Mary Oliver and the Pisces/Virgo Axis

Mary Oliver’s take on Emerson always surprises me. She describes him as “unbelievably sweet.” I don’t find him so. I find him upright, vigorous, rigorous and entirely admirable, but not sweet, an adjective she never gives evidence for, that I can see. She may simply be grateful to his open-mindedness, as he “opens doors and tells us to look at things for ourselves.” He takes us beyond our assumptions and invites us to explore. It’s an act of generosity, providing a steadying hand while inviting us into wonder. As Oliver writes, “the best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.”

For Oliver, one of Emerson’s extravagant possibilities is his faith that a man should want “to be subsumed, whirled, to know himself as dust in the fingers of the wind” while simultaneously believing “a man must live also in this world.” His expansive understanding can hold both Nature, “this web of God,” and nature, “the small-lettered noun, as well.” It is, Oliver writes, “as though to burden us equally with the sublime and the common. It is as if the combination - the necessary honoring of both- were the issue of utmost importance… it presupposes the heart’s spiritual awakening as the true work of our lives” (69 Upstream). 

With Saturn in Pisces, Oliver’s true work is certainly spiritual awakening.* The Pisces/Virgo axis is significant in her chart, so honoring both the sublime and the common, Nature and nature, the transcendent and the quotidian, is of the utmost importance.

Much of her writing is about her own rambles back and forth on this axis, carrying sublimity into the daily and practical matters into the visionary. It’s the alchemy out of which her poems and essays are crafted. 

You can hear the echoes of Emerson in her earth-bound example of the eternal: 

“Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else? Plant your peas and your corn in the field when the moon is full, or risk failure. This has been understood since planting began.”

You can hear Virgo’s desire to be useful in the house of eternity: 

“I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the wind-flower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”

In her essay “Swoon,” she makes a spiritual practice of Virgo’s meticulous attention to the details of a spider’s life. Her noticing is as minute as the baby spiders emerging from the egg sac: “Only by putting one’s face very close, and waiting, and not breathing, can one actually see that the crowd is moving… Little by little, one or two, then a dozen, begin to drift into a wider constellation — toward the floor or the stair wall - spreading outward even as the universe is said to be spreading toward the next adventure and the next, endlessly.” This pinpoint of focus ripples into sublimity.

Oliver witnesses the glide along the Virgo/Pisces axis in her neighbor who is highly skilled in the craft of woodworking, but is also drawn to poetry. “I know a young man who can build almost anything — a boat, a fence, kitchen cabinets, a table, a barn, a house. And so serenely, and in so assured and right a manner that it is a joy to watch him. All the same, what he seems to care for best — what he seems positively to desire — is the hour of interruption, of hammerless quiet, in which he will sit and write down poems or stories that have come into his mind with clambering and colorful force. Truly he is not very good at the puzzle of words…”

She herself has the opposite pull, from writing poetry to working with her hands. “I would not pry my own tooth, or cobble my own shoes, but I deliberate unfazed the niceties of woodworking — nothing, all my life, has checked me. At my side at this moment is a small table with one leg turned in slightly. For I have never at all built anything perfectly, or even very well, in spite of the pleasure such labor gives me.”

With a Virgo/Pisces opposition, this dance from the imaginative to manual, from ethereal to practical, is lifegiving. Oliver says it this way: “I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.”

 *(Emerson’s true work, on the other hand, is the impeccable pursuit of goals that take him beyond the known horizon.)

Source: Oliver, Mary. Upstream.