Born 5 Feb: Adlai Stevenson & William S Burroughs ~ Similarly Different

Two men born on this day, 5 February, early in the 20th century:
Adlai Stevenson (1900) and William S. Burroughs (1914). So different were this pair of Sun Aquarius-types, yet with a few similarities which must be acknowledged.

I'm not going to dive into full bios or extensive chart interpretation, just a few lines on each and my view on the astrology which painted these two men in such different shades of the same colour.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson, born 5 February, 1900 in Los Angeles, California. He was a member of a famous Illinois political family, became a political leader and diplomat who helped found the United Nations, where he served as chief U.S. delegate (1961–65); mainly remembered as the eloquent, witty, stylish but unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1952 and 1956. Noted for his intellectual demeanor, and promotion of liberal causes in the Democratic Party. Republicans and some working-class Democrats ridiculed what they perceived as his indecisive, aristocratic air. He died July 14, 1965.

Quotes of Adlai Stevenson

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

William Seward Burroughs born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis, Missouri into a prominent and wealthy family. Burroughs was a novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and counterculture. He is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he picked up the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life.

Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict. Drugs, homosexuality and death are common ingredients in his novels and stories. Due to the repressive context where he grew up, and from which he fled, he kept his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood. His novel Naked Lunch, published in 1959, brought him international notoriety. The novel was prosecuted as obscene in some American states.

Burroughs died on August 2, 1997.

A quote of W.S. Burroughs

I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.

Adlai Stevenson born on 5 February 1900 in Los Angeles, California at 11.55 AM (Astro.com)

William S. Burroughs born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis, Missouri at 7.40 AM (Astro.com)

Even standing far back, a passing glance at the shapes made by planetary positions in the two natal charts indicates that Burroughs will be a wee bit more...strange, a more out of the ordinary character than Stevenson. Inching a little closer, using astrological Elements (my favourite reliable "go -to") we see that while Stevenson has a nice mix: planets and ascendant spreading through Air, Earth, Water and Fire, Burroughs has planets and ascendant in Air and Water only - not "grounded" and tending towards a certain coldness of attitude.

Taking a few more steps forward, and there's no getting away from the fact that these two men were both seriously intellectually gifted - Aquarius Sun and planets working well! Both also had Gemini input. The owners of these charts would be highly likely to turn out as communicators, of one sort or another!

Look to their natal Sun's rulers, modern and traditional: Uranus and Saturn - Stevenson's Uranus sextiles his Aquarius stellium (cluster) from warm, philosophical Sagittarius; Saturn lay in its other sign of rulership, Capricorn, in trine to Stevenson's natal Taurus Moon - his Earthy grounding. In Burroughs' chart Uranus is hooked up within that Aquarius multi-cluster of personal planets, while Saturn conjoins his natal Moon in Gemini - Air and even more Air ...and yet more Air comes via his Aquarius ascendant!

Their similarities come from a common ability to communicate, albeit in wildly different flavours to a largely different audience. Both men, from their words quoted above, had similar feelings about being different and not universally popular - not one of the crowd.

Putting the charts under closer scrutiny, several other significant differences and similarities would become apparent.

There's a rather odd commonality too that's worth a mention, but it's of no astrological significance that I can see. I noticed this from their Wikipedia biographies: both men accidentally killed another person:

Stevenson, on December 30, 1912, at the age of twelve, accidentally killed Ruth Merwin, a 16-year-old friend, while demonstrating drill technique with a rifle, inadvertently left loaded, during a party at the Stevenson home. Stevenson was devastated by the accident and rarely referred to it as an adult.

Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City, and was consequently convicted of manslaughter. In the introduction to Queer, a novel written in 1952 but not published until 1985, Burroughs states, "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death ... [S]o the death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out".

Arty Farty Friday ~ Brion Gysin & William S. Burroughs: what you get when the recipe calls for a heaped measure of Aquarius & a scant measure of Cancer

No pretty pictures today...because Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. These two didn't produce much that was pretty, though they remain revered in certain circles. They were part of the Beat crowd and 20th century avant garde who weren't known for pretty.

I've already written a post on Burroughs, his artwork and natal chart (SEE HERE). In searching for an artist who had a birthday in late Capricorn I stumbled upon Brion Gysin, who, it turned out was a good friend and close collaborator of Burroughs, who described Gysin as ".. the only man I have ever respected. I have admired many others, esteemed and valued others, but respected only him.”

Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, tape composer, lyricist, and performance artist. He was, at one time, proprietor of a Tangier bistro called 1001 Nights; later became artist in residence at the Beat Hotel in Paris. He is the one said to have submitted the recipe for hashish brownies to the Alice B. Toklas cookbook; he introduced Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones to avant-garde sound recordings and the master musicians of Joujouka (Gysin's former house band).

From cover blurb on a biography of Gysin by John Geiger - Nothing is True – Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin

Gysin (1916-1986) English-born, Canadian-raised, naturalized American of Swiss descent, who lived most of his life in Morocco and France. He went everywhere when the going was good. He dabbled with surrealism in Paris in the 1930s, lived in the “interzone” of Tangier in the 1950s and traveled the Algerian Sahara with Sheltering Sky author Paul Bowles before moving into the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris.

Gysin’s ideas influenced generations of artists, musicians and writers, among them David Bowie, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Genesis P-Orridge, John Giorno and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. None was touched more profoundly than William S. Burroughs, who said admiringly of Gysin: “There was something dangerous about what he was doing.”

Official website for Brion Gysin - images of his artwork are there, along with biographical and other detail.


In addition to their writings and artworks Burroughs and Gysin were deeply interested in magic - not the "rabbit out of top hat" kind - the darker Aleister Crowley kind of "magick". More on that in a piece by Matthew Levi Stevens: The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs.







I mainly want to compare natal charts of Gysin and Burroughs, but first a brief word about "cut-ups", a technique originated by poet Tristan Tzara in the 1920s, re-introduced by Gysin and appropriated by William S. Burroughs.
From Gysin's official website, linked above:

In the 1950s, Brion Gysin more fully developed the Surrealist cut-up method after accidentally re-discovering it. He had placed layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade. Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions of text and image. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. The book Minutes to Go resulted from his initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerged as coherent and meaningful prose.

Burroughs explains cut-ups:



In 1959, Gysin invented, with Ian Sommerville, the “Dreamachine,” a device intended to simulate lucid dreaming through the projection of light patterns on users’ eyelids.

So...Burroughs and Gysin were a pair who revelled in being, and producing things, far out of the ordinary. Burroughs in his writing, but also, as shown in my 2009 post, he dabbled in art as well. Gysin dabbled in the far-outer fringes of most of the arts.



Taking a look at their natal charts:

William S. Burroughs, born 5 February 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri at 7.40am (Astrodatabank)

I wrote back in 2009 -

Wowee!! 5 planets and ascendant in Aquarius (including Aquarius' ruler, Uranus); 3 planets in Gemini, two in Cancer. So much Air (Aquarius and Gemini) cannot be good for a body - or a mind! Here's another instance of "too much of a good thing". I've seen it before, but never quite as extreme an example as this. Too much Air blows away anything of substance, literally and metaphorically.

This guy had potential to spare, yet he squandered it. It seems to me almost as though he was born drugged and drunk - from the overdose of Air in his chart. Oh, the literary elite coo over his books with exaggerated praise. Does the average reader, though, see anything praiseworthy, or just a case of the emperor and his new clothes?

Brion Gysin born in Taplow, near Maidenhead, UK on 19 January 1916. Time of birth isn't known so this chart is set for noon.

Well..turns out their charts are quite similar - pity we don't know Gysin's time of birth.

Though Gysin had Sun in late Capricorn he also had plenty of Airy Aquarius going on, with planets conjoining some of Burrough's Aquarius planets; he doesn't have Burrough's additional Gemini, Air though. Instead he has three Cancer planets, including Moon (whatever his time of birth), and Jupiter in Pisces both of which bring in a much softer, more sensitive and intuitive feel to his nature.

Burroughs did have some Cancerian flavour - his Mars and Neptune are both in that sign, whereas the same two planets in Gysin's chart are in Leo. In both cases at least one of the Cancer or Leo planets is striking a balancing opposition with planets in Capricorn or Aquarius. So there is a similarity, even there.

The Aquarius/Cancer mixture they both had in different proportion was, I suspect, what led them in the paths of magick and psychic experimentation. Aquarius alone wouldn't necessarily head in that direction.

It's not difficult to see how these two men, when their paths crossed, would easily become friends. Their work isn't easy to like, unless one is naturally on their far-out wavelength. I'm not. I find their natal charts more interesting than anything they produced, but then, at their levels, even with my own Aquarius solo Sun to assist, I remain a Philistine.

In a conversation at AnOther Magazine website John-Paul Pryor answered the questions:

Do you think that Gysin’s symbiotic relationship with Burroughs may have held him back as an artist?

The two were certainly joined at the cerebellum, but Gysin shines a tremendous light in his own right, especially in the field of visual art. Burroughs was an underground phenomenon and the platform for Gysin’s livelihood, but it’s true that he also shadowed him. One area of contention has to do with who invented the “cut-up.” Burroughs tried his entire life to tell people that Gysin invented the cut-up, but because Burroughs ran with the idea, producing numerous novels, he is the one credited. It’s important to think of Gysin as an idea generator above all.

Do you think they were driven by a desire to be subversive?

Yes, it was a choice for them. They took their energy from being counter, and I think it was enormously important for that generation to be counter to the structure of contemporary culture in every possible way. These were guys who were stateless, gay, psychotropic experimenters (and in the case of Burroughs, also a murderer and a junkie). They used drugs very consciously as tools that supposedly allowed them to get out of where they were. There is a lot of talk about cultural subversion now, but I don’t think anybody could beat these guys at that. Gysin was also interested in the straightforward notion of magic. The calligraphic style he created was a personal glyph that consisted of drawing his initials over and over again; it was, in its way, a spell.

It all fits rather well!

Arty Farty Friday ~ Celebrity Art

AUTHOR, WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS ~ HIS PAINTINGS

In the past, I've twice started to write about William S. Burroughs, but abandoned the task because I found him uninspiring. It's hard to devote time and effort to an uninspiring subject. This, my third try, may or may not amount to something! Burroughs was one of three writers from what's become known as The Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg were others of this ilk.

It might help to start with his natal chart.



Born 5 February 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri at 7.40am (Astrodatabank)



Wowee!! 5 planets and ascendant in Aquarius (including Aquarius' ruler, Uranus); 3 planets in Gemini, two in Cancer. So much Air (Aquarius and Gemini) cannot be good for a body - or a mind! Here's another instance of "too much of a good thing". I've seen it before, but never quite as extreme an example as this. Too much Air blows away anything of substance, literally and metaphorically.

This guy had potential to spare, yet he squandered it. It seems to me almost as though he was born drugged and drunk - from the overdose of Air in his chart. Oh, the literary elite coo over his books with exaggerated praise. Does the average reader, though, see anything praiseworthy, or just a case of the emperor and his new clothes?



From Astrodatabank (linked above)

"Searching for identity, Burroughs moved to New York when he was in his early 30’s, where he joined the city’s gangster underworld. Buying stolen goods and drugs, he intentionally became a heroin addict in the early ’40s after initially experimenting with morphine. In 1943, he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two writers who later became principal figures in the "Beat" movement. The three became close friends, and Kerouac once described Burroughs as "tall, 6' 1", strange, inscrutable because ordinary looking, like a shy bank clerk with a patrician thin-lipped cold blue-lipped face." They were impressed by his obvious intelligence and worldly cynicism, and were interested in his underworld experimentation.

A strong emphasis on personal freedom is evident in his life and his writing, and he moved to East Texas, joined by Herbert Huncke and Joan Vollmer Adams, where he became a farmer, growing oranges, cotton and marijuana. The threesome lived in squalor on the farm, addled by the drugs they took. Burroughs’ life during that period was later used as fodder for Kerouac’s book "On the Road." "

William S. Burroughs is best known for his very avant garde, nay, peculiar novels, such as "Naked Lunch". That, by the way, was the last major book to be the subject of prosecution for obscenity in the United States.

Bearing in mind his writing style, it comes as no surprise to find that his art is similarly abstract and fairly unintelligible to the average looker on.

THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE - THE GOLD HEART



OUT OF THE CLOSET

















RUB OUT THE WORD





COLLAGE


He spent his later years in Kansas and there developed a strange painting technique, creating abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of, and some distance from, blank canvasses, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shot gun. Some of these creations were shown in a New York City gallery in the early 1990s.
From an interview HERE

Burroughs: When I am painting, I see with my hands. When you write, you can’t help but see what is right in front of you. This is not true with painting — your hands do all sorts of things. For example, I read a book called Bad Medicine by C.Q. Yarbro, and in it someone had overdosed on anticoagulants, so that blood was coming out of his nose, through his skin, everywhere. And the drug was disguised in orange juice, because it had an acidic taste. Well, in one of my paintings, you can see the guy drinking the orange juice, which is odd because I wasn’t necessarily thinking about that at the time. In other words, what I am doing is automatic painting.

Ellis: When did you recognize it?

Burroughs: As soon as I painted it, I looked at it and said, this is that scene. I have had several experiences like that, recognizing events in my paintings after they have been completed.

Ellis: Do you think symbols come out of your unconscious mind onto the paper through your hands?

Burroughs: I would never use the term “unconscious,” because if it were completely unconscious, no one would be aware of it. Usually it is partially conscious.

Compare Jane Seymour's art (here, last Friday). She also has Sun in Aquarius, by the way. The two characters could well be from different galaxies.