PLANET WAVES By ERIC FRANCIS
For April 2, 1999

Copyright ©1999, all rights reserved.

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ARIES (March 21-April 19)
When I was living in Germany last year, I visited the theatrical academy of a legendary actor named Frieder Nögge. For twenty years, Nögge (a hairline Pisces-Aries cusp born March 21) has performed essentially the same show -- a clown act in which he goes through four roles: melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric (sad, happy, lazy and angry). After 2,000 performances, his shows are still fresh, with an edge, and both his theater and cash-box are packed every weekend. And he's surrounded by a respectable cadré of young talent. How does he do it? His philosophy is that performing requires being absolutely present and conscious in every moment. The performance must go so far beyond scripts and roles that it is essentially real, and not a show at all. Sound familiar?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
I suggest you consider to what extent the drive to connect is one of your most deeply-held values, and to what very real extent you can now no longer stand silent. Taurans from the "communications department" of humanity include none other than William Shakespeare, an impassioned visionary communicator whose ideals have saturated all of Western literature and society; Sigmund Freud, who first turned the human mind toward the mirror of psychoanalysis; Guglielmo Marconi, who invented the wireless radio; and Samuel Morse, who created the language first used in long-distance electronic communications (the Morse Code). Their lives point to one fact: That communication is not an end in itself, it's a series of relays. So, no definites need to be spoken. It's enough to ask questions -- out loud, like you mean it.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
I've mentioned before the link between intelligence and the awareness of beauty. It's one of those facts of the human psyche that astrology uniquely points to, since most worldly schools of thought treat most things (and people) that are physically beautiful with deep intellectual skepticism. Astrology hands us the Venus Principle, which could be summarized mathematically as art = love = beauty = living wisdom. Oh, I almost forgot. Equals sex. Oh yeah, equals money. To use the Venus Principle, which exists in every human being who strolls the planet, and is currently blazing thru Gemini. Try on these possibilities as a kind of life experiment: If you're bright, you're attractive. If you're loving, you're talented. When you feel good, sex and cash flow like water. And right about now, when you're hot, you're hot.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)
The thing about your solar chart is, while your Official Career stuff is running high, your creative self-confidence may be faltering in some way. I recently did some creative-coaching astrological work with a novelist client, who was doubting the validity of his literary achievements. I reminded him of what I will remind you. A book called Stephen Hero was rescued, slightly toasted, from a fireplace by the sister of its author, James Joyce. The book became a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A friendly woman named Tabatha retrieved the manuscript of her husband Stephen's first novel from a waste basket. The manuscript was for a book called Carrie, it's author's first and perhaps most famous work. Yes, even brilliant people who are about to rock the culture are known to harbor their doubts.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
Introducing a word: POLYAMORY. These are the folks who admit to having more than one lover, and everyone is fine with it. The possibilties are pretty well endless. There is a magazine (Loving More) the title of which actually reflects the central concept -- which is that some people simply want to love more, and to love diversely, and that this is natural. Our culture's central teaching is that you must love one person "till death do us part," which is of course an illusion most of the time, all good intentions notwithstanding. Perhaps it sounds too good to be true, but when you eliminate the lying that comes with the almost inevitable "cheating" that comes with making impossible deals, a lot of the common neurosis of relationships evaporates.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
Gwyneth Paltrow recently won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing the role of a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman. Yet the tradition of gender-bending in theater has been around for a while. In Japan, male Kabuki performers create the astonishing illusion of a female presence, from their atmosphere to the movement of their fingers, taken to the point where gender itself is revealed as the theatre-of-the-mind that it truly is. My theory is that there are hundreds of genders and sexual orientations, crossing many spectrums in many directions, but more specifically, that lately, the course of your life has been orbiting the possibilities. A fun game would be to entirely reinvent your gender and sexual orientation, starting from the drawing board, allowing anything at all to become real.

LIBRA (Sep. 23-Oct. 22)
I may not have mentioned before the connection between living a full creative life and maintaining the awareness of death. Is the connection clear to you? I think some people get it intuitively. The link commonly surfaces when we suddenly become afraid of dying, and then life suddenly, mysteriously becomes this precious experience which we normally take for granted. This phenomenon can be used as high-grade creative fuel, and, far from requiring a morbid, attitude, all it takes is knowing that our current existence on this plane of reality is fragile, and a temporary experience, kind of like a bubble in the air. Pause for a moment and reflect on the notion that at any moment, this can all be gone. (If you don't experience an immediate positive effect, you might consider making some major changes in your reality.)

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
A confrontation you face the truth of now can be used to disarm or take away the destructive force of something that occurs later in the year. But I don't suggest that you force the issue, because you're rather unlikely be seeing it clearly now. But you can do your best to pay attention and collect information, and if you take some mental notes, you will have enough data to analyze the situation during the coming weeks and months. This process will give you a mystical toss of hindsight, foresight and insight that could easily save your skin later in the year. But the key is that you must remember what happened in these very weeks; remember who was involved; remember their positions, what they said and what they did. You must not forget.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 23-Dec. 21)
The sign of the centaur is traditionally ruled by Jupiter, but that hardly explains the often ferocious intensity with which most Sagittarians live. More than twenty years ago, astronomers discovered a very strange object orbiting our Sun and named it Chiron, after the first centaur of the ancient Greek myths. Chiron the space-object was a cross between a planet, a comet and an asteroid. Chiron of mythological fame was a healer, teacher and warrior, as well as a musician and specialist in ethos, or ethics. Chironic people are rebels, they stand out from the crowd, and they tend to be special cases of rare or unusual talent and ambition. With Chiron now making his first visit to your sign in half a century, it would not surprise me if that Sagittarian urge for freedom was not stirring up some revolution in your heart, or elsewhere. Just remember, it's not a revolution if you need to get permission first.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
The other day I paid a visit to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site in the Internet, and encountered the "Gallery of Galaxies" -- a sampling of six photographs selected from portraits of more than a hundred of nearby little universes. These swirls, globes and spirals each contain billions of star systems, and nobody knows who lives there. For the most part, modern astrology deals with a bunch of gas bubbles and rocks orbiting a little fireball in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, astrological charts are interesting. But the questions we ask are not big enough.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 19-Feb. 18)
Y'know, I have an Aquarius moon. So I can relate. Aren't we all, I guess, what you could call Ellie Arroway-meets-Mother Theresa? Aquarian altruism is really just a disguise for the extent to which we stand in the void of the world, in that unknown universe of the "Gallery of Galaxies" (see Capricorn). Terrified in some subtle way about half the time, and exuberant a lot of the rest. There are many different ways to view life. The professed answers to the vast mysteries are laughable. It's a gorgeous day outside and I am sitting here writing horoscopes. Seeya later.

PISCES (Feb. 19-Mar. 20)
It was my Gestalt therapist who first pointed out the connection between sex and money. He probably picked it up from Freud. These Big Two, sex and money, share one major element in common, which is that both need to flow, and when one is loose and moving, the other is a lot more likely to follow suit. Astrology illustrates the picture nicely, with the different money houses in the chart also representing aspects of sexuality. And it happens that the house in your solar chart where the stars are shining brightest is about self-love, self-possession, self-value and personal wealth, a/k/a, The Mighty Second House. You may have lived through a few years of slim pickings in all of those departments, all the better to make the point that you're currently living in very different times. Let the warm air of April remind you.

FOR THE FAITHFUL
A mystery message appeared on my screen this morning from someone I am dubbing Aries of the Week, named Greggie. I can't find the thing again (It morphed into a puff of animated smoke and vanished), but it said something like, "Send lots and lots of really cool presents." I take the offer public, and suggest the following for Mr. Greg, with a reminder to lavish gifts on your favorite Spring Baby: A server big/fast enough to handle audio and video (yes, an entire Internet server); a massive set of crayons and super-hero coloring books; a digital radio studio; a great lawyer; a harem; and a few other things, use your imagination. As I cannot reveal his true identity or location as he is currently employed as a cell in the brain of a Very Large Enterprise, Inc., we're accepting gifts (and cards) in his care here at Planet Waves, PO Box 208, The Actual Woodstock, NY 12498.

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