Do you remember your first extinction? Taurus and Scorpio Nodes and Nationalism
As the Taurus full moon approaches, conjunct Uranus and square a retrograde Mercury in Scorpio, and 2020 seems to have evaporated any standardization of time for many of us, questions of temporality preoccupy me.
As I previously wrote about Saturn moving into Aquarius to square our dear Scorpio moons, our Taurus moons will suffer the same fate for the next couple years. Uranus has already been there since March 2019, so our usual steadfast container for the joys of embodiment continues to be upended. Saturn and Jupiter in Aquarius seems to be, in part, about the absolutely final undeniability that we, as a species, are all in this mess of Earth-based existence together.
In Taurus, I see the non-human. In Scorpio, I see the non-living. As the moon waxes, I wonder where we go when we are gone entirely.
Do you remember your first major extinction?
It’s probably the same as mine: the baiji, or the freshwater dolphin of the Yangtze River, declared extinct in 2006. Short story: struggling with habitat degradation for decades, the completion of the Three Gorges Dam marked their final disappearance.
I was studying hydroelectricity at the time, a lone critic among a dam-happy academic cohort who understood hydro power to be Green Energy. Any mainstream critique of the Three Gorges Dam was more anti-China rhetoric and racism than understanding for the displaced animals. Even in Canada, no number of fish ladders can replace free running rapids. The Indigenous name of the town I studied in means “the place at the foot of the rapids.” Over a century ago, the powerful river was dammed and locked and only the echoes remain, any time someone says the right name.
In Le Guin’s ‘Always Coming Home,’ the Kesh ascribe individuals of a species to the Earth realm, but a species as a whole to the Sky realm. When we think in species time, we’re not quite at the deep time of geologic excavations, but we’re in a vaster territory than the broadest reaches of our current mind is able to imagine. We basically live in Empire time, or if we’re less colonized, seven generation time. Climate change has thrust the West into a more ecological temporality, but we won’t even come close to appreciating more-than-human concerns if there is a continued denial of how our ancestors are simultaneously culpable and capable of aiding us in survival and restoration. Hydroelectricity is great for humans. Hydroelectricity is terrible for the river itself and everyone else.
As we live through the Pluto return of the United States, we can feel empire time ticking. I wandered this week through this video of changing historical political boundaries of Europe. I'm attempting to understand the ways my people moved. It’s surely not entirely historically accurate, but the linearity of it is astounding, how you can see the forced migrations of people and the rise and fall of empires seem to demand the creation of nation states despite their violence, as a matter of survival, safety, identity, true Taurus values.
In tracing the emigration routes of my ancestors from Germany to Romania in the 18th century, I’m becoming versed in the old maps of empire. What I know as the glyphs of the planets indicate mines and quarries of salt, silver, iron, and sulfer. Bugles mark post offices. Fortified cities and markets are rare. Customs houses are common. There are two main routes they would have taken, as far as I can tell. One is by river, down the Danube. One is by land, up and over the Carpathian mountains. I anticipate the side with more money came earlier, down the river. The side with less went north, on foot and wagon. Last summer, unbeknownst to me why, I ended up spending a month in Krakow, Poland. The route up and over goes right past the walled city. These are strange paths we wander.
Already critical of nationalism (and monarchy) from early punk rock baby Pallas days, as I’m trying to track a lost maternal line back from Canada to Europe, I’ve become more and more frustrated with our modern reliance on literacy to tell where we are. Romania, Moldavia, Austria, Austria-Hungary, Bukovina, Galicia, Silesia, these places as they were named when my ancestors birthed and died there don’t exist anymore. The languages the records and maps are written in depend more on time than place. I lean into my mutable angles. I try to hold it all.
I learned a related lesson early. My parents didn’t hide the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide from me, what I would consider my first war. Both sides of my Scorpio mother’s family, a couple generations back, come from the area just west of Italy, south of Austria. While I didn’t completely understand the underlying reasons for the conflict, I learned to change what I said when people asked where my ancestors were from. I no longer said Yugoslavia. I said Slovenia.
Even as a child, I knew they are the same mountains, the same rivers, and listening to their wisdom, now instead of nation states and provinces, I trace the rivers and the hills. I look for the mountain passes, used by non-humans long before we ever needed them. I look to the closest oldest towns, making lists of all their different names. The names of rivers often stay the same despite changes in official languages. You’ll notice this on Turtle Island, too.
While our individual ancestors may belong to the earth with us, the ancestors as a whole belong to the sky. The lesson I see in this Taurus/Scorpio lunation is that in order to survive, in order to comprehend species time, we must reach past our individuality and into the sky realm. As Saturn moves into Aquarius, we have ample opportunity to grasp the new tools (and weapons) necessary to do so.
When we’re living in time with our ancestors, our temporalities both expand and contract. Our bodies are understood as their bodies. Our voices, their voice. Our food, their food. Our extinction, their extinction.
