Saturn’s Return (First of 2)

So, Amy Winehouse died today. It wasn’t something that necessarily caught anyone by surprise, I’m sure, but it’s still definitely interesting to see what happens, how people cope when someone in her realm dies. She, as much as I can say without being too familiar with her, is someone who has been around for the past few years. She was certainly a spectacle, a snowball of calamity that might not have wanted to get so big, but did. She was, like a Michael Jackson or Lindsay Lohan, picked apart for public consumption, her music easily overshadowed by her disastrous celebrity.

She died at the age of 27, which seems to be a cursed year for musicians. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and a host of other musicians big-time and not-so-big-time have kicked it in their 27th year. Almost all of the circumstances surrounding each of their deaths is at least strange and at most unbearably tragic. Overdoses to drownings, disappearances to murders to misadventures gone fatally awry, the story for each of them isn’t just that they were famous and died, but that they were famous and died in amazing ways. Some of them are forgotten, others become eternal legends, but they all get a stifling amount of dead.

Mind you, I’m no expert on this. I saw that Ms. Winehouse kicked the bucket, saw that she was 27 and thought, “oh, isn’t that when they all die?” A few minutes later, a friend posted a Wikipedia link on Facebook, and I caught myself up with great haste. I hadn’t realized just how many people had become a part of the “27 Club” until I looked at the page, and it was a bit sobering to see just how much of a trend it is for musicians to die so young.

Immediately more interesting than that, however, was a little “see also” provided as a Wiki Wormhole to endless learning. The term, “return of Saturn,” was familiar enough to me; I’ve seen it in music for over 15 years. It’s a Goldie album, a No Doubt album, and the idea figures heavily into one of my favorite songs from the band Tool, “The Grudge,” which is the opener from their 2001 release Lateralus.

Given that, I’d never delved deeper into just what the concept meant. Truthfully, I just thought it sounded cool and musicians, independent of each other, were coming up with the phrasing. Turns out, it’s an astrological concept, and it also happens to be completely fascinating.

So the story goes, the “return of Saturn” refers to the orbit of Saturn around the sun, and where it is in relation to an individual’s birthdate. When Saturn rounds the sun and returns to where it met you in birth, it’s said that a major life event occurs. Most people only go through 3 returns of Saturn, so it’s characterized that the first meeting represents the abandonment of childhood, the second meets the actualization of maturity, and the third is when a person truly becomes wise. This is all shaped by whatever elements a person has to battle at these crucial moments.

I, as a relatively stern rule, don’t put much stock in astrology. I feel like it’s a matter of one’s own perception; like a spiritual buffet, we take the characteristics that best build the character of our individual selves and leave the rest. It gives us only what we want and nothing more. This, also, is what makes astrology so appealing at a surface level.

For most people, even for myself on occasion, the prospect of being able to dissect my  psyche, understand my role in the world and predict my own future with little to no effort is massively enticing. It can be fed in any dialect, any writing style, and because there’s so much good or inert, and so little bad about horoscopes and the culture around them, there’s next to no risk. Such a comfortable trap…

…but today, in reading about the return of Saturn, I was entranced. It takes roughly 28 years for Saturn to make its orbit around the sun, and that connects well with my belief that people disappear when they’re 28, to deal with whatever shit is flung their way and emerge a better, stronger person. It’s said that the range for Saturn’s return is from 27 to 29 in someone’s life, and that resonated with me like nothing else.

Again, I’m most likely just filling in my own blanks to make a theoretical fallacy seem logically correct in application to my life. But I remember almost dying of a drug overdose when I was…27. 28 was the worst year of my life. 29 threatened to follow suit for the duration, but I was finally cleared of the fog in my mind and heart on July 3, 2010, just about a month from my 30th birthday. Falls pretty well into that range of Saturn, no?

I thought of that and thought again of Amy. It was curious to me that the 27 Club and the Return of Saturn were tangentially connected to one another through Wiki links. I thought of her, and Kurt, and Jimi, and Janis, and applied the idea.

Their challenge, as Saturn returned for them, was just to stay alive. Had they curbed the pain, the negativity and misery in their lives long enough to make it through, perhaps they would have transcended what we know of them. They could’ve made art on a new level, music that went further than they (or we) could have imagined, or abandoned it altogether, in search of some great new thing.

Kurt Cobain might have gone to Haiti to help after the 2010 earthquake. Janis Joplin might have left the road and settled into happy domesticity. Jimi Hendrix might have died later, saving a child’s life in a New York City subway tunnel. And Amy? Maybe she’d have just cleaned up, put out a new album, been revered as one of the greatest singers of her generation.

I followed another path through Wiki entries later in the day, eventually stumbling upon a concept in quantum physics called “Schrodinger’s Cat.” Essentially, it states that a cat, trapped inside a “diabolical mechanism” that could potentially kill in the cat in an hour’s time. We can’t see the cat, as the device is closed to outside view, and Schrodinger believed that we had to assume the cat to be both alive and dead, since we can’t verify one or the other. Since we can’t observe the cat’s survival, or its passage from alive to dead, it could reasonably be one, the other or anything in between. Our observation and the act of definition: dead, alive. That’s what makes something whatever it is, so goes the theory.

The idea bleeds into the “many worlds” philosophy, where numerous outcomes exist as potential which is then manifest as a reality when the choice is made, the path traveled.  It’s Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” the buddhist’s Fourfold Negation, the “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it…” argument and Marvel Comics “What If?” comic series all rolled into one.

Here, Amy Winehouse is alive. Saturn returns and she faces it. She lives to actualize herself, become wise. Kurt Cobain gets old and fat. Jimi Hendrix fights crime and Janis Joplin’s the first female President of the United States. All of it exists and doesn’t exist, verified here this one time and one way because we understand the choices made and the paths taken. That doesn’t mean that the other layers don’t exist, maybe even folded upon one another in the same instant. It just means that Likelihood A occurred, and Amy Winehouse is dead.

I processed the news the way an addict would: disgusted with the death of Amy Winehouse because I see in it the worst of what could have been a very real existence for myself. I could’ve not been rushed to the hospital, had numerous bags of saline pushed through my veins to keep me from dying. When Saturn returned for me, I could’ve died of a drug overdose. I’d have been an unknown in the 27 Club, but I’d have been there just the same.

I realize that and hate that someone with so much more couldn’t do the little thing I did: stay alive. Such thinking made me completely cold to the news of her death. I’m no great man, and I got over myself in Saturn’s return, so why couldn’t she?

Whatever the reason, she didn’t. Or, maybe Schrodinger would think that she did, just not here. Not this layer of life. She, like her aforementioned club members, were exploding rockets in this existence, and they burned out quickly, unsteadily so, leaving us with what some consider a tragedy, a waste of potential.

I try to just see it as inevitable. Which it was. And wasn’t. And both. I don’t know, but I can verify through my observation of the news that she is now dead. However it goes, I can only hope that she doesn’t have the misfortune of crossing paths with a world of famished consumers at a media buffet more than once. No one needs a possible outcome of her talent and a world that treats the sick as entertainment mingling ever again.