Taurus 12° (corresponding to May 1, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

The sign of Taurus rules the ages 7-14 when we can be at our most vulnerable. I would venture to guess that most molestations occur to people during this span of their life. My “experience” surely did, pretty much right smack dab in the middle. As relates to my personal experience, I don’t embrace the word molestation. Although the other individual was older than me it wasn’t by all that much. It’s similar but different, I think, from having been abused by someone undeniably adult. Though any kind of sexual experience that is imposed upon a person who is as yet not of sexual age, therefore lacking the mental ability, never mind the physical equipment, to cope with it is not to be excused; I have always considered myself relatively lucky in the scheme of premature seduction in that the so-called perp was still, relatively, a peer; such that “our little secret” still managed to smack of something between friends that we are simply not choosing to tell our parents who were off somewhere doing something fueled by alcohol no doubt—at the beach with a cooler, at the track, out to a fancy boozy lunch, on the golf course—leaving, as you unfortunately did, kids home alone to fend form themselves. Besides, and I’ll get flack for admitting this, I actually found it fun at the time; blissfully unaware of how this might be sending me down a path of self-loathing, fear and making me prone to any number of floaters up and out from Pandora’s box.

The fixed sign of Taurus, as I’ve said, is associated with the garden and the dichotomy of innocence and temptation. We know the biblical line; but the Greek mythological landscape in which these archetypes live is that of Arcadia, wherein the nubile nymphs and flower gods provide temptation to even the highest ranking of gods—divine noblesse is no match for a lecherous mind and constitution. My own Arcadia happened to be the Jersey Shore where I was forever left to my own newly deviant devices at the very same moment that I was becoming obsessed with mythology and magic. I had more crushes on divine beings than I did on any real people my or any age. I fancied myself emerging from silken pools filled with immortalizing liquids and expending my natural energy running nearly naked along untrodden paths; when in fact I was simply awaking before anyone else in my jam-packed beach town to swim in the calmer waters, close to the jetty, the ocean pink from the gumdrop Sun emerging from it on the horizon, running along the water’s edge wiped clean of footprints, fueling my fantasy of total privacy and blissful isolation. I would recite incantations in my head to Apollo and Dionysus, to whom I would also make invocations dressed in robes I made out of old curtains. Not sure if I learned this trick either from The Sound of Music or Gone With The Window. Either way, I was watching way too much TV. But not in the summer!

In the summer, I entered into a fantasy bubble, much the way I would have done at two years old, entering into fairy worlds by crawling inside empty duvet covers or other wrinkles in quotidian reality. But at the age of ten or eleven, I would be ripped away, in June, from summers spent with the kids I went to school with, never having the kind of summer-bonding experiences others did when they returned in September with matching tans and inside jokes. I went to the beach each June where I didn’t really know anyone but a casual acquaintance or two I’d meet on the beach. Mostly I lived inside my own head with no parental guidance at all. One day I walked to a movie theater and sat and watched the same film four times in a row. It was hot. The theater was air conditioned. They had soda and popcorn and nobody missed me. There was a certain beauty to those anonymous days; nothing really costing more than a quarter or maybe a dollar or two for the movie, easily affordable entertainment on a weekly allowance of two to five dollars; and of course there was always change looking within the tobacco flakes at the bottom of my mothers’ myriad handbags.

So with summer arriving I feel nauseous. It might be the fact that the whole of my childhood existence was ripped away, not a single shred of it remaining. Relations all dead or estranged, the towns and houses of my youth left in the dissipating fog of memory dating back some thirty, forty years, now. I don’t have Proustian remembrances, I have waves of nausea. Is it the same nausea I felt in the first moments of being urged to do things beyond my ken? Is it trauma of these having been terrible times resurfacing in my viscera. Or is it a result of being flung so far out, as if on the tilt-a-whirl or spidey rides of my summer youth on rides in Asbury Park to which I would ride my bike, increasingly, ten or twelve or fifteen miles from where I lived or worked in Belmar, Spring Lake or Sea Girt as a young teen, still alone, nobody knowing if I return directly home from my evening restaurant shift or if I drive further toward Asbury to enter a seedy landscape of bars and clubs where nobody checked your age upon entering to drink endless Cape Codders, mostly for free, because the feather-haired bartender with the turquoise rings would give them to you and any child brave enough to enter into such a place at the age of fourteen or fifteen. I had such an education. Most folks I encounter have no idea. The lives I lived before I even had a drivers’ license. Thankfully, that life was led mainly if not primarily as an observer. And the bubble in which I kept myself was pretty secure. Trying to see myself through the eyes of….what was turquoise bartender’s name?…he went on to open the Raspberry Cafe in Ocean Grove? Oh, well, it will come to me…trying to see myself, say, through his eyes, I must have seemed like some kind of sexually confused autistic Holden Caulfield. Better known as, well, Holden Caulfield, only small and without the patch of grey hair.

Then again my nausea might just be garlic which I’ve had these past few days but not for a long time before.

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