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Chapter 21: The Gerbil Wheel of Life The Montparnasse cemetery was one of Olney's favorite haunts. He liked visiting cemeteries in France. In the provinces, graves were often decorated with cameos of the dead, with inscribed eulogies highlighting events in their lives. To Olney they were beautiful people, larger than life. Valiance was a common theme; it seemed they had all died fighting the oppressor. In Paris, he strolled among tombs of the world famous. Père Lachaise was the mother lode, but other cemeteries were just as rich. And the cemetery at Montparnasse, contained within high granite walls off the busy boulevard Edgar Quinet, was quiet. He never encountered a living soul during the many times he wandered its tree-lined avenues. Olney often stopped at the grave of Charles Baudelaire for a few moments homage. He felt silly standing there with hands folded over crotch in the inevitable graveside posture. Who was he to bend with respect before the original poète maudit? Olney Garkle was a flaky American whose best poem was called "Goin' to the Sex Crime Movies." Worse, it was a "best poem" no one had ever heard of. Once, he tried to recite, or sing it, actually, to Maggie, but she had run from the room, herself loudly singing "The Teddy Bear's Picnic" to drown its perverted message. The first of his kind, Baudelaire set a trend for artists afflicted with poverty, drugs, disease and clarity, a trend which lasted for over a hundred years, until the 1960s, when the media drove its mobile units into the heart of the underground, to remain forever. Olney thought that maybe it was just as well. Perhaps the time had come to leave such seductively romantic ways of being, to move up the hopeful human spiral to bigger and better paradigms. At any rate, there were no more Baudelaire's. Obsolete now, the poet in garret, obsessed with the word, his soul in flames. And the poet's audience? As deaf now as it ever was, but with a spiral-descending difference: the same few who were still listening today had their keen edges dulled by TV. The option to take ten and vege out in front of the neutralizer was not there for Baudelaire. Olney didn't have the option, either. Unfortunately, he also lacked the will to do something about it. Olney was fascinated by Baudelaire's horoscope. Seven planets and the Moon's node were clustered within a 40 degree arc in Pisces and Aries, all of them straddling an opposition to the ascendant in Virgo. Compounding the stellium's intensity were spleen-provoking squares from the Moon in Cancer and the conjunction of Neptune and Uranus in Capricorn. All of which pointed to chaos and suffering in the extreme. Others born at the same time would have been better off deposited in the nearest thicket under a mound of tyke-sized, bramble-covered earth. Yet the Prince of Clouds handled his dangerous configurations well. Art saved his soul. Without it he might have lived his five decades seething bestially in the dark rooms of his restless mind, driven at every moment to tear the world to shreds. Olney's interest in Baudelaire always rekindled when Saturn squared off against his own chart. Comes the Down-Bringer: Know thyself or kill thyself ever quoth the bilious old soul shredder. Horoscopically speaking, Olney's could be compared to a gerbil wheel. Used by astrologer friends as an example of someone better off dead, his chart is indeed afflicted by aspects he could have better dealt with by arriving stillborn. The noted astrologer, Rabida Hutch, more compassionate than her colleagues, suggested he simply take the lifetime off, preferably in some desert or arctic hermitage, she didn't care which. To a large degree, Olney has followed her advice. Particularly since the era when LSD dropped the bottom out of socially condoned self-interest, when he learned that life in the nine-to-five lane was at best an interactive fiction. Yet, he always came back from those "voyages" with the same old hungers. During one particular trip he experienced a regression which, were it true, was to give him a stunning glimpse into his problem. It seemed that while waiting for transmigration in the cosmic transit lounge, he'd paid less attention to debugging the system software of his up and coming new life than in looking through the slobber-provoking tabloids so thrilling to the silent majority in whose domain, because of his shameful laxity, he was about to be born. Important details--like choosing to be born in a relatively sane era under a beneficial placement of planets--were tiresome and boring for this cocky, between-lives spirit. In addition to problems with parents, as shown by Mars square Dad and Uranus opposite Mom, Olney has been cursed by a grand trine in Earth. Twanging away in equilateral harmony at his birth were Mars, Uranus, and Neptune. Since his first shriek of recognition--upside down and slapped on the butt for his spirit-world inattentions--Olney's psyche has been light-cycling without egress along the unswerving rut they've laid out for him. Rarely has he had the chance to pull off on the soft shoulder of some comforting planet--Jupiter perhaps--to fill up his reserves and take a deep breath, to absorb a little of that centuries-old wisdom so necessary for a harmonious and fruitful life. Still, he might have taken advantage of the trine's positive qualities, such as the easing of tensions and release of immense creative energy. Unfortunately, his antsy metabolism put paid to the former, while all creative juices have been trapped and sapped since puberty by his spill-crazy spunkster. Complicating the grand trine is Olney's crescent Moon in Scorpio. Sitting in his first house, the troublesome disk has ever caused the poor chap to vacillate between rejecting the world and conning it into loving him unconditionally. The moon's cookie cutter profile has further subjected him to the whispering innuendos of past life ghosts, especially the murmured reminders of his lives-long distrust of women; a condition eternally wedded, as karma would have it, to a dark lust for their bodies. Not a man to call it quits over such puny configurations as these, Olney also boasts of chafing aspects to Venus from the ne'er-do-well planets, Pluto and Uranus. Indeed, the universe's feared gunsels have caused thrill-seeking Venus to froth at the mouth far too often, provoking Olney, in turn, to consider daring acts of an extrasocial nature with any female catching his fancy, and especially the ones who would rather not. These and other poorly conceived placements have often pounded at the barricades Olney has so prudently erected at the periphery of his consciousness. Although he and his cocky sidekick have always taken the rap for wanting to pull the barricades down and let it all hang out, he well knows who is really behind those terrible fantasies: none other than She, the Inner Woman Spurned. She, it is, who exerts a terrible control over his desires, but it's Herself She wants him to take, not those silly external projections. Down deep, where She breathes at the core of his being, Olney knows that he needs Her if he is ever to be free. She is the One who will make him whole, yet he cannot make the connection. He also knows that if he waits too long he'll be forced to give in to Her terrible frustration by kicking in the barricades. God help him then, for She will sweep across the rubble to crunch his bones like Tinker Toys! §§§ Chapter 22: A Kakistocracy of Mangistes |