Astrological chart courtesy of Adrian Duncan; for those of you interested in astrology, I recommend Mr. Duncan’s website. He will give a fine interpretation of your relation to the planets in our solar system. Thank you, Adrian.
Astrological, or natal, charts are based on the precise time we come into the world. My entry information is from my mother, still alive and lucid after 97 years on Earth. If you look closely, you’ll see that both my sun and moon are in the sign of Scorpio, making me a double Scorpio. Aries is my rising sign.
Scorpio people are very strange and elusive. My mother tells me my birth was easy for her, and I never kept her awake by bawling at night. I am, she says, her quietest son, the third of three or the “runt of the litter.” But I am also her most sensitive child, and when I turned thirteen, despite my English teachers in Junior High School, I decided to read a book a week.
My third selection was James Joyce’s Ulysses, and though I understood damned little of what Mr. Joyce was doing, I understood immediately that this was a work of high art, language manipulated to a vast knowledgeable scheme. I’ve kept after Mr. Joyce’s book all my life, and it never ceases to show me something new with each reading. Soon after beginning my lifelong affair with Ulysses, I fell in love the poetry of Dylan Thomas. I knew then, I’d have to become a writer, poetry first, then graduating, as it were, to prose. What I write now has elements of both, a poetry in prose, if you will.
I came to writing late in life, a late-blooming fleur de mal. What I leave behind I hope and pray will astonish another young person to take up writing as a way of life. It isn’t easy, you will fail more often than succeed, but if you are born to solitude, as I am, there is no better friend, confidante, and wonder-worker than another writer. You have at your fingertips the entire experience of human history. Start early or, like me, accumulate a lifetime of stories, but young or older, never, ever give up.