Patricia Highsmith

I recently finished Joan Schenkar's biography of the novelist Patricia Highsmith. It was a very interesting read. Figure 1 shows the cover of that book. I've seen four movies that I know of, based on her books. The first is Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 "Strangers on a Train" that I saw many decades ago and just now watched again because I'd forgotten the details completely. The second is "The Talented Mr Ripley", the third is "Carol" based on her novel "The Price of Salt" and the fourth is "The Two Faces of January". Sadly, I've not read any of her books as yet but may get around to doing so
.

Figure 1: front cover of biography

Some details that emerge from the biography are:

• she was predominantly a lesbian although she did have some affairs with men
• she started off writing captions for comics in the 1940's
• her novels usually involve murder and duality e.g. Tom Ripley impersonating Dickie
• she had an intense love-hate relationship with her mother
• she had little contact with her biological father and never liked her step-father
• she enjoyed sketching, gardening and working with wood (making tables, chairs etc.)
• her sexual relationships with women were very stormy
• she travelled relentlessly, especially in her earlier years
• she was more comfortable living in Europe and was far better known there
• all of her novels were translated into French, German and other European languages
• many of her novels were made into movies, either in Hollywood or Europe
• she drank prodigiously throughout her life (and smoked as well)
• she ate very little
• she was parsimonious, although sometimes uncharacteristically generous

Figure 2 shows her chart and I'll try to relate it to some of the dot points I've made earlier.

Figure 2: https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Patricia_Highsmith

Patricia's sexual ambiguity (she felt from an early age that she was a boy) is attributable to Mars conjunct Venus in the fourth house in Pisces. The fourth house represents ones psychological foundations suggesting the male and female principles struggling for supremacy and the boundaries between the two eroded by the amorphous nature of Pisces. She was always at war with herself or her mother, onto whom she tended to project her this inner conflict. She perceived less as a mother figure and more as a rival. She was largely raised by her grandmother for the first six years of her life and she got on well with her (Moon trine Sun).

The struggle between Mars and Venus in her psyche is echoed in the conjunction between Jupiter (her ruling planet) and Saturn in her tenth house, in Virgo. Once again there are two diametrically opposite tendencies in close proximity to each other. This constant tension in herself, that she usually projected into her relationships, was fuel for her novels and whenever she was going through a period of relative equanimity in herself and in her relationships, her productivity would suffer. The pairing of Mercury (ruler of her tenth house) and the Sun on the cusp of the third house is consistent with her career as a novelist.

Her penchant for homicide as a plot element in her novels can be attributed to the close trine between Mars and Pluto (in the eighth house) or the almost exact trine between Pluto and the mid-point of Mars and Uranus. Murder was always on her mind, with sex and death closely interlinked.

Her fondness for gardening and her lifelong interest in woodworking can be attributed to her grand trine in Earth signs, the Sun is in Capricorn, the Moon in Taurus, and Saturn is in Virgo. The Moon in Taurus accounts for the importance she attached to her base or bases of operation. Even though she moved continually between the United States, England and Europe (Sagittarius is rising let's not forget), the houses in which she lived were very important to her.

There is an almost exact quincunx between Neptune and the mid-point of Mars and Venus. Patricia's copious consumption of alcohol was a constant throughout her life and doubtless this aspect contributed to her dependency.

That's enough for now. I'll probably return to this later and add more comments. Here are some snaps of the movies that were made from her books: Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Figure 3: A thriller centred on a con artist, his wife,
and a stranger who flee Athens after one of them is
caught up in the death of a private detective.

Figure 4: A psychopath forces a tennis star to comply with
his theory that two strangers can get away with murder.

Figure 5: In late 1950s New York, Tom Ripley, a young underachiever,
is sent to Italy to retrieve Dickie Greenleaf, a rich and spoiled millionaire playboy.
But when the errand fails, Ripley takes extreme measures.

Figure 6: An aspiring photographer develops an intimate
relationship with an older woman in 1950s New York.

The Taal Volcano

Many have connected the recent conjunction of Saturn and Pluto to the beginning of a cycle that will produce profound shifts in the global financial system. That may well prove to be the case but in terms of a connection to immediate events, the Taal volcanic eruption in the Philippines is what caught my eye. This volcano is situated 14°00'N and 120°59'E and in the Philippines, the conjunction was exact at 12:12am on Monday 13th January 2020. The volcano began erupting on the Sunday. Figure 1 shows a chart drawn up for that time at the location of the volcano:

Figure 1

The conjunction falls within one degree of the chart's IC. Saturn can be associated with the Earth's crust, marking as it does the "skin" of the planet, and Pluto of course is the seething magma beneath this crust that sometimes breaks through it, as it's attempting to do via the Taal volcano. Note that Mars in the second house throws a sharp semi-square to the conjunction that involves Mercury, Ceres and the Sun as well as Saturn and Pluto. 

A youth living at the foot of Taal volcano rides an outrigger canoe
while the volcano spews ash as seen from Tanauan town in
Batangas province, south of Manila, on January 13, 2020.
Credit: Ted Aljibe Getty Images

Here's an excerpt from a recent article describing the volcano:

For the more than 500,000 residents of the exclusion zone around the Philippines’ Taal volcano, which began erupting on Sunday, the coming days will be a tense wait to see if the eruption will intensify—threatening lives and property—or sputter out. If activity ramps up, Taal is capable of producing all three of the deadliest volcanic hazards: tsunamis, mudflows, and superheated flows of gas and debris. Volcanoes are notoriously unpredictable, but there are seismic signs and others that geologists will be watching for indications of what this one will do. Taal is the second most active volcano in the Philippines Islands, which are situated at the confluence of several tectonic plates. Taal’s peak sits at the southern end of the main island of Luzon, about 40 miles south of the nation’s capital, Manila. The entire volcanic complex presents something of a geologic Droste effect (a term used to describe recursive pictures within pictures): a lake fills the main crater, which itself is an island in a larger lake that fills the old caldera that formed after catastrophic eruptions about 500,000 and 100,000 years ago. The volcano has erupted 33 times since 1572—most recently in 1977. Since then, it has seen numerous periods of what volcanologists call unrest—seismic rumblings and up-and-down ground movements indicating that magma and other fluids are shifting below the surface. The quandary for those trying to predict Taal’s next moves is that “sometimes that unrest leads to eruption, and sometimes it doesn’t,” says Michael Manga, a volcanologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

It will be interesting to see how things play out.