to your expectations. But I see it in your eyes: the discontent, the haze that signifies that you are holding back from every thing that you would never tell any one, but that you are secretly dreaming of a better life, and planning a way to turn your present life into that.

Why not yield to me? I feel, distance as you’ve kept me at, and as much as convention might bar me, that I’ve known you through several lifetimes. And having expected this fortuitous meeting for the past year, far from filling me with doubts as regard the prospect of what psychologists call confirmation bias (the superstition that wanting some thing fervently would predispose one’s self to delusion when one believes one’s self to have found it), I feel more certain of this than I have ever felt certain of any thing. The fact is that, intellect intact, I feel that we can pull this off. Why? Because you have lived up to all of my expectations, save for one, and even that one I am uncertain of: that you do not fervently stalk me to the degree that I stalk you. And yet I don’t imagine such daring deviance, which fills my nerves with fire at each long, laborious walk to this coffee house, and that transmutes as though by some alchemical magick to raw nerve and confidence along the triumphant walk back, would estrange you or lie “beneath you”. As the Taoists spoke sagely: “The Way seeks the lowest level, the one that human beings abhor”. And just as surely as we slip beneath the radar of conventional consciousness, my naïve and clumsy gestures notwithstanding, so it shall be that we soar above the binding laws of convention and instituted status quo.

My final point in my neurotic self-defense is this: that had I not known that this day some day would come, I would all ways FEEL this primordial love that culture, in all its attempts to represent it and then to bastardise the representation, can never touch or besmirch, that psychology cannot reduce and that philosophy cannot deconstruct. All generic and cliché ideas come from SOME place. Human beings are NOT predisposed tragically towards disappointment; it is rather that they envy, covet, and chase what they are not yet ready for.

I love you, Clever Field of Barley on the Hill. If I did not know this day would come, I would allow you to be swept away under the raw force of socially organized power, the most brutal wilderness to lose one’s guiding star within. In that sense, that the positive part of culture has helped me to combat the negative, culture acts as a set of water-wings. I shall not dare to let them turn to weights when it comes time to truly fly. I want YOU to fly with me, Clever. I cannot imagine joy without you.

Dmytri A.A.

A Tale of Exploitation:

I suppose it’s easy for the Rationalists to dismiss. According to the theory of confirmation bias, the moment that I ‘choose’ to believe that I had a bad childhood I will focus in on all the negative times and ignore all of the positives. But that is itself a pre-

Judiced rationalization. For instance, it PRESUMES that there even WERE good times, or that I need to be reminded of them should my mindset grow too negative, or that the good times all ways and invariably balance out the bad, and that this happens for EVERY one, but that either we all go through the same things but at different times, or those of us who wind up in a rutt – a lesser station in life – do so by some ‘fault’ of their own:

Either ‘imbalanced chemistry’ or the even murkier modern myth of ‘personal choice’. The TRUTH is that my mind does not need to be reminded to perform this set of exercises. With Libra in my House of Self, it’s done this my entire life. And that is no foregone conclusion; this is not the first time that I’ve noticed that I’ve all ways striven to ‘balance’ my inner world as my whole interpersonal world fell apart around me. Nor is it the first time that I’ve noticed that my life is one that I’ve been living backwards: that my childhood was a sort of project I’d intended to ‘complete’ within my adulthood, and that now that I’m older I am trying to learn how to be a kid. Plenty of times I’ve rationalized that my childhood was not so bad, even saying once after I’d finished reading Waiting for Godot:

‘My life has been a happy one. Yes:

There was some oppression. But I have survived. And now I’m good.’

I still remember where I was when those exact words crossed my mind. And only now I realise I plagiarized them from a Marxist lecture.

But part of it’s true: I was oppressed.

The fact that my own thoughts were taken from a lecture further proves my point:

My entire life, I’d had no life.

There is some thing about the Truth that has a way of upsetting our attempts to level rationally with our peers. It’s not politically correct, nor is it ‘fair and balanced’ as we (or SOME of us) would like to be. A revelation is accompanied by an extremely BIASED emotion. But because it is begotten by the Truth, this feeling is a truthful one, and so one must conclude then that the Truth is Biased. This is no foregone conclusion, even if the reasoning for Truth sounds circular to tin ears.

One cannot ethically dismiss the possibility of such a Truth, and it alone musters the Deep Emotions up against the (dated) monarchy of Reason.

All ways my attempts to see the bright side offered only fleeting, insecure, and superficial relief. The Truth now is that each memory of joy that I can conjure in my desperation is swiftly over-shadowed by a memory whose pain consumes its pleasure. One would expect (and really hope) that every grim recollection would, by the same token, have a silver lining.

But that is not so; I would have to contrive it, as I all ways did to cope.

It’s not as though all human life is doomed to failure.

Plenty people my age do not seem to think so, and I’m getting to the point that I no longer laugh at them for their naïveté, nor even envy them for their blissful abandon. I simply, calmly, but without that Libran pretense, rather with the heartfelt equanimity of a Zen master, come to accept the fact that my peers, for the most part, had some thing I never did: a childhood. Even those who had a miserable childhood still can say that they were CHILDREN. They were kids. But I could not afford that privilege.

My whole life, up until the last few years, I’ve had to be the Grown-up. And that is a fact that no swindling pretense can extricate from my Heart.

When I first realized this there was an intervention. I broke down. My ex’s Mother had manipulated my own into taking me to the Mental Hospital (a sort of cozy, passive-aggressive version of an Asylum, as befit their family’s character) that the former worked at. When Father tried to set my old Casio keyboard ‘straight’, for it was crooked (to his mind) upon its stand, I flipped out. I meant no harm to a soul. It was purely aesthetical.

I simply began to re-

Arrange the layout of my whole bedroom. The bed became diagonal. My keyboard too.

My parents did not bother once to ask me what was wrong. They never had; it was all ways a ploy my Mother used to learn how bad my grades were, even when I was in Middle School and got no worse than B’s, and on occasion.

So I went to the Hospital gladly.

It was like being in my ex’s house again, and she had been the closest thing I’d ever known then to an alma mater.*

*‘Nurturing mother’.

I was surprised to learn it, nonetheless, and for much the same reason, that my ex’s mother had ‘successfully’ won my own mother’s favour.

They were just so diametrically opposed: Ally’s mom and my own were archetypal opposites, and Ally and I had agreed.

Yet Ally would no longer speak to me, so I never could figure it out.

I think that I understand it now, though: Ally’s mom and mine had common goals. The former did not care about me, but that I keep away from her daughter. The latter did not care about me either, but just that I do not tarnish the family’s reputation.

So a compromise was reached.

Where was I? I was playing with tiny coloured index cards within my bedroom, trying to discover the mysteries of Chi. Having become frustrated with women, I’d decided to join a cult. It would take me some time to get out of it. The leader’s books, still published post-humously even decades after his death (I think decades, definitely years) continue to peer at me each time I pass the New Age section of the local Barnes and Noble.

This is not neurotic projection, but poetic personification. Even the O’s in his damned name look like blank, staring eyes.

I could continue to elaborate, but I forego that burden.

My point has been made, I am exhausted, and we are past the point that any body sensible would dismiss my exhaustion.

Yes: to speak of ‘sensibility’ seems all so to be hyper-rational.

But it is thankfully only to speak from experience. I only retain my rationalist habits be-

Cause, until recently, I did not know yet from EXPERIENCE how sensible people can be. Lo and behold! It is a virtue that tends to be in direct proportion to Kindness, and often it is in inverse proportion to condescension, at least where the object of con-

Descension would be me.

Does this make me biased in favour of my fans? Hardly.

It simply indicates that, as an empath, I can tell which critics are emotionally unstable and which ones are stable. And the stable ones I hesitate to call ‘critics’.

I do not care how astrology works.

I did not write this as an ‘essay’ to be published. That I’d even think of it that way, and that the audience intended would be scientific positivists,

Only underscores the tyranny I lived under throughout my formative years, as far as my creativity had been concerned.

It is sufficient to say, with childlike abandon: that it DOES work. I have Known of its practitioners to be beneficent and healing people,

Even if I had to come to terms with their Humanity and take back a few shadows in my Self to get to that point.

I have Cancer in my Tenth House. This is not a growth of cells.

It is an astrological symbol referred to as ‘the Crab’. And it is every bit as tragic as the medical Cancer. The trick in both cases is to spot it early.

My whole life has been reversed. By this I do not mean a recent change. I mean that since the day and hour of my birth I’ve had to deal with adult pressures that only an adult can be expected to handle. That boundary – betwixt the adult and the child – was violated. And I feel like Lao Tzu, the Taoist sage whose name means literally ‘Old Boy’, who was Rumoured to have been 600 years old when he was born into his most historical re-

Incarnation. And like Merlin,

I age backwards. I paid MY dues early. I intend to party the rest of the way. This is not the first time I have said this. My only regret is that I did not adhere to this ethos with more valour and rigour. I won’t lie: Having fun

(for me, at least) is HARD.

Only a twelfth of the population will have lived through what I’ve lived through. Just as the theory of evolution suggests that things like Dogs, Cats, and Humans are the work of millions of years of natural mistakes, so it is that thousands of years of studying individual case histories have produced our present and incorrigible body of Astrological fact. Anecdotal evidence is hard to dismiss when every body has a story, it gets harder to dismiss when every story’s different, and it becomes impossible to dismiss when the Stories follow trends. Nor is it that all of the stories offered by Astrology apply to everyone.

This naïve reduction is an absurd inflation, for were that so then no one would judge of any one, and no one would help any one. The rationalist will contend that these are but two different ways of coping,

And that so long as there’s a choice there is no reason to eliminate either completely; one can simply CHOOSE to ‘deal with’ one’s own life and others either by condemnation or commiseration. Yet such a choice would be tragically arbitrary to make, like voting in a bad election. It eliminates the third party: Empathy.

By avenue and grace of the Empathic Gift, one can Feel one’s way into an other’s pain. Granted that one remembers one’s own identity in the process, one will be stricken by just how ALIEN the suffering of others is to one’s own. We do NOT all go through the same trials. And some of us DO suffer more than others, or at least we suffer less as the result of our own foibles. To take any more blame upon ourselves would be to snap under the weight and strain of others’ foibles.

And that’s a mistake so tragic that it would be cruel to make those others (in this case, my parents) face the shame of it, when I am no longer AROUND to blame them, but the Truth persists as advocate for me.

Those of us who have lived with a Tenth House Placement in Cancer have spent our whole lives at Sea gazing out for a lighthouse in the night-time myst, the night being a premature adulthood in a life whose morning and day we had only barely glimpsed.

When I find that light, in the form of a beautiful, motherly astrologer telling me it’s OKAY, and that she UNDERSTANDS, we’ve found our birth-right, and that lighthouse carries all the light of Truth and all the warmth of Love. If YOU would disagree, Know that you disagree from a position of privilege.

I am only thankful that I found this sanctuary no later than I did. And that some of the repairs that all ways were in order have all ready been underway.

This was not the first Sign to appear.

DM.A.A.

A Tale of Pretension:

A Tale of Pretension:

All of my peers, my self included, were born with Capricorn in their North Node. Ours was a journey to be dispossessed of the entanglements of home and to be thrust headlong into what my best friend in high school called (with great presumption and cliché) “the cold, adult world.”

It was not that the adult world was objectively cold, even in the intersubjective sense of sterility, objectivity, and narcissistic apathy. All of that was a projection. It was rather that we all learned quickly that it would not live up to our expectations; WE would have to tell the WORLD who’s boss, and that would have to start by playing the game of life by its rules, and only after having sold out to the system could we HOPE to buy your souls back and to recreate the system in the image of our childhood fantasies. The world could not be EXPECTED to be a beneficent boss, but it WAS the boss, so we had to appeal to it just long enough to beat it at its game. And we could not do so by acting like the boss from the beginning.

I barely keep in touch now with my graduating class. I think oft on the song by John Mayer, “No Such Thing”, wherein he professes that there is no such thing as the Real World, [but] just a lie you have to rise above. It is not unlike the song “Real World” by Matchbox Twenty, wherein Rob Thomas wishes that the real world would just stop hassling him. I would listen to that song over and over on my best friend’s iPod on a bus ride to a Marching Band tournament. He never understood why I liked that band so much, even though they WERE on HIS iPod.

In that song by John Mayer,  though: he sings lightly, all most talkingly, about how he wants to run through the halls of his high school and scream at the top of his lungs. He wants to bust down the double-doors of his ten-year reunion, and as he stands on these tables before you you will know what all this time was for. (Sorry for spoiling the ending.)

That was how I envisioned my ten-year reunion, approximately. I just did not expect that so few of my peers would share that sentiment. The sounds of my close pals mocking John Mayer’s voice slurring “Am I living it right?” on “Why, Georgia, Why?” apparently did not echo into the halls of my discretion.

My peers grew up to be largely what my best friend would have called “pretentious douchebags”. There is a sort of Satanic trap underlying people whose life purpose is material competence. It is no wonder that in the Christian religion Capricorn, the Goat, ruled by Saturn (“Satan” in Hebrew), the Fallen God of Law and the archetype of Cardinal Earth, is vilified as the antithesis of all that Jesus Christ had come to teach. Jesus was of course the principal mystic of the Age of Pisces. As Pisces was my Sun sign (I say now in case you have not yet surmised), this set me somewhat against the rational arrogance of the Goat, preferring the matriarchal moralism of the Crab in my South Node.

There is a mire of arrogance that haunts my peers now. I call it a mire because once caught one has trouble getting out. Such extrication requires a put-down that my water-sign tendencies tend away from (I never had much Scorpio in my chart.), and if I try to muster such condescension I am met with the EXPERTS in one-upmanship (an other word that my best friend enjoyed because the thing it signified he so despised).

It begins with innocence. I approach an old friend seeking mental clarity. (we both are, though the old friend might deny it.) He then does not hesitate to classify whatever it is that I’m “interested in” (using for healing) as one of a number of consumer preferences that he is familiar with but politely impartial towards. Then I try to expose him, compelling him to LOOSEN UP A BIT by acting silly and evasive. So he lets the proverbial claws out, dismisses all my “interests” outright, as though the world needed to know what “true taste” is, and withdraws coldly. Why is this a mire? Because in the process I am left accused of being “pseudo-intellectual”, “pretentious”, and “immature” by the very people who have seemed, to my mind, now not to have aged a day since they were in the seventh grade, calling video games that did not convey their notion of “reality” by that old, unacademic name of “gay”.

And how am I to escape the accusation, innocence intact?

The truth is that I’ve all ways known that there was more to life.

My first friend in the class of 2011 (my own class being-2009) was a Gemini. So was his South Node, as well as was so for the rest of his peers. He initiated me into his peer group; under the Trojan Horse that we were both born Russian we became friends, though the mystical causes that underlay this were totally lost to us.

The Class of 2011 has therefore as its North Node Sagittarius. It would be a while before these traits would show; they were two years younger than I, so they were not yet at the point that all my peers were at: the test of adulthood, so to speak. So it must have been the freedom-loving, easygoing, airy Gemini tendency that I so loved and craved covetously in those people. That of course explains the fact that my first key into the Gates had been born with a Gemini Sun Sign.

Later, it would be the wild and careless, but yet fundamentally well-meaning, loyal Sagittarian North Node that piqued my interest. These people praised me for my being-philosophical; I could teach them how to become the optimystical intellectuals that they were meant-to-Be. This stunned me. I thought very little of my self. But then: that’s all that I knew growing up. My parents were aloof and held me only to their own standards, which proved in later years to have been nearly totally unphilosophical. My peers were even worse. They looked at me with a look that I recognize to this day in Capricorns, for it only appears in them: a sort of condescending pity, as though I protested some thing that could never change, and even if it could change it would be of no greater consequence.

My generation loved J.D. Salinger. They did not mourn his death so much as they craved its fruits. He had been holding out on us. It is remarkable how like-a-Salinger-character they all became.

But I was different.

I was never Helen Silsburn, Rhea Fedder, Lane Coutell, or even Holden Caulfield. At most I was Seymour Glass. Yet I am still alive, and unmarried. I have yet to reach thirty-five, but I don’t doubt much that I shall.

My life has NOT been a game played by the rules, as Holden’s History professor had insisted.

I was born with Capricorn in my Fourth House.

And Cancer in my Midheaven.

And this changed everything.

DM.A.A.

A Tale of Tyranny:

The Scorpio archetype is often the least readily understood, most often misunderstood, and most tragically understood sign of the Western Zodiac. Its function primarily is the preservation of Justice for the downtrodden. Suppose that a child is born to an inattentive and dogmatic father. The father, reeking of privilege and condescension, casts out all his children to fend for themselves, for he has no further need for them. Hitherto his other children were forced into servitude, and their lingering “debt” to him for his “kindness” bound them to a path that barred the way to charity. So it was that MOST of the outcast children perished in agony whilst the tyrant enjoyed the complacent boredom of privilege. But one survived. And that was the Scorpion. Scorpio is the outcast and rejected child that grew up on its own in the wilderness. It learned the law of the land, not the law of the kingdom. It had no education in civilized life, but was raised by wolves, an outcast to both its own kind and its foster parents, a perpetual alien to the world of Intersubjective Relationship.

Scorpio’s skills in fending for its self at all costs imbibed it with the notion that all life is a game of zero sum. Survival is for the fittest and the perpetuation of the predator is all ways at the expense of the prey. Friendships were neither entitlements nor sources of amusement, except when the weaknesses of friends became cause for amusement, even then at the expense of the amusing. Friends were resources to serve the Utilitarian purposes of the Quest, to be protected jealously only insofar as they might be put to use. At times sacrifices had to be made, and so Scorpio cast off its weaker friends and found stronger ones to fill the place. At times even the stronger friends had to be challenged and robbed. All friends were potential enemies, and enemies had to be kept closer than friends could ever be. A friend of strong but generous character was to be exploited; its generosity was its weakness, and its strength was its utility. The outcast child of a King would not be “fooled” by generosity, for the King had only ever been generous so far as it would privilege his preferences. Generosity was the instrument of Privilege to use towards the ends of Injustice. Justice was only to be found in the wilderness.

I have spoken of a Quest. This Quest’s purpose was Justice. To be redeemed, to validate its existence, Scorpio had to work its way back into the Kingdom. Its entry went largely unnoticed, though rumour of a creeping shadow or a band of thieves grew swiftly. Scorpio infiltrates the Kingdom of its slighted birth by avenue of the catacombs: the network of sewers and burial sites that the Royals do not wish to see. (This is the story of Jak and Daxter in Jak Three.) It is a cat burglar that climbs up the fire escape ladders to reach the rooftops and that sets up a network of spies to infiltrate the palace, as in Sly Cooper. Finally it comes to the throne of the King, who does not remember it. The King asks: “Who are you?” and the Scorpio replies: “I am your outcast child. You have violated me. Your irresponsible activities of privilege have wound me up in this wretched state, clawing for survival. And I watched you live in privilege. Now I shall collect what is owed to me.”

So the King is overthrown, the outcast avenged, the children redeemed, and Order and Prosperity restored under the banner of Justice.

Of course we who have had the privilege of living in the City know that this entire account is one-sided, and as Jung attests: one-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism. As our philosophers keenly remind us: Romanticism begets Fascism. Kierkegaard insists that all passions burn to their own destruction. So it is that, like Anakin Skywalker, and plenty of anti-heroes before him for that matter, Scorpio is inclined to become an agent of the very force that it had been born to vanquish. And, true to form, it will not know this, for it has not enjoyed the privilege of our education. When it receives information it grows combative, for it is clever enough to deconstruct any narrative. It is not yet wise enough to see its self in a mirror as it repeats the karmic history of the human race even as it scoffs nervously at the thought that any one could outsmart it. Fate outsmarts it; its adversaries are mere messengers of fate for the tragic anti-hero.

Truly, our privilege is not a privilege but a right, and our right is our power, our power our responsibility. When the Greeks eliminated the “right to fail” they rose above the barbarians. But the Scorpio will only scoff at such sophistication, reminding us that “barbarian” was a Greek invention, as though to make us forget of the horrors that that word had properly signified. The slighted outcast of the Kingdom will retort by drawing our attention to Daemonides and the cruelty of sophistication, as Vonnegut does in his books. Yet when has any one of us seen brutality in the kingdom such as has been the work of a Scorpio? Leo inflicts pain out of its ignorance. Scorpio inflicts pain on purpose. And every Scorpio fears vampires moreso than Zombies, for the weak-minded evil can be controlled, its moral weakness an added convenience. A strong-minded evil is not only a veritable adversary but a Black Mirror that the well-meaning public cannot cloud in all their appraisal of the Scorpion’s “beneficent” agency.

Let’s return to the present day, then.

The Scorpio’s intent is of course to raze the Kingdom to the ground and to establish a wilderness. When the Scorpio man does not wish to work, for all avenues represent the agency of the King, he becomes a radical Marxist, daily reminding his friends that life is a matter of subjective, relative fact, that freedom lies outside the walls of the city, that morality varies from class to class, that nothing can be possessed and nothing is required, and that to subordinate one’s self to servitude is to enslave all of one’s peers by example. His seemingly easygoing spirit draws in the downtrodden, humble souls who find their disillusionment under the supervision of a monarchical and absurdly tyrannical and arbitrary “boss”. Yet even in his sloth the Scorpion plants the seeds of a later hegemony. It is EASY for him to say that the boss’s oppression is necessary; he has never HAD one. He can pretend towards having been oppressed by the system and by his family, for those of his peers who have known such injustice would gladly open their hearts to him. Their affect predates their intellect in so triggering a matter, and it is long before they realise the startling fact that he had only ever been a “victim” of his own frivolous misadventures, and that he was never met with the prolonged cruelty or serious threats that they had to labour through. But by that point he has all ready accused THEM of having been false victims, so what can they say to retort? He has cheated them of their revelation before a jury of their peers, for long before they realized that his victimhood was a show he convinced the hard-nosed realists that victimhood is self-imposed and the bleeding-hearts that HE has been victimized by the people that were in fact his own prey. He might fear reproof eventually, that his prey will catch up with him, but shelter is in the arrogance of the survivor, for he has never known an adversary who is more prone to recover and avenge than himself. The only evil he fears is in the mirror.

What he obscures by brutish and unbelievable dishonesty is the simple fact that pain is not necessary. His own pain was not NECESSARY, except towards the ends of his own survival. On the WHOLE, his entire condition was a tragic error on the part of the King, so it was never justified. But having established himself as his only end he saw pain as a virtue, and so it would be a blessing to those that he would have to hurt in order to perpetuate the only value he had: himself.

Underneath the lie is the truth that he should have admitted to begin with: that it was IGNORANCE that created pain. That it was PRIVILEGE, that it was PREFERENCE, and that it was COMPLACENCY that all conspired to oppress. That we are not all victims in this life whose goal is to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. (As Watts reminds us, this is traditionally an expression for the impossible and idiotically futile.) A victim by necessity requires an oppressor, and it is either the Ignorance or the AMBIVALENCE of the parasite that makes possible the pain of the host. When the Scorpion dismisses the sufferings of his friends, humiliating them by praising their bullies, he obscures this fact. He himself becomes-bully, and then by playing the role of a victim he obscures the fact of bullying once more. Finally the true victims recognize him for a fake, once they have moved past the shock and disbelief that any “person” could be so cruel as to use them in their innocence. Until then they cannot be brought to believe it, even as they criticize him daily for his villainy and he rages against them for their own “oppression” of his appetites. Yet his appetites are all ways parasitic. He depends entirely upon the kindness of jaded and broken people who can, at least for some short time, be made to feel, against all Reason, that he is every bit as jaded and broken as they are. He can never reciprocate their kindness, and so he pretends towards an injustice in the relationship, early on, and holds them in his illusory debt until he takes from them, by force of cunning, and often by force of law or plain physical aggression, more than they can afford. THEIR lives become secondary at that point, even in their own EXPERIENCE, to HIS. And at that point his existence is seen to be an error, his birth the mistake of the King but his survival the mistake of his own. And yet by then it becomes seemingly too late to stop him, for he has all ready set up a network of his peers who would gladly act as jury in a Kangaroo Court, believing fervently that their proprietor is innocent and that his adversary is guilty.

So it is that when the Scorpio man FINALLY gets a job it is not long before he turns from Marxism to the opposite extreme: Fascism. The spirit of vengeance permeates this transformation as much as any other, poisoning his every word. If HE, the central purpose of existence, must be made to suffer in servitude (though of course by his own device and for his own purposes, for he was never in fact a victim and suffered little in the way of “coercion”, save for negligible peer pressure) then so must ALL men. The very friend he had had who had to answer back then to a “boss” must NOW answer to the SCORPIO. For if the “boss” was necessary, is not the pressure of one’s peers?

Of course, I was that friend. It evidences my point that I refer to myself so late and so secondarily in this piece, as though my only function was to be the friend and tool of a narcissistic manipulator. As much as it pains me to admit, I become more relieved by the moment. If any doubt is cast upon my own victimhood it is only because the account its self comes from such a position of renewed strength now that any thought of my becoming a “victim” again would be ridiculous. And so one might wonder if I was ever a victim to begin with.

There are several ways to identify one’s own victimhood. One may never prove it effectively to others, at least not until one is in good company again, and victimhood inevitably perpetuates its self by drawing the victim away from good company by every deceptive device available. Yet once one knows that one has been abused, one must swiftly recognize this: that one has not the right to fail. All counselors, professional and unprofessional, who will shelter the victim’s ego but prevent its healing by its own empowerment are part of the oppression. The truth is that one does not get to choose misery. If one chooses to remain a victim the abuse will inevitably perpetuate its self. As Marion Woodman attests: the feminine can be every bit as cruel as the masculine. To do nothing in the face of danger to one’s self is to do nothing in the face of danger to others. One’s self is an end in and of its self, and as a part of the Whole, the primordial Unity, it may be the force that saves and heals an Other. It is not that the Self is a means towards the Other’s ends, but rather that when the Self has been actualized most beautifully then it merges with the Other.

The second step is to admit that pain is not necessary. Nature does not hate us. All of our suffering comes from expulsion from the human community which is our birthright. This includes the Scorpio’s suffering most notably. The Scorpio becomes the very oppressor that he had set out to destroy. He has not brought Justice to the Kingdom. He has become-the-tyrant, and unlike the Old King the New King rules by vindictiveness and a surpassing cruelty. The Old King banishes his own children to the wasteland. But the New King reduces the entire KINGDOM to a wasteland, and HE becomes the predator at the top of the food chain.

The third step is a simple test of character. We all co-exist by generosity. Generosity is not peculiar to the King. It is the network that we have all ways used to survive even under his arbitrary tyranny. The fact that this virtue cannot be stolen from us, but only repressed by the King’s privilege, (a fact subtly overlooked in the Romanticism of the Scorpio’s Tale) makes it possible to render the egoism of the monarch a sort of joke. The jesters in Shakespeare’s plays love to joke about the mortality of the King who is allowed a short time to “monarchise, be feared and kill with looks”. The ignorant and negligent tyrant can be made a secret joke by the people so long as the people are unified, even if their unity is non-violent. In FACT, it is the very non-violence of their union that prevents them from falling prey to the radicalism of the Scorpio. Why appoint a beneficent dictator when your neighbor can simply “hook a brother up” (provide)? Was it not all ways THIS generosity that the Scorpion had used to navigate his way around the city, all the way to the top of the palace where his rival slept?

The third test is to ask one’s self: have I given all I could? If I have housed a thief, if I have healed a traitor, if I have funded a swindler or promoted an invader, then I am innocent. It is HE that used his Will to render evil in the midst of my goodness. I can never be blamed for being so “stupid” as to be ungenerous, for that is to suggest that it had been INEVITABLE that my “friend” would betray me and use me. To say that is to preclude the possibility that the Scorpio would have chosen Goodness over Evil. It would be to dispossess him of that RESPONSIBILITY for his actions. If *I* am to be blamed, HE cannot be. I can only be held responsible for the fact that I WAS generous, and that such generosity was blameless, for if I should withhold resources from my peers I would be the evil. The evil Scorpio all ways maintains a gap between what he CAN do and what he WILL do, for it is only so that he can avoid mersion with the human community. What he reserves for himself he does to serve as a reminder of his own autocracy, not simply his autonomy. However noble the cause, if he must be coerced into it, he will refuse, even if he does not hesitate to use such coercion towards his own perpetuation-as-parasite. So long as he has your next meal under lock and key, he can persuade you to do “this for me”. He can even convince you that you owe it to him. Yet most of what he has to give was either stolen or given with a grace that he does not possess.

Generosity is the arbiter. Without it good and evil are reduced to equals, and again the veil of tyrannical ignorance is cast over the eyes, for we then forget the fact that pain was the work of evil. So long as I know that I’ve given all I could to my treacherous friend, I know that he was treacherous. And I require no vindication from my peers in this matter; they are all ready turned towards the devices of treachery. He will tell me now that if they are all ready turned then I’ve all ready lost. But in fact I’ve won. For beyond this tragic kingdom is an other that rests on a higher plane. There my new friends wait for me. There they can help, because they care. They know their privilege to be a right that I reserve. They have only to see the TRUE me, the bruised child that the Scorpio rejects as weak even as he exploits that weakness. He does not recognize the “weakness”, by avenue of which I provide for him, as strength. And so if I can take this journey into the deep indigo Heavens, if this path is available to me and closed to my traitor, then the less time that I have to spend professing my pain and position to a crowd of dishonorable thieves, the better off I am. If they are all ready turned-to-Evil, then I owe them no account and no warrant, for it was only for their sake, out of generosity towards their character, that I would have ever spoken. If they cannot reciprocate such generosity, I am absolved of all my karmic debt.

Dm.A.A.