WEEKLY CONSTELLATION ⭑ 012
Wall Street Goons Go Searching for Answers
Happy Taurus season, happy trees full of green and blooming season, happy sunrise by 6 AM to all those who celebrate! A full moon in Scorpio rounds out our week ahead, asking the challenging questions – go deep and see what lay there.
⊹₊⟡⋆
I’m still reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, which grows more strange and experimental as the pages turn. I’m often at a loss for how to describe literature. How do I capture the magic of page 23, the character arc of the lady we meet only thrice, the use of language, the ending, in a few short lines? I miss book reports, I guess. That and there is a reason the book exists in the first place– to experience it first hand, the only way to truly know. How do you describe books and what gets you to lunge at a new read?
Anyway, the book and other life events have got me thinking about how limited my knowledge has become. I talk to project managers and filmmakers who mention prolific writers I’ve never heard of—no biggie, but what were the two English degrees for?
If a brain surgeon is writing books in her spare time, can’t I? And I hate to compare, I heard the brain surgeon’s books are plagiarized, I don’t know if the filmmaker is also doing his own laundry and cooking for four hours on Sunday afternoons, or if the project manager ever had depression which made him sink into the recesses of his mind where no new knowledge was allowed to enter. What I am thinking of is possibility, plurality. Not restricting myself to what I see, but expanding to whatever corners of the earth my mind takes me, and allowing myself to explore.
⊹₊⟡⋆
I’ve been on a kick of great books and movies lately. I think I’ve found the secret– curate a library of recommendations to pluck from intuitively when the moment strikes. I bought Eagan’s book second hand three years ago, never felt drawn to it until last week. I have a playlist of movies on Criterion which has simmered for years, movies I’ve heard a few times in passing, and whilst hovering over their titles on a Friday night, I pick the one that seems to call to me the loudest. If you’ve got any recommendations, I’d love to add them to the library.
⊹₊⟡⋆
Choosing intuitively from the Criterion home page, I watched Wall Street on Saturday while it rained in heavy sheets. Easily the source material for many of the shows and films: Industry, Wolf of Wall Street. It’s funny seeing it in retrospect. I generally loathe heavy handed fables that use multi-million dollar movie budgets to goad the viewer into doing the “right thing” but for some reason this movie didn’t feel like that. I resonated with Bud Fox’s desperation to lift himself out of being poor. So much so that I applied for two jobs in the first half of the movie. I know the catch-22 of wealthy lifestyles. I’ve watched TV, I’ve seen the news. But it often feels like you’ve got two options: get rich or stay poor. No in between. Life is a desperate race for success or it is a miserable acceptance of failure. The movie quietly demonstrates this fallacy in the constant juxtaposition of the wealthy alongside the working class who serve them.
I think about this often as I work, slowly discovering over time that the smiling people who wave past me in yoga tights and trench coats are actually rolling in six, even seven figures of money.
⊹₊⟡⋆
This weekend we welcomed an old friend who moved out of our neighborhood one week after we moved in. She left for South Carolina to have her baby, and was back in New York for the first time in almost a year. We had Thai food nearby, then drinks at a bar, and another bar, and allegedly the group kept going but my boyfriend and I had been up since 6 and were exhausted. We talked on the outdoor sofa under a blanket drinking strong tequila drinks about the country’s hatred for mothers and children. How Americans dislike babies disturbing our lives, we dislike moms for bringing forth the disturbances.
I wanted to tell her about the gap I felt between us; like there were completely different worlds we operated within now. One where she found knitted baby clothes in her pocket and I flinch at the thought of me holding a tiny reproduction of myself. I tell her instead that I think Americans are too individualistic, that we create barriers between every visible subgroup of person and cannot manage the overlap. I don’t know if I make sense because it is freezing and I am halfway through a Paloma and she is looking at me but really at the side of me as if disappearing into another language she knew gravely she wouldn’t be able to translate to me. We switched the conversation to men and their lack of self-reflection until deep in adulthood, and are able to laugh again.
On Saturday we clean the house as it pours. I am tired of the wicked dance— dreaming and then capitulating, dreaming again, capitulating again. I’m woozy from the sway, or nauseous from whatever engine drives it forward. I am not enough, it seems, and that angers me. I have a small epiphany Saturday evening, well really it was Sunday morning, at 3am.
Why not face the challenge, just to see what all the hype is about?
Maybe it’s nothing— it’s easy, or short lived. Like eating an oyster for the first time (disgusting) but I moved on almost immediately and life did not change. Maybe it’s true that the protections placed on my life are more suffocating than the actual dangers I was protecting myself from.
⊹₊⟡⋆
This week’s therapy is to remain quiet for as long as you’d like. Something about the last week has zapped my excess energy. If you find yours also dwindling, be content to smile and rest, showing up where you need to with what you can offer. If it’s not much by way of speaking, so be it.
⊹₊⟡⋆
I leave you with “prayer” by Lucille Clifton
talk later,
MADZ✰