Last night, I caught a documentary about the late actor and monologist Spalding Gray. It reminded me how much I adored him – that is, as much as you can adore someone you’ve never met and don’t know in any intimate way. Watching Spalding Gray perform a monologue made my heart just about explode with delight. Everything about it, about him – the mischievous arch of the eyebrows, the plaid shirts, the puppy dog eyes, the collision of words, the comic timing – made me feel good.
Spalding Gray committed suicide in 2004. I’d lost enough people I really loved to know the difference between actual grief and the vaguely pleasurable drama of bidding farewell to someone whose public image illuminated a small corner of my life; but I cried a little anyway when I heard the news, in a way that girls once cried when the Beatles got married.
Anyway, all of this got me thinking about relationship astrology, otherwise known as synastry, in which one person’s birth chart is compared with another’s to find areas of compatibility and conflict. I’ll be honest with you: I’m just not interested in doing relationship astrology. It seems terribly complicated and unreliable (anyone looking at the synastry between my chart and my husband’s would assume one of us would eventually murder the other, and yet we rarely even quarrel). But mostly I find relationship astrology frustrating because it’s often such unhappy work. It seems that most people want you to analyze their relationship when:
(1) it’s hopelessly broken,
(2) they want you to help them figure out how to get the other person to give them what they want, or
(3) the whole situation is a fantasy – that is, they’re longing for the other person, trying to will them into a relationship, but there’s no actual two-way relationship going on.
The latter types of “relationships” are not unlike the weird, one-way infatuations we have with public figures. Elusive lovers are like unobtainable, unknowable celebrities; our attachment to them says much more about us than it does about them. So watching the documentary about Spalding Gray, I found myself wondering: what do celebrities spark in our birth charts that makes some part of us leap to attention when they wander across the landscape? What is it in their birth charts that finds a quickening response in our own?
Birth data for public figures can be elusive. Luckily for me, Spalding Gray’s birth chart is posted on his official website. There’s the arch, twinkling Sun and Venus in Gemini in the third house, and Jupiter in Gemini at nearly the same degree as my natal Gemini descendant, and – well, of course I adored Spalding Gray: he was the embodiment of my seventh house! His sly sparkle and fluidity with words represent ideal qualities for me in any partnership.
But of course, what attracts us in partners are the qualities we’d most like to develop in ourselves. I never fantasized about being with Mr. Gray; I fantasized about being him. Or at least, about having his job. I can’t imagine much that would be better than sitting onstage behind a desk and telling stories about your life, and being really good at it. Other than having that job and being happy. Which Spalding Gray, evidently, was not, poor man. But of course, that unhappiness found its way into his monologues too, and probably found resonance with my Gemini Moon and its dark square to Pluto.
Are there celebrities or other public figures who make your heart sing? You might be able to find their birth charts here. Where does their astrology connect with your own – and which parts of your inner life are projected on those blithely unaware strangers?
