Saturn's return and walking down an over-engineered psyche

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This is one of those niche problems that I don't think everyone will be able to relate to directly but I think there are manifold examples that I think people could relate to here. Recent rock star suicides come to mind, the 27 club comes to mind, and in some way I wouldn't be surprised if Collin Wilson's 'peak experience' dynamics come into play here as well though, regrettably, his lectures have always bored me when he starts talking about the 50/50 vs. 51/49 stuff but... I digress.

When I think about how a lot of more creative types approach their pre-teen and adolescent years I get the sense that a lot of people have sort of a reflexive instinctual inclination that could be best described as fitting something like a classic Gnostic theme of operation. For example, I had a cousin who I really looked up to as a kid - super popular guy in the area, was big on chasing down all of the most intelligent alternative, grunge, funk, skater-thrash, metal, trip-hop, etc. as a kid, had a reasonably good garage band, and almost anytime I was over there were usually a dozen or more guys and girls in the driveway and the guys were all doing different kinds of tricks on the skateboards, jumping over coolers and all that. His dad actually build them a half-pipe in the back yard and in the basement his parents were actually helping assemble a studio - it was pretty well loaded by the time he was 18 or 19. He passed back in 2008 and a lot of things made sense that I picked up after that, ie. a lot of this was a sink for his struggle with bipolar - the creativity, the dive off into intellectual complexity through music, etc..

I don't even think this takes bipolar though as I've run into a lot of guys and girls who run into the same issue - ie. they hit almost too much of a creative stride in their late teens and early 20's, style themselves up to the hilt, and they do so almost with the same sort of spirit that John Ralston Saul describes of the renaissance painters who believed that if they could perfect the painted image enough some type of magical transcendence would occur, they finally got to the peak of realism with Raphael and - big letdown, no such transcendence happened. From there art walked increasingly away from realism, went into some interesting territory for a while with respect to subjective representation but after that it really went decadent to where a couple decades ago people were seeing who could do cooler things with jars of urine.

I can think of at least a handful of my favorite musicians who were making absolutely beautiful music in their mid 20's, ended up in a suicidal phase in their late 20's and early 30's, and had to readjust/recalibrate something within themselves to come out on the other side of it.

My own struggle in this regard - I was beset pretty badly as a kid and as a teen, my battle against that as well as seeing my cousin's social success leveraged my own desire to treat both my pool of experiences and my creative desires to transcend known reality through art and music. I was able to pull at least a little bit of something out of that musically through my 20's but by 30 I noticed that the technical side of my production destroyed the fun of what I was making, like a lot of people who are super-demanding of the emotional and instrumental content of their music I made very few compositions compared to what other people were doing, and eventually I had to put it down. That set off years of disorientation, of me trying to figure out how on earth to reinvent myself.

The takeaway - during the time most of my friends and really most people would be getting families together, establishing career, etc. I was dealing with a crippling identity crisis and while I had a good degree I floated from dead end job to dead-end job. That may not have entirely been my fault but I look at the trajectory of the mess I had to clean up and a large part of that period was me slowly eating my own soul until I'd eaten, digested, in a way destroyed a lot of what made my own inner world beautiful for the sake of surviving the difference between how I generally felt and...well... what the real world actually was.

The mistake I made and so many other people have in this regard seems especially easy and the strange thing is - I can't tell how much of it is really bad habit vs. mismanagement of drive. It's a bit like our culture, when they see this urge in children, doesn't know how to offer minor course corrections which would help that child rearticulate it or at least put the right safety valves in so that the later course-correction isn't so painful.

I might not have articulated what it is that I'm looking for in terms of responses to that, its just that all of that hit me a bit more last night after listening to some retrospective albums by 90's hip hop artists as well as having my bubble popped on the idea that Tricky was some kind of super ladies man when it seems like he's fumbled through his relationships and made as much of a mess as anyone. Seems like we're all human, some more inclined to the creative pull than others, but I think there's a problem with what I described both on the upswing and the downswing. On the upswing there's the illusion of transcendence and salvation - here on earth - through emotional and creative development. On the downswing it's running full speed into the sense that not only does society see creativity as meaningless glitter - worse, most people seem like they can't even process it ie. it's a nearly invisible skill set, it further damages a person's natural herd conformity, so they pay through the nose for their ambition. I feel like in a healthier society they're be a bit more balance or meeting in the middle with that.

I feel sad that I wasn't "genius" enough to have such extreme emotions in my 20's.

Perhaps, if I were exquisitely creative like the members of the "27 club," I could have taken a downward slide to the Abyss, and picked myself right back up, learning lessons along the way.

I think balance is good-----but I also believe deviations from the "norm" could prove more productive to those folks than the degree of productivity found in those who live on a relatively "even keel," which I did when I was approximately 27.

It really depends what side of it you're on I suppose - ie. whether it's actually being in a position to be a great artist, musician, or something along those lines vs. having it eat one's potential in other areas. I think the later was more the way it worked out at my end in that whatever I wanted from it wasn't going to happen.

The way I'm trying to chip away at both my 20's and the love I received from my parents and family is that I need to rearrange it into something unassailable from the outside and into something that I wouldn't feel encouraged to assail from the inside. In a lot of ways it seems like we get fired off the mark in different ways - whether it's scholastic achievement, being told at a certain age that you're a wonderful person and that you'll find a great partner, you get these visions of who you think you'll be by 25, 30, etc.. and it's disorienting to say the least finding yourself with all of the feelings and expectations in tact but far less of it actualized. That's really where I'm trying to chip away at it - ie. where it's grown impractical and become more of a burden than anything else.

Saturn doesn't really return until you're 28, so I don't think you can blame it for the "27 club" effect. For me, the experience was like being squeezed through a black tunnel, like birth. All the extraneous things I'd been experimenting with (identities I'd tried on, jobs I had quit) fell away, so that my essential self could make it through more solid, more compressed, and more able to survive the intense heaviness of Saturnian energy.

Our society doesn't really have a way to help late bloomers; having a developmental delay means having to do things on your own, or with some eccentric mentors.

I'm not really sure if I could have been a better, more creative man than I am now.

I don't know, really.

But I do believe that I squandered something during those years---by remaining in a complacent state.

True. I guess I have to admit, as shoddy a Hermeticist as it might make me, I tend to think the planetary themes are great analogies more so than actualities. I feel pretty good about their handling on the Tree of Life, less sure of them in the sky mapping earth's future.


I hate to say it this way, it would probably sound like I'm embellishing, but it's been a nearly identical experience for me. I really felt like I was free-falling down a really deep hold that was getting narrower and narrower and I was terrified that I was going to be a line of blood and gore cheese-gratered down the sides. One of the worst elements of that was having four years of sketchy temp jobs and the realization that every new job and every new situation was like a spin and click of the chambers in Russian roulette - the right 'opportunity' could have destroyed my future and I came close to that several times, either by terrifying incompetence over me or my my own nervous system doing a king-sellout on me at times that had me deeply wondering how long it would be before I was unemployable. All of that combined with me being forced to cannibalize a creative wealth, feel that at lot of my deepest and dearest goals were vapor in the real world, so it was all kind of going on at once.

I did have the good fortune of having my full-physicalism end in 2012 although I knew the spirituality trip in a lot of ways would just be fuel on the fire. In some ways it was, in others I really doubt I'd still be here if the spiritual journey hadn't fired up that summer.


I'd have to go more with just outliers in general rather than late bloomers. To be above the curve, to the side of the curve, to the north-east or north-west, if you're over two standard deviations from the straight-vanilla mean you suffer a steady diet of disconfirmation and invisibility and to whatever extent that you're able to affirm your own life you'll usually do so with the understanding that you're building your own world from the ground up. The last part can actually be very healthy and who knows, some of us can I suppose raise ourselves to be true societal exemplars, but it's definitely a challenging road to walk.

nice post!