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

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

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

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. 

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

For my Sagittarian friends

ARIES IN RED

I will post an image of an Aries in a red dress every day this month.

The Bride Wore Red

Aries Joan Crawford, first glimpsed as a child by her 1979 biographer as

"a tiny figure in a bright red accordion-pleated dress."

Here in The Bride Wore Red.  "Anna scandalizes everyone late in the picture with the titular red dress, a year before Bette Davis would do the same early in the superior Jezebel." (Lawrence J. Quirk, Joan Crawford)

For Bette Davis see Aries in Red #13.

Red Aries #3: Lon Chaney

The red of Aries excites and vivifies, but it also shocks and terrifies.

Actor Lon Chaney (born 1 April 1883) developed his expressivity as the child of deaf parents. The silent screen is heavily populated with Aries, which must make itself known over all obstacles. Many of the most memorable were Aries-born: Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Harold Lloyd, George Arliss, Fatty Arbuckle, Freddie Bartholemew, not to mention Marcel Marceau, Houdini, Bill Irwin and David Blaine; there’s no silencing Aries.
For the range of his extreme characterizations Chaney was known as the ‘Man of 1000 Faces’,  recalling Aries Joseph Campbell’s mythic ‘Hero with 1000 Faces’. (In his one talkie Chaney played a ventriloquist with five voices.)

Chaney as The Masque of the Red Death
Opposite Joan Crawford in the gruesome 1927 silent The Unknown, Cheney plays Alonzo the Armless, a circus knife thrower. He excelled at the grotesque, the Hunchback of Notre- Dame, the scarred Phantom of the Opera, pathos and grotesque deformity are his Self. The Aries unconscious teems with primitive horrors, and a distinct terror of nothingness, as if recalling the suffocation of the womb.  

Chaney's talents extended far beyond the horror genre and stage makeup. He was also a highly skilled dancer, singer and comedian. In fact, many people who did not know Chaney were surprised by his rich baritone voice and his sharp comedic skills.  

Purposefully fostering a mysterious image, he  avoided the social scene in Hollywood. He tried not to be photographed undisguised and said “Between pictures there is no Lon Chaney."

Mars-ruled Aries is partial to the military. Chaney’s portrayal of a tough-as-nails marine drill instructor in Tell It to the Marines (1926), one of his favorite films, earned him the affection of the US Marine Corps, who made him their first honorary member from the motion picture industry, and provided a chaplain and Honor Guard for his funeral. He was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California, next to the crypt of his father. His wife Hazel was also interred there upon her death in 1933. For unknown reasons, Chaney's crypt has remained unmarked.

James Ensor, Aries in red #9

James Ensor, The Red Parasol

James Ensor, the Belgian fantast, was born on April 13, 1860. His canvases are always marked by the well-placed reds. Favorite themes are red-cloaked skeletons, red lips, red caps, red fire.

Astrology cannot be captured by science. The two may be regarded as enterprises at right-angles. Scientific procedure requires the scrupulous eradication of subjectivity. Astrological procedure, on the other hand, requires the equally scrupulous  conservation of subjectivity. One must not confuse the truth of the horoscope with  methodical paragraphs of interpretive boilerplate. The truth of the horoscope is not to be found written on a page, it is something that unfolds within the experience of the Subject.

James Ensor, Skeletons warming themselves

Ensor, Self-portrait in red hat

Red Aries #10

Jayne Mansfield is Aries in Red #10

ARIES IN RED #14

Emma Thompson (b. April 15, 1959 )

Brenda Spencer (b. April 3, 1962). “A tiny girl, under five foot tall, with long red hair, epileptic. She stayed with her father after her parents divorced, living across the street from a school. On January 29, 1979, she took a rifle that her father had given her for Christmas, shot the custodian and principal dead and wounded six children and a policeman, because 'I hate Mondays.' ”   Astro Data  V, Profiles of Crime.


Marguerite Steinheil (b. April 16, 1869) Parisian courtesan, mistress of a president, murderess, known as the “Red Woman of Paris”.

VanDyck n Descartes, Aries red #18

The great 17th century portraitist Anthony Van Dyck, a March 22 Aries, adored the ferric oxide pigment which has come to be known as Van Dyck red and made it the principal feature of many paintings. Red swags, red drapes, red trousers, dresses, robes, ribbons, tablecloths, stockings, capes, cloaks, rags, you name it.

Strange! That thy hand should not inspire
The beauty only, but the fire:
Not the form alone, and grace,
But act and power of a face. (Waller, To Van Dyck)

Van Dyck introduced to portraiture the goal of presenting, on a red curtained theatrical stage, distinctive, individual personality, dash and flair. His years (1599-1641) correspond to those of Descartes. His subjects all say, "Therefore I AM!" Descartes (born March 31, 1596-1650), the philosopher who ushers in the modern era, is ground zero for a methodical exposition of the zodiac as an approach to the post-modern Subject. (Which is in the works, but we're doing red dresses now.) We have no portrait of Descartes in red (although he was known to dress en militaire and carry a sword). Let Van Dyck represent him visually.

ARIES IN RED #19

Red Aries #20

Add Hugh Hefner to the list of Aries Casanovas.

Red Aries #24 (Mothers)

Ann Miller, star of "Easter Parade", b. April 7, 1923

ARIES'S MOTHER PROBLEM

I hurry through these references in order to achieve a general impression of the harsh reality of the birth experience which Aries exposes.

Samuel Beckett (b. April 13, 1906): His parents made it clear that he was an unwanted pregnancy. He was obsessed with memories of suffocation in the womb, of an attempted wire hanger abortion on himself as a fetus, and with a nagging sensation of having been “incompletely born”.

Marguerite Duras (b. April 4, 1914) was obsessed by her demented mother, who favored her horrible eldest son. She was traumatized by her only pregnancy, which ended in stillbirth. She wrote, “I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”  

Cynthia Ozick (b. April 17, 1928): Her tale of Puttermesser and the Golem is an amazing meditation on the  mother/child dyad. So, for that matter, is her famous holocaust story, The Shawl.

Baudelaire (April 9, 1821) and his mother, the remarried Mme Aupick, a paradigmatic relationship acutely analyzed by J-P Sartre in his classic 'Baudelaire'. Baudelaire lived fatherless with his mother in a state of symbiotic, quasi-fetal bliss, until he was eight, when she abruptly married Aupick. The poet never recovered from the late loss of his paradise. 

The mother of the poet Paul Verlaine (b. March 30, 1844) “suffered three miscarriages before Paul’s birth in 1844; she preserved the fetuses in jars. When Paul came along he received the obsessive and indulgent mothering that such behavior portended. . . .In 1869 Verlaine made at least two violent attacks on his mother, threatening to kill her (how genuinely remains unclear), and on one occasion breaking the glass jars in which the three dead fetuses were kept.” (Bohemian Paris, by Jerrold E. Seigel)

Bette Davis, in the film Now, Voyager a self-proclaimed matricide and in her daughter's autobiography My Mother’s Keeper an abusive parent. Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, an abused mother, and in Mommy Dearest, an abusive mother. In Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, they abuse each other.

Among the psychoanalysts:
Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, two important post-Freudian theorists specializing in the child: Each of them criticized Freud for his over-emphasis of the oedipal phase and his neglect of the crucial and often traumatic mother/child bond.

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897): As a teenager he spied on his mother’s trysts, breathlessly reported them to his father, and thus precipitated her suicide. Then he had to discover her body. This parallels Aries Christopher Hitchens's mother's suicide, which he hints he might have prevented. He was summoned to Athens to fetch her body, and shockingly confronted the blood-soaked scene of her death.

Billie Holiday suffered this formative meta-maternal disaster. Her favorite family member was her greatgrandmother, her grandfather's mother:

She really loved me and I was crazy about her. She had been a slave on a big plantation in Virginia and she used to tell me about it. She had her own little house in the back of the plantation. Mr. Charles Fagan, the handsome Irish plantation owner, had his white wife and children in the big house. And he had my great grandmother out in back. She had sixteen children by him, and all of them were dead except Grandpop.

We used to talk about life. And she used to tell me how it felt to be a slave, to be owned body and soul by a white man who was the father of her children. She couldn't read or write, but she knew the Bible by heart from beginning to end and she was always ready to tell me a story from the Scriptures.

She was ninety-six or ninety-seven then and had dropsy. I used to take care of her every day after school. No one else paid any attention. I'd give her a bath sometimes. And I'd always bind her legs with fresh cloths and wash the smelly old ones.

She'd been sleeping in chairs for ten yearrs. The doctor told her she'd die if she ever laid down. But I didn't know. And once after I'd changed the cloths on her legs and she had told me a story, she begged me to let her lie down. She said she was tired. I didn't want to let her. But she kept begging and begging. It was pityful.

Finally I spred a blanket on the floor and helped her stretch out. Then she asked me to lie down with her because she wanted to tell me another story. I was tired too. I'd been up early that morning to scrub steps. So I laid down with her. I don't remember the story she told me because I fell asleep right away.

I woke up four or five hours later. Grandma's arm was still tight around my neck and I couldn't move it. I tried and tried and then I got scared. She was dead, and I began to scream. The neighbors came running. They had to break Grandma's arm to get me loose. Then they took me to a hospital. I was there for a month. Suffering from what they said was shock.

When I got home Cousin Ida started right in where she had left off, beating me. This time it was for letting Grandma out of her chair. The doctor tried to stop her. He said if she kept it up I'd grow up to be nervous. But she never stopped.

What a gruesome version of the birth trauma, the terrifying struggle of nascent being against negation and regression, that continually animates Aries, the sign of beginning.

James Watson, Red Aries #27

The dustjacket of The Double Helix is red because blood is the metaphor of hereditary transmission – bloodlines, blood relations, blood will tell. The Aries author told us (in his  third volume of memoirs, Avoid Boring People) that he was delighted by the jacket color. The 1953 book shocked with its demonstration that science is cutthroat and personal, and that scientists are primarily motivated to high achievement by the blind desire to get laid. Watson’s second memoir is called Genes, Girls and Gamow, reiterating the strain of crude sexual reductionism that infects the ‘selfish gene’ theorizing of the belligerent Aries Richard Dawkins as well. This Don Juanism, an inability to get beyond the domination of pubescent excitement, is Aries extroversion par excellence. In all three of his memoirs Watson comes across a puerile oogler.

On the cover of Avoid Boring People Watson put a picture of himself hammering his chair in childish glee.

Watson is a good read, with a brisk Aries writing style. (“Use snappy sentences to open your chapters,” he advises.) Obviously he enjoys ruffling feathers, but it comes as a shock to read sociobiologist E. O. Wilson say he was “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met.” After all, Wilson,  author of Consilience,  is a master at smoothing out differences. Watson notes with pleasure that Linus Pauling called The Double Helix “a disgraceful example of malevolence and egocentricity’. At the beginning of his career he “deeply offended several old-timers by giving lectures in unlaced tennis shoes and wearing my floppy hat at night as well as during the day.”  At the end (recently) he scandalized with reactionary remarks about race, intelligence,  sexuality,  ecology,  obesity,  and so forth,  as if compelled to hit the hot button.

Watson is not so much a great scientist as the most aggressive competitor in a race to complete a difficult puzzle. The word double (in The Double Helix) invokes the Gemini, so the astrologer is pleased to remark that Watson’s partner in the discovery of the double structure of the dna molecule, Francis Crick, was born under that collaborative sign.

Watson’s three volumes of memoirs have importantly contributed to an awareness of the subjectivity of science, a field whose emphasis on objectivity could only be pierced by an exhibitionistic Aries.