Gemini Women of Letters

Gemini Women of Letters 

        Siblings and gender issues are said to play a special role in the lives of those born under the sign of the Twins.
 
        Barbara Pym, (b. 6/2/1913) Spent most of her life with her sister Hillary, and they are buried together. The relationship is examined in several of her novels.

        Ivy Compton-Burnett (b. 6/5/1884) She had eleven siblings, among which "her favourite brother, Guy, died of pneumonia; another, Noel, was killed on the Somme, and two sisters died in a suicide pact on Christmas Day. Not one of the twelve siblings had children, and all eight girls remained unmarried." (Wiki). Her first successful novel, Brothers and Sisters (1929; 18 of her twenty novels have similarly dyadic titles) introduces a favorite theme: incest. She signed her writing "I. Compton-Burnett" as she wished the reader to regard her as neuter (as well as dual).

        Novelists Joan and Jackie Collins are sisters: Joan is the Gemini. Author of five best-selling novels, five life-style books and two memoirs, in 1996 she was awarded 1.3 million dollars in damages from her publisher Doubleday. She is perhaps even better known as an actress, and starred in two movies based on novels written by her sister.

        Joyce Carol Oates (b. 6/16/38). Her preoccupation with siblinghood spills over into obsession in her series of thrillers (Double Delight, Snake Eyes, Lives of the Twins, etc) written under the alternym Rosalind Smith (Smith is her husband's name), which explore the criminal psychology of twins. Her signature 1966 short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is about a teenager named Connie: "Everything about her had two sides to it." (It's dedicated 'to Bob Dylan', also a Gemini (b. 5/24/41). Oates has written, "Eventually, I would regret the dedication: too many people have asked me, 'Why?' Who knows why?").

Oates's biographer, Greg Johnson, writes of:

"The extraordinary fates of Caroline Oates's two daughters--both born on June 16 [eighteen years apart] and virtual twins in physical appearance, but one brilliantly gifted, the other severely [autistic]--contributed to Joyce's fascination with twins . . . and her lifelong interest in the theme of 'doubleness' in human nature."

One can't discuss J. C. Oates and Gemini without noting her brilliantly-imagined 738 page bio/fantasmagoria Blonde (working title: Gemini), in which she downloads her mythos of twentieth century American female experience onto her uncannily opposite alter ego, the historical Marilyn Monroe (b. 6/1/1926), replete with contemplations of twins, mirrors, gender and identity. One of the book's great set-pieces is the antepenultimate chapter, 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President', recreating the unforgettable 1962 Madison Square Garden event for Pres. Kennedy (as well a Gemini) [www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4SLSlSmW74]. Replaying tragedy as farce, Gemini Beverly Sills breathily sang the song at Gemini Henry Kissinger's birthday a few years ago.

Oates published a book of literary essays called Contraries in 1981. The title recalls Mary McCarthy's 1961 volume On the Contrary. Mary McCarthy (b. 6/21/1912) has as her remarkable-sibling-experience: the distinguished actor Kevin McCarthy.

        Lillian Hellman (b. 6/201905) had a lifelong personal and literary relationship with another Gemini, the writer Dashiell Hammett (b. 5/27/1894). She refered to him as her twin. She was involved in a vicious literary feud with Mary McCarthy, who accused her of duplicity.

        Lady Mary Wortley Montague (b. 5/26/1689) rescued her sister, the mentally deranged Countess of Mar, from a cruel husband. Noted for her scintillating and informative letters from Turkey, where her husband was English consul, she was perhaps the first foreign correspondent and female travel writer. She was involved in a vicious literary feud with Gemini poet Alexander Pope, who imputed Sapphism.  

        Hedda Hopper (b. 5/2/1885) famed Hollywood gossip columnist, was born Erda Furry, third of eight Furry siblings. After marrying Mr. Hopper, she was advised by a numerologist to change her first name to Hedda. Double-lettered names seem to stimulate Geminian achievement.

        Harriet Beecher Stowe (b. 6/14/1811), author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and, according to Abraham Lincoln, 'the little lady who started this war', was the seventh of thirteen siblings. The next in age was Henry Ward Beecher, the fiery abolitionist preacher whose trial (for adultery) was one of the most famous of 19th century America. Four other Beecher siblings were prominent political activists. Harriet and Henry were particularly close and collaborative throughout their lives.

        Marguerite Yourcenar (b. 6/8/1903) lived intimately with her translator, Grace Frick, for fifty years, until her death in 1979. Her first novel, Anna, Soror, introduced the theme of brother/sister incest, which along with male homosexuality (for instance, in the figures of the Emperor Hadrian, Mishima and Cavafy, about whom she wrote biographies) recurs in her work. Her mother died in childbirth, and no man ever replaced her aristocratic father, who raised her with quasi-incestuous intensity. She was the first female member of the Academie Francaise.

        Djuna Barnes (b. 6/12/1892), American journalist and modernist writer, was daughter and granddaughter of polygamists. She raised her eight younger siblings, and was subjected to incest and rape. Flamboyantly bisexual, her work explores intra-familial passions.

        Anne Frank (b. 6/12/1929) and her older sister, Margot. Their relationship deepened during their confinement. Margot also kept a diary, believed to have been lost. They died within days of each other in Bergen-Belsen.

    "Interest" comes from the latin inter esse, to be between. This Gemini experience of being as a twoness, or a multiplicity, or a passage, and the associated curiousity of the child, restlessness of the adolescent, energy of the youth, this vivacity and wit to connect, is Gemini's continual gift to life.

  

Enclosure

Hands of Gemini 9

Johnny Depp    9 June 1963 

Vincent Price   27 May 1911

Why Geminis Lie.

   Gemini Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

His friend Gemini Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself."

Is it that Geminis are aware that truth is something we seek and travel towards, continually shedding old interpretations, experiments and mistakes behind us? Or maybe they’re just whimsical.

      Gemini, the twins, mirrored, mimics, mimicry, imitation: the lie is the imitation of the truth, so a gemini may enjoy the lie, the fiction, for its own sake. It can be compulsive, it can be useful, it can be amusing . . . For attorneys, writers, boxers, it’s punch, counterpunch. [Counterpunch is the blog of Gemini Alexander Cockburn.] The statement’s force is not entirely due to its truth. And Geminis have a fundamental love of language and communication — sometimes, they remind us, the act of communication is more important than the content. As the 18th century Gemini letter writer Lady Mary Wortley Montague put it, “When one loves, one always has something to say.” Inconsequential chatter, gossip, ”garrulous to the last,” (Walt Whitman), Gemini’s planet, Mercury, thr messenger, is also the god of thieves and liars.

      Geminis are the great networkers, always pairing off, putting people together. Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the www was born June 8.

      They are often creatively identified with a particular partner, collaborator, spouse or sibling. It’s interesting to observe them pairing with each other. Two writers, both famous gossips, Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, had a famous feud. McCarthy public,ly accused Hellman of being a liar (most offensively: "Everything she says is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.") and Hellman sued her. A 1990 book, “Telling Lies” contains chapters on each of them. McCarthy's own memoirs deal extensively with the role of lying (and its twin, theft) in her self-creation.

      3 noted cafe-society gossips: According to interior decorator Billy Baldwin, ‘Cole Porter called Elsa Maxwell “Miss Liar” to her face’! All three were Geminis.

      Geminis will sometimes tell you what you want to hear, in order to further the conversation. So do we all. But then they turn around, after you liked them so for having understood you so well, and they're laughing their heads off with your worst enemy, about how screaminhgly funny your cherished little ideas are. This is a Gemini type of betrayal. They can't help it.

Happy Birthday Tim Berners-Lee; Gemini post-modern philosophers

    A birthday greeting to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, born 8 June 1955, creator of the blogosphere. Unavoidably, cyber-presence, the binary code, everything mediated, is owed to the Twins.     Gemini, the Third sign, is preeminently the sign of communication of information. First is the dot, Second the dash, Third is the flash of the difference, the current that leaps from the negative to the positive, meaning constituted by the binary, the digital, the iterative, the multiplicative, the network  the Web.  (Later in the zodiac come the spiders.)

    Naturally, Geminis have contributed significantly to post-modern communication concepts. The current privileging of the term “discourse” itself is introduced to contemporary discourse in the work of the French linguist Emile Benveniste (8 June 1902). Lechte, in the indispensible  50 Key Contemporary Thinkers (1994) writes: that "B. sees language as essentially a dialogue between two or more parties, unlike a signal system.    . . . this means that human language has an undeniable poetic and fictive character to it." 

    The communications theorist Jurgen Habermas (18 June 1929),  urges that dialogue itself  “calls for participants to engage in interpretation at all levels, thus heightening the degree of each person’s self-understanding as this derives from his or her interaction with others.” We all have an “intersubjective recognition” of the validity of the other’s utterance. Habermas’s development of the idea of “intersubjectivity”as a counter to both solipsism and scientistic objectivity has been indispensable to recent thinking about identity. He stands on a high mountain range separating Modernism and Post-Modernism, fortifying the borders of the Enlightenment. He has confidence that the "reasonably human can prevail". In the title of his seminal work Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) a dichotomy is suggested and the word "interests"  calls attention to itself with its implied betweenity. The question raised is how to balance the powerful weight, Knowledge: the scientific and technological exploitation of the globe, against the concerns of being human.  Gemini is the associate of borders. Habermas wishes us to maintain the border, but to cross it freely. In fact, he says: "The borders of truth are movable."

    "Interest" comes from the latin inter esse, to be between. This Gemini experience of being as a twoness, or a multiplicity, or a passage, and the associated curiousity of the child, restlessness of the adolescent, energy of the youth, this vivacity and wit to connect, is Gemini's continual gift to life.

    No aspect of post-modern thought has a more urgent claim to examination fundamental assumptions about communication than feminism, as it grapples with the psychosocial and historical irreducibility of gender binarism.  French linguistic philosopher Luce Irigaray enriches the feminist debate with the experience of Gemini consciousness, beginning with her tour de force deconstruction of gender binaries in the 1974 Speculum of the Other Woman. [Note the mirror, the Geminian doubling]. Her 1994 book To Be Two, opens with a rhapsodic prologue in which she attempts to describe her awareness of her own birth process, including the moment of her acceptance of her astrological imprint:

“You, my stars, masters of the universe, are my guardians and my peace, the font of my duties and of my fortunes. Bound to you in some mysterious way, I try to be faithful without understanding. I welcome your commands. Attentive, I am sometimes amazed, sometimes terrified, even though, in a certain sense, I put more faith in you than in myself. When decisions frighten me I search for a sign, not knowing if you are to guide me or if I am to guide you. I do not even know how to respect you in carrying out my own becoming.”

    Another major figure of French post-structuralist feminism, the poet Helene Cixous (5 June 1937)  obsessively explores the idea of a specifically female writing, to strip the mask of gender neutrality from communication itself.  She too at one point reaches to stars:

“How far it is from a star to a self, O what inconceivable proximity between one species and another, between an adult and a child, between and author and a character what secret proximity? Everything is far away, not everything resides only in distance, everything is less distant than we think, in the end everything touches us, touches us.” ('The Author in Truth', in Coming to Writing).

    On another level entirely, the oeuvre of American sociolinguist Deborah Tannen (7 June 1945)  reiterates the gendered dyadics of discourse: You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation;  Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work;  That's Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships; Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends; I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You're All Adults;  You're Wearing That?: Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.

    The sociologist Erving Goffman (11 June 1922) is worth noting in this context, for titles like:  Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction;  Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior; Strategic Interaction and Forms of Talk.

    Finally, to link the post-modern back to the digital binarism of Berners-Lee, take the figure of the late Jean Baudrillard (20 June 1929, according to the London Times and numerous other sources, although Wikipedia has July 29. Baudrillard was evasive about his biography; like Irigaray, he prefered "to be without a background”.) Baudrillard noted that the reduction of information to digital binarism enables the proliferation of the perfect copy, and therefore a by-passing of the real, and into the experience of hyperreality (his coinage). Baudrillard’s nightmarish vision of the simulacrum (cf, the copy, the double, the twin) is in fact a version of Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web,  in which the easily-accessed deliria of passive specularity, have, seemingly overnight, hollowed out the civitas, which now implodes under the vitality of a counterbalancing religious terrorism. This puts Baudrillard in the company of Gemini’s icy anarchic extremists: de Sade, Bakunin, Celine, the Unabomber, Drs. Kervorkian and Guillotin.  Of the pitiless heart of dualism Baudrillard writes: “No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of one does not eclipse the other—far from it. . . Good does not conquer evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen, they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated.” (The Spirit of Terrorism, 2002). As an addendum, a few more Baudrillard titles which make me think he's a Gemini, whatever Wikipedia says: The Mirror of Production, Symbolic Exchange and Death, The Evil Demon of Images, Simulacra and Simulation, The Twin Towers.

"Deep down, things have never functioned socially, but symbolically, magically, irrationally, etc."                                                                                                                 J. Baudrillard

Enclosure

ALBRECHT DURER

ALBRECHT DURER  one of the earliest Gemini media giants, perfected the manufacture and trade of the reproduced image, and launched several culturally influential images of Gemini itself. First, the widely-transmitted versions of the primal pair, the biblical Adam  and Eve.                                                                                                                                     

And this image from the climax of the judeo-christian writings, the Saint as Voracious Reader.

                                                                                                                

Durer was the first graphic entrepreneur, creating images for reproduction and distribution on a substantial scale.    The computer screen cannot do justice to these astonishing engravings, so I take the liberty to crop them badly. Seek out better examples at your local used book and print dealers. 

two gemini painters: Fairfield Porter and Velasquez

Fairfield Porter movingly captured the American suburban pastoral, snapshotty in composition, in occasion, in cropping, even in rapidity of execution.

As in many Gemini artists (Gauguin, Rouault, Gottleib, Steinberg, perhaps even Courbet) a certain awkwardness evokes a certain manner with which to conceal itself.

At a Porter show  in 1992 it seemed that every other painting was of a pair of something: a pair of houses, a pair of boats, of people, of trees, a couple of chairs, a
mixed doubles match,  etc.  The show was titled "Porter Pairings." A curator had intuited Porter's Geminian nature.

One of Porter’s most notable canvases, The Mirror, is a direct homage to Velasquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, a work that incorporates a mirror to profound effect. The mirror, of course, is a principal visual Geminism, and Velasquez, one of the greatest “hands” in the history of painting, was himself, also, a Gemini.                                                                                                                                            

Velasquez,
Las Meninas
(detail), Prado


Porter is an elegist of John Cheever country, and the two Geminis had much else in common:  both husbands and fathers juggling family ties with a bisexual identity, both artistic WASPS with intense sibling issues. Porter was 4th in a brood of five children, one of his three brothers was the well-known photographer Eliot Porter. Cheever had a notorious love/hate relationship with his older brother, and his fiction is marked with fratricide and incest.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Fairfield Porter: Art in its Own Terms. Selected Criticism 1935-1975. vg/vg, rare, $45.

Arnold Bennett, a gemini novelist

In the course of a busy life a certain type of respite is obtained by the reading of a Victorian novel and in no other way. Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale might loosely be called the last big Victorian novel, and it gains in relevance at the moment because 2008 is the centenary of its publication and instant success.  And Bennett was a Gemini, good grist for my image mill.  I knew little about Bennett except that he was an editor and journalist in addition to being a novelist, and that his novels were disdained by Bloomsbury as old-fashioned. I have on the shelves a collection of his journalism with the Geminian title “Things That Have Interested Me.” (inter essei, latin, to be between).

So, an avalanche of other duties procrastinated, I lay down with, and stayed up with, The Old Wives’ Tale for a few days, and have this to report of this native of the sign of The Twins’ most important work. The subject, characteristically, is siblinghood: the life history of two sisters. A brief, keenly imagined narrative of a pre-adolescent character’s petty theft carries a heavy symbolic and anticipatory freight, as in so many novels by Geminis (Frances Burney, Th. Hardy, Th. Mann, Joyce Carol Oates, Patrick White, Mary McCarthy, Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins come to mind).

A lovely passage of marriage bed soliloquy, Bennett’s Mollie Bloom piece, ends like this: “As she lay darkly awake by her husband, her secret being seemed to be a-quiver with emotion. Not exactly sorrow; not exactly joy; an emotion more elemental than these . . .  The two had to be reconciled. And they never could be reconciled. Always she would be between them, to reconcile them, and to be crushed by their impact. . . she was conscious of no bitterness, conscious rather of a solemn blessedness.”

DANTE

O glorious Twins, o stars
    impregnate with great strength,
to whom I owe whatever genius

I possess, with you the sun
    arose and set when first I
breathed sweet air of Tuscany.

              Dante Alighieri

new arrivals + escher pettibon

 Of Gemini interest: Hannah Arendt's biographty of RAHEL VARNHAGEN  (b. 19 June 1771), the famous Jewish Berlin saloniste, voluminous correspondent, bluestocking and proto-feminist, a close sister to Margaret Fuller, Fanny Burney, Mary Wortley Montague; $5

and the Phaidon RAYMOND PETTIBON (b. 26 May 1957) an artist who holds hand, so to speak, with other geminis like Saul Steinberg, Escher and Albrecht Durer. (The two hands on top are Pettibon. One day I'll figure out this layout business.) $15

M. C. Escher (b. 17 June 1898)

        I sit at my desk and scribe the endless message from myself to my                                                 own hand.    Allen Ginsberg, Planet News

(Durer)

                                                                                                                    Planet News, 4th printing,  $10

Durer's Drawings, Berlin 1937, Vol 2. superb oversize

(13"x10") cloth covered, from which most of the Durer drawings seen here were scanned. $150. 

Pettibon and Durer united in spiritual light

I have wondered if my attribution of a specifically Geminian vibration to Durer's Revelations plate XIV might not be a bit far-fetched, the pair of pillars not being as entirely central to the image as one might wish to uphold the claim.

Then I came across this corroborating twin-piece by Pettibon. Evidently the ultimate manifestation of Gemini spirit is in a starry flash of illumination, that transcends the shallow, garrulous dualities which Gemini may often display. Pettibon routinely counterposes image and text; here the very words "I'm Gemini", embedded in an airheaded phrase that mocks the profundity of the image, takes the mid-bottom label title position precisely parallel to Durer's placement of his famous monogram.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another quote from gemini Ralph Waldo Emerson:

How slowly, how slowly we learn that witchcraft and ghostcraft, palmistry and magic, and all the other so-called superstitions, which, with so much police, boastful skepticism, and scientific committees, we had finally dismissed to the moon as nonsense, are really no nonsense at all, but subtle and valid influences, always starting up, mowing, muttering in our paths, and shading our day. (Journals, September 1842)

scientists: gilbert coulomb poisson maxwell lodge crookes mesmer

Another image of pure Gemini from Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1914). 

Scientists usually feel left out when the topic of astrology arises;  they should not. For instance, a clearly disproportionate number of the seminal names in the physics of magnetism were born under the Twins, the primal dualism, Gemini:

William Gilbert, author of De Magnete, ("the first great English scientific work") was born May 24, 1544. He discovered that the Earth is a giant magnet.

Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736). In seven papers on electricity and magnetism published between 1785 and 1789, he explained the mathematical laws of attraction and repulsion between magnetic poles and electric charges.

Simeon Poisson, mathematician (b. 21 June 1781)  " . . his memoirs on the theory of electricity and magnetism, virtually created a new branch of                 mathematical physics. .....  made important contributions to the theory of                       attraction."

James Clerk Maxwell (b. June 13, 1831), author of the 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism demonstrating the identity of the two phenomena, "the most important physicist between Newton and Einstein".

These four men established the theory that the material world is essentially constituted by the interplay of two opposing immaterial forces. Equally entranced by the dance of plus and minus was the genius British technoscientist Oliver Lodge (b. 12 June 1851). He extended and applied electromagnetic theory to wireless transmission, the bipolar electrical cell, the study of lightning, automotive engineering (the spark plug), and fog-busting. He might almost be the man in Steinberg's drawing. Oliver Lodge was also twice a highly active president of the British Society for Psychical Research.

Another important scientist and British SPR president was Gemini Sir William Crookes (17 June 1832) who made discoveries in many scientific realms, including electricity. He is best remembered for the Crookes radiometer, which moves by virtue of the difference between black and white. Gemini Wallis Simpson's witty earrings

Mention must also be made of another experimenter associated with a form of magnetism, so-called animal magnetism: Franz Anton Mesmer (b. May 23, 1734) who, applying the principal of universal immaterial polarized force to medicine, psychology and sexuality, was the progenitor of dynamic psychiatry and the experimental approach to subjectivity. Mesmerism was, of course, a principle object of study at the SPR. 

At the time of the flourishing of the SPR London was awash with Gemini writers characteristically eager to extend communication. Arthur Conan Doyle (22 May 1859) and G. K. Chesterton (29 May 1874), both alter-egos of popular psychic investigators (Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown) both also deeply pursued mediumistic contact with their departed, beloved brothers. The poet W. B. Yeats (13 June 1865) while working with Crookes on a spirit-voice transmission device, runs into novelist Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867) at a seance . . . Gemini embraces any possibility of communication. No wonder Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, is a Gemini.

This universe a thing of dream
                substance naught & Keystone void
                                    vibrations of symmetry  Yes   No
                                    Foundations of Gold Element Atom
                all the way down to the first Wave
                making opposite Nothing a mirror
which begat a wave of Ladies marrying
waves of Gentlemen till I was born in 1926
                in Newark, New Jersey under the sign
                                                                sweet Gemini ---
                                                                           ALLEN GINSBURG

pettibon & escher

Here's a couple of interesting Gemini images from Gemini artists. The one on the right is by M. C. Escher. The one below comes from "The Arte of English Poesie" of 1589, an influential compendium of rhetorical and poetic techniques. The column on the left is to be read from bottom up, the  one on the right from top down. "The Arte of English Poesie" is attributed to George Puttenham about whom little is known (no birthdate, alas)  except that he had a brother. This particular, and peculiar, excerpt  appears in a selection of work by the Gemini artist Raymond Pettibon (published by Phaidon), in the "Artist's Choice" section.

The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham. $5

Two gemini hearts

Have a nice day from two gemini artists.  

Two six foot red hearts, sculpture by Jim Dine (b. 16 June 1935 )                                                                                                                                
   

                                                                                           

                                            Raymond Pettibone (26 May 1957), 

                                         Untitled (Meet  John Doe), detail                 
 

E. M. Lilien (Hands of Gemini 10)

      

An interesting Gemini has turned up on my shelves, the photographer and artist E. M. Lilien (b. May 29, 1874). These two images comprise the front and back covers of The Art of Light, Photographic Aspects of E. M. Lilien, Jerusalem, 1992. The reciprocity between the two duplicative processes (photography and engraving), both practiced with great imagination and skill perfectly strikes the Geminian interval.

In Lilien’s involvement in newspaper, journalistic and reportage photography, book and periodical illustration, and art education, the resemblance to the German graphic master, Durer, is notable;
the stylistic resemblance is obvious. In the two illustrations above notice the importance of that symbol of Gemini, the subject’s hand.

There is bold adventure in a 25 year old eastern European Jew dragging cumbersome photographic equipment to the desert. Sometimes called “the first Zionist artist”, his photograph of Theodore Herzl is iconic. As Gemini needs continuously to communicate, to mediate, so Lilien felt that his art would help
bridge  both the jew/arab and the semite/European splits.

John Edwards, Gemini behaving badly.

He of  the “Two Americas”,  with the inherent duplicity of the Twins, called LIAR in 4 inch letters on the front pages of the tabloids. Months ago he was caught by YouTube preening in a mirror. Narcissus, a Gemini without a brother, yearns after his own image, never matures. Dowd in the Times made merciless fun of him for hiring his lover to make videos of himself (“His self-diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic . . . ”).  

Mentally fluent Twins fill the ranks of Edwards’s profession, lawyering,  fascinated by the dynamic of justice’s two-panned scale and the power of the word.  As a Gemini, the lawyer enjoys  in-betweening and pairing off in so many ways: as an advocate, a mediator, a communicator, a representative,  an opponent whose strength lies in the ability to argue either side;  also,  she exploits to the hilt her network of personal relationships and inter-obligations, contacts and introductions.  Some prominent  attorneys immediately come to my mind: F. Lee Bailey (10 June 1933, with the Geminian lightness of the aviator/playboy), and Palm Beach’s Robert Montgomery (9 June 1930, who died last week),  a tort litigator like Edwards, a Democrat with Republican clients, and the man responsible for the multi-billion dollar finding against the tobacco industry. Closer to Edwards’s current dilemma are two recent New York Attorneys General: Eliot Spitzer (June 10, 1959), who projected an image clear as a bell, then suddenly proved schizoid, two-faced; and Rudolph Giuliani (28 May 1944), whose idiosyncratic infidelities and cellphone antics are the least of his Geminian displays.                                                         

(Marilyn Monroe & Donald Trump are also Geminis.)

Geminis Cardozo and Habermas carry weight.

A highly distinguished Gemini attorney, “one of the most influential legal minds of [the twentienth] century”, would be Benjamin Cardozo,  revered Justice of the Supreme Court from 1932 until his death in 1938. Born 24 May 1870, he was one of twins, and lived his entire life, apparently celibate, with the older sister that raised him, another example of a talented Gemini  enacting a lifelong sibling-centered existence. Witness the gifts and interests of Hermes/Mercury, the patron of Gemini, in Cardozo’s contribution to contract law (dyadic, reciprocal),  while as a theorist of common law and social action he shares the terrain of the Gemini communications theorist Jurgen Habermas (18 June 1929), about whom I wrote a few weeks ago. The vibrational similarity (if I may) seems to play out in a physical resemblance.

Benjamin Cardozo

                                        

Juergen Habermas

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 A weighty column by Habermas appears now on Arts and Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com) about the current European Union crisis. There are few public intellectuals left who express enlightenment ideals as forcefully and opportunely as he. (www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,560549,00.html)

Not G. K. Chesterton, too.

Readers of The New Yorker puzzled recently over a seemingly pointless article about G. K. Chesterton, of use to me at least because he was, you guessed it, a Gemini (29 May 1874).  When he was 19 he got deeply into the Ouija board with his 14 year

old brother Cecil and they were scared witless. The experience was so powerful that Chesterton was shocked into lifelong orthodoxy. He and Cecil remained staunch brothers-in-arms, both professional progressive literary journalists in London, supporting and editing each other, co-editing journals, even sharing in libel trials, until Cecil’s death in the Great War.

The tendency among prominently paired literary siblings, for one of them to be a Gemini is marked: the Corneilles (Pierre's the gemini), the Goncourts (Edmond), the Manns (Thomas), the Hitchens (it's Peter), the Wolffs (Tobias), the Collins (Joan), Byatt/Drabble (Margaret), Cockburns (Alex), Dunnes (John Gregory), etc . . . where is my list?

Chesterton had that knack of creating an identity by pairing off. His biographer Joseph Pearce examines his long and successful, though childless, marriage with Frances Blogg in a chapter titled “Chesterblogg”.  His signature controversies with Hilaire Belloc and G. B. Shaw get chapters likewise titled “Chesterbelloc” and “Chestershaw”.  Called in the title of another biography “the Prince of Paradox” he bristles with dualisms. The caricature above calls  attention to his wonderful plain old bookishness, which an old bookstore owner admires. He seems to have published yards of books;  one collection of essays published in 1908 was called “All Things Considered.” 

Chesterton is remembered mostly, however, for his Father Brown mysteries, which some esteem as highly as the Sherlock Holmes tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, also born under Gemini. Doyle was led to mediumship by the death of his brother. He paired up with Gemini Oliver Lodge for psychical investigations. Also involved with these two in the Society for Psychical Research was the scientist Sir William Crookes, (again, what else, a Gemini) the discoverer of the cathode/anode tube, who turned to the study of mediumship after the death of his brother. 

The chameleon

photo: Francois-Marie BanierReading about prodigious imposter, the "professional liar", Frederic Bourdin, in the Aug. 11-18 New Yorker, I sez to myself, "This guy has got to be a Gemini." Sure enough, the author (David Grann) gave up his birthdate: June 13, 1974. In addition to his amazing adaptability, his facility with languages, and his effortless border-crossing, it was his youthfulness, his ability well into his thirties to convince everyone he was fifteen that struck me as particularly Geminian.

Stendhal on astrology

Any announcement of future events is an infringement of the rule, and involves this danger—that it may change the event, in which case the whole science falls to the ground,  and becomes nothing more than a childish game.  

The Charterhouse of Parma, Chapter 8