Today I’m sharing “Virgo Problems” — something I wrote back when moon missives was a quarterly print journal (2018). Edited to adjust for the fact that back in 2018, I wrote extensively in this piece about Wylie Dufresne (the brilliant chef of wd~50) who I thought was a Virgo (thanks, Google), but have since learned he is, in fact, a Gemini (thanks to Wylie for posting on Instagram about his own birthday dinner at Razza in Jersey City this year). I’ve adjusted accordingly ;)
Other Notes from the Current Sky
Mercury stations retrograde on September 9th, and we’ve been in the pre-retrograde shadow phase since August 21. What’s been coming up for the last 10 days will certainly come back around.
Mercury opposes Jupiter today— an aspect of bold ideas and grand plans, considering the details beside the big picture, swimming in overwhelm and considering what makes it so. Due to Mercury’s upcoming retrograde, we will experience this same aspect again on September 18th and October 12th. This conversation isn’t ending anytime soon, but there’s so much growth available when we dig into the details. Finding balance between sweetness and diplomacy, enthusiasm and pragmatism.
Some Housekeeping
My books are open for September! This month is the calmest astro weather we’ve had since June with things set to get a bit wonky again in October and November. What better time to review and plan for the future?
If you’re in NYC, I’m doing readings at Brick Aux in Williamsburg next Saturday, 9/10! There are a few slots left so grab yours now :)
Virgo Problems
“Structure without life is dead. But Life without
structure is un-seen.”
-John Cage, Virgo
from Lecture on Nothing
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Our experience with Virgos is not about timeliness.
Our experience with Virgos is not about lists.
Our experience with Virgos is not about neatness, nor precision.
“It’s back to school time.”
We all think about Virgos in this way. At least off the top of our heads. Organized, analytical, helpful, skeptical, fastidious, persnickety, and (not quite) pure, we think of Virgos like we think of syllabi: complex and thorough.
What we forget though, about Virgo, our teen earth sign—both mutable and mercurial—is that Virgo season is not made of back to school alone. (Everyone forces Virgo into fall, no one lets Pisces be Spring) Virgo season isn’t the fall, but a fall. Virgo season is a transition. It’s the end of something too. Not just back to school, but the scramble. It’s spending the whole day packing, and then minding five hours in the car or the airport terminal on the last day of vacation; it’s the crowded ritual of examining every aisle in Staples for the perfect funky but classic three ring binder and college ruled paper and a new TI 83 Plus; it’s the insurmountable task of completing an entire summer’s worth of assignments for College Level French, AP US History, and AP Statistics, in three days and two nights, while a rolling thunderstorm reverberates from out the window.
Virgos live in a state of inevitable free fall toward the celestial equator. Virgos contain both equanimity and decay. Libras do too. But while Libras hold onto the equinox and must lose their balance to have it at all (or nothing at all), Virgos bear the burden of always landing on their feet.
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Nothing is more sacred to a Virgo than priorities.
“You either like my style or you don’t, you’re into the vibe or not.”
-Alison Roman, former pastry chef, current food world star & proud owner of a Chemex
Virgos know what they like.
Alison Roman, famous for both her nothing fancy recipes and for being not-quite-cancelled during peak COVID, has engineered the perfect caramelized shallot pasta. This innovation originally made waves in The New York Times in early 2020 before becoming SUCH a kitchen staple during lockdown that grocery stores were running out of bucatini faster than they were running out of toilet paper and disinfectant wipes.
Really all the pasta is is six shallots, tomato paste, anchovies, and (like all of Alison’s recipes) a ton of olive oil (with chopped parsley and raw garlic on top for good measure), but for whatever reason, the pasta is addictive. The jammy sauce incredible. Days later, it’s delicious spread on bread or paired with runny eggs. Somehow this dish satisfies the simplest of weeknight lockdown dinners but also feels elegant enough to serve when trying to impress a more intimate date.
How does Alison do it?
Well, she's a Virgo.
Virgos can execute anything. If they put their mind to it. But Virgos only put their mind to it if it is worth it, and they only put their mind to it if it is love. Alison Roman loves beans. Amy Winehouse loved singing. John Cage loved silence. A Virgo who loves you will hire an entire excavation and landscaping team to move a mountain and get to you, but only if the love is real. And real to a Virgo means that the love must be useful to them. Virgos are solution oriented. And if a Virgo doesn’t love you, they will ignore you.
Remember the nature of a Virgo is not about timeliness. Virgos will also flake—not just on something small, on something important! But on something that, to them, is not important enough. In the same way a Pisces fucks up by being overly generous, a Virgo fucks up by being overly selfish. Pisces and Virgo sit side by side on the selfish/selfless continuum.
Virgos love to cancel as much as they love to plan. Alison Roman quit Bon Appétit during a meeting for the Thanksgiving issue, bored to death with the constant editorial refrains of “how can we do something new???”
As told to The New Yorker in late 2021 re: her “light” cancellation, Roman said, “The only way I will be successful is if I’m myself, because…I can have a really shitty attitude if somebody asks me to do something I don’t want to do and I can’t be myself.”
Virgos make selfish choices, because if they didn’t, there would be no excellence. No shallot pasta. No nothing.
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Like the love of a Virgo, the creativity of a Virgo is also uncompromising.
“I know it sounds a bit wanky but I can’t even work with someone unless they know more about music than me. I have to learn from them or it’s pointless.”
-Amy Winehouse, Virgo
If we are to return to the incorrect idea that a Virgo is a refreshing list, Amy Winehouse’s Virgo identity surprises us. She is a Virgo remembered less for her structure and more for her fall. But we must look at what Amy was trying to do, what she was trying to solve. Amy Winehouse’s love for music and singing is so clear in her meticulous and irreverent attention to phrasing, her perfunctory technique, and the scope of her croon.
As Anthony Lane noted for The New Yorker, “[Amy] learned or pilfered as much from artists like Theolonius Monk as she did from other singers…[S]he was an entire brass section, melted down and poured into one small frame.”
Amy wasn’t a dedicated practitioner of jazz, Amy was an instrument. A trumpet. A vessel.
John Cage wrote,
“ Everybody has a song
which is no song at all:
it is a process of singing
and when you sing ,
you are where you are . ”
Even Amy’s hair had a disheveled, but precise structure. Amy was a reliable shape. Too reliable. Caught in a bout of insecurity or vice or myopia, a Virgo continues to fall, but is unable to seek solutions. Or worse, becomes the problem. Or even worse, has nothing left to fix. Equanimity has become decay and decay, equanimity. Fallen Virgo, we say. But Virgos always fall. And Virgos always land. It’s about where they land. Amy Winehouse knew the shape she needed to hold to provide a solution, and as time went on, this shape became more and more unsustainable, until she could no longer land among us. But her shape is still with us: Amy’s voice gave structure to her larger-than-life heart.
Listen to her sing “Lullaby of Birdland,” her pronunciation and tone blending seamlessly with the brass section behind her, like the saxophone, gliding into drowsy emphasis.
Watch Amy in 2007, at a lowkey AOL “The DL” session. She sits with perfect posture on an artichoke green leather chair, hands in her lap, hair in a disheveled mess of her classic beehive. Microphone in the center, with some light hand drumming and an acoustic guitar, she channels the songs. “They tried to make me go…”
Watch Amy summoning the title track of Back to Black, in the studio with Mark Ronson. It flows out effortlessly. “Oh, it’s a bit upsetting at the end, isn’t it?” she muses, leaving the booth whistling. She does this like it’s nothing.
Because it was nothing.
For a Virgo, there is no greater relief than being nothing: living inside the list, flying above the neatness, floating on the precision. These are all givens. These are all nothing. To live inside something and do it and make it happen is nothing. To work is nothing, to love is nothing, to embody is nothing.
“ All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing. ”
-John Cage
A Virgo smiles after moving a mountain, “Oh that? No worries. That was nothing.”
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