Thoughts about Michael Jackson have been wafting in all day. Dominick had on some cable music thing piped into his cafe that was playing a bunch of the old songs, ‘Dancing Machine’ came on, and I had a flashback to third grade when I was stage managing a talent show and these three hot girls did this dance act (we’re talking 1973 or so) and I did the lights, flipping circuit breakers to make the footlights on the elementary school stage create a disco pattern.
It was very effective and I had some of my first experiences of directly witnessing female sexual power, at the same time theater magic and my own creativity fusing into one experience.
‘Ben’ came on a little while later and I remembered getting that album for my birthday one year, from my mom. I started to get the feeling that his music was ubiquitous in my life, though I didn’t realize it earlier. I grew up in a black neighborhood till third grade so I was more immersed in the Jackson 5 than I might have been in another place.
‘Billie Jean’ is among my favorite rock songs of all time…I know I speak for all of us when I say, the guy at his peak was truly an artist, and like his stuff or not, the talent behind it is obvious. The more I work at my own talent the more I respect the talent of others. He made those dance moves look easy, but trust me he worked at them. How easy they look is how you can tell.
But all day long there has been something disturbing me and I’m starting to get clearer about it. It involves our perception of celebrity. The whole kid thing he had going on is being glossed over as a cloud over his life, charges dismissed, not anything worth really thinking about. Which is not surprising, we are often kind to dead people, it’s part of being afraid of death. But if you tune in and feel the potential for what might have gone wrong in that household, how weird it might have been, and how disturbed he became, it’s another world. I am not saying he did or didn’t do anything — I’m curious about our response to the potential.
We have an example here of the world covering up the question of abuse itself; it has nothing to do with MJ per se. However, as someone with iconic status, he does get the special role of projection screen and the current media environment — despite the utter frenzy about protecting kids made by politicians — is not projecting this particular issue onto him.
There’s something else tho…maybe unrelated. It involves the ‘monster’ quality that plastic surgery created. This, in a world of perfect looking celebrities. We had this zombie roaming around, a living parody of the botox-perfect teeth-forever young thing that Hollywood does.
It seemed that as he went through his plastic surgeries his true face was revealed; the face of how he felt about himself; the inner reality of how ugly people who have that kind of self-esteem crisis feel about themselves. Often they are so physically magnificent and yet beneath it is such acid selfdoubt. Looking at that monstrous face we were looking at the feelings that led to him even thinking he had to change at all; the inner loathing.
We can’t imagine this is true in some of the other celebs we love so much because their well- crafted faces — pretty much the prerequisite for fame — cover up their deeper sentiments. So we have no idea, really, it barely occurs to anyone how they might really feel…and yet we look up to them…Michael Jackson unmasked that whole phenomenon.
The scrim of the 12th house made it look like something else was happening — botched plastic surgery. All along we were looking at a vision of the motivation to do it at all.
I would just like to say that the man, Michael Jackson, may have had many problems but his relationships with children were completely pure and innocent. He was inspired by their innocence and felt that it was that innocence of spirit that could bring change in the world.
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I’m sorry Pam but.. and I have to say this bluntly.. that assertion is absolutely incorrect.
I think this has to be stated strenuously. The only thing we can be sure of is that we just DON’T KNOW. Like you, my desire was always to sustain the interpretation that you are wishing to gold plate. However, you weren’t there and you CAN’T know.
We all know the media-slur machine will kick in without fail and import gross distortions, where it can. However, those who didn’t know Jacko personally will always be guessing without the hard evidence being available.
Many folk have an emotional investment in what you stated, being true – but then those people would be well advised to look at that, closely. As per my earlier post on this, it has to be recognised that one person cannot make the world right for everyone else. The drive of underlying pain makes this understandable but the person who attempts to do that is confusing their own unmet needs with those they are claiming to want to ‘save’.
This is known as co-dependency – it is NEVER pretty when someone has to face that. Michael never really did, because of the money and fame which procured for him the capacity to shape his Neverland, Peter Pan-esque, magical world.
Sadly, that very power was what fixed in place his unworkable method of addressing his pain by making everything alright for others.
He could have done with a subscription to Planet Waves.
I would just like to say that the man, Michael Jackson, may have had many problems but his relationships with children were completely pure and innocent. He was inspired by their innocence and felt that it was that innocence of spirit that could bring change in the world. You should read his poetry: Dancing the dream (http://www.scribd.com/doc/6547388/Michael-Jackson-Dancing-the-Dream?from_email_04_friend_send=1). Also listen to him speak and you will understand the essence of the man. Read also the Michael Jackson Conspiracy by Aphrodite Jones.
I also believe that childhood innocence is what we should all be looking for in ourselves and it is that purity of consciousness which is needed today to bring about change.
So, I fear, Eric, that your interpretation is warped in some way by media influence, which MJ had to suffer all his life.
Totally agree gaelfire – only if he had balls!!! I wish I could lock all your politicians up in a theatre and force them to watch some french movies and media and learn something 🙂
As a South Carolinian, I’m finding the Mark Sanford news a whole lot more interesting than the Michael Jackson news. I hope someone at PW will write about it from an astrological perspective. I’d love it if we could have a separate blog post and comment thread about Sanford.
Because to me, the Sanford situation presents an almost ideal vehicle for an exploration of sex and power, fantasy and reality.
I’m quite befuddled by it all. I am now passingly acquainted with two governors, two Mark Sanfords: the stingy bastard who slept in his Congressional office to save money, and who embarrassed the SC state house by bringing baby pigs to run through the chamber as an indictment of “pork.” And the Mark Sanford who is a sexual and romantic being, who spent such lavish, generous praise in writing to and about his beautiful Argentine mamacita. Can you tell I have a 5th house Neptune? Is this like how it was in that Star Trek episode where we saw two Mr. Spocks operating in alternate realities?
Sanford won’t have a political career left unless he reconciles with his wife… who would then be quietly viewed as the one wearing the pants in that family. He would be “pussy-whipped,” and she would be an “emasculating bitch.”
I see a political career in Jenny Sanford’s future.
Reconciliation would be a bad deal for Mark Sanford, in my view.
This won’t win me any points with the “family values” crowd, but I rather hope Mark runs off with the mistress.
kamarel. . .”The other thing that strikes me about this week is the cluster of people that have passed and have been in the news”.
The New Moon had Pluto in opposition, and he’s in Capricorn, a very publicily oriented sign. The summer solstice has the same opposition, so expect more of the same. In addition, the U.S. chart has transiting Pluto opposite its Venus. Ray Merriman refers to this Venus as our “loved ones”. I think it can help healing by making the transient nature of life on earth more conscious to us as a whole. We have no time to waste. Chiron, with Neptune, is the “key” to unlock this group consciousness we share and now’s the time to do it, as they are both retrograde. Jupiter will facilitate by spreading the awareness, as he has already done, through networks.
Belle, I think the press, and the people “behind the press”,especially in Hollywood, had a fear of Michael. He was just TOO BIG. They take nobodies and make them big stars. Then they feel obligated to tear them down when they become big enough to reject the invasions of privacy so typical of the media feeders. The hide of a rhinoceros is required to fend them off and survive their attacks. If one don’t have that, they smell blood and will keep it up ’til it destroys one. It’s a cruel world; look what they did to Anna Nichole Smith, for example.
The problem is us, as a whole. Those of us who buy that crap (literally) encourage the bottom feeders to continue hounding their victims. Reminds me of bull fighting. Ugh.
Thanks HDW for this: “We benefit little, however, when we neglect an opportunity to hone awareness by separatng Michael the consruct from his immanent being-ness.”
I have done this without even realizing it, and now I realize how much I look for the essence of a person – what’s underneath. Having witnessed MJ’s life for practically my whole life, I feel like I have some sense of him as a being, and predatory pedophile doesn’t fit in anywhere.
It brings up alot for me around children and sexuality. I have a 4-year old daughter. I can’t read or watch any news that details harm to children. Children are so precious and amazing to me – even more now that I have one. I can’t understand how anyone could harm one.
Watch the movie ‘The Good Mother’ – with Liam Neeson and Diane Keaton. There is a fine line between a child’s curiosity and sexual appropriateness, and depending on the parent, openness about sexuality can be misconstrued as sexually inappropriate.
Fontanelle nails it: [. . .] our erotic core is concomitant with our creative core and by those standards MJ was, at the very least, deprived freedom as a child to discover his own without the thwarting hands of his managing parent/s.
And with that much energy on board, you have to know that things –once torqued out of rhythm– would go pretty much quantum chaos.
But. Here’s a thought: what if MJ (like all of us) was just perfect? Perfectly willing to play this role, perfectly willing to climb out this far into distortion and brilliant pain? What if?
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In every creative process I have endured/enjoyed or witnessed, there is a period of compression that is horrifyingly, gut-wrenchingly, wonderfully weird. Celebs are those of us who can’t walk away from it, can’t put it down, can’t stop stepping through it. We love and fear (for) them for precisely that compulsion. So dangerous to live on that tightrope – but as Wallenda says, once you’ve tasted the air opening all around you, everything else is just waiting.
There are other ways to get into that dissolving lovezone, but having a couple of million people *want* you to go there is one of this culture’s short-cuts. I’m hoping YouTube and the Net in general will reorganize the game. So far, so good.
Okay, enough theory. Back to Bobos.
(Jacqui, I’m sorry I growled at you. You’re holding another set of keys…)
M
It’s horrifying to think that sexual abuse might have happened to MJ as a child. But when you think about it, he was larger than life so maybe the nessus moon thing is simply something that he thought a lot about due to the charges against him. That is, maybe it deserves a wider interpretation than normal. I mean, perhaps it is not so much about what he did or what happened to him, but about him knowing those themes intimately through contemplation. I wonder about the patterns of love in his life. Like did he receive love early on from his family only when producing hit tracks and then lose it “all”. Just as he lost so much love from so many of “us”. So all the outward changes to his face were kind of coping mechanisms or attempts at being perfect (virgo) in an extreme way (pluto). I think the whole fiasco that happened was a charge from his core to re-evaluate his past. I mean, Eric is always talking about how our erotic core is concomitant with our creative core and by those standards MJ was, at the very least, deprived freedom as a child to discover his own without the thwarting hands of his managing parent/s.
Thank you, Eric, for what you wrote. It had been bugging me that all the news channels immediately took the same spin on MJ’s life and achievements, about how great he was, without mention of anything that had happened regarding the children (from watching our Direct TV news octibox the evening he passed). Last night things had started to develop, and Keith Olbermann had a very touching and insightful interview with Deepak Chopra that you can find on the msnbc site. Yes, MJ had a tough childhood, Thriller was great, but there was such a Dorian Gray quality to what he had become, though it was himself and not a picture that showed the tortured processes within.
I am still blown away by the similarities to Elvis Presley, both as an icon of rock and how they both passed at the hands of physicians who would give them drugs. That he had been married to Elvis’ daughter creates such a surreal story line that it seems fictional. I wonder if there are any similarities in their charts?…
The other thing that strikes me about this week is the cluster of people that have passed and have been in the news – Neda, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson. Can we use this for our healing of the group? (Just thinking of Chiron and Jupiter, making it all so big, especially Neda passing so publicly. I have been a critical care and trauma nurse for over 30 years and have been with more than a few people as they passed, but don’t think many others have experienced that first-hand. Now they have, through the technology that has brought us together. We are all one)
Thanks for posting the progressed chart. After this past week’s radio blog I started looking at progressed charts, and while it all seems fascinating I am again overwhelmed by how much there is to know in studying astrology – been doing it for over 10 years and I continually find there is more that I don’t know than that I know.
Love and Peace
Indeed, paletiger.
I think savas sums up Michael the human being – stripping away the layers (necessary for a healthy psyche).
We benefit little, however, when we neglect an opportunity to hone awareness by separatng Michael the consruct from his immanent being-ness. There is a reason why this thread, so to speak, never ends (even if *conclusion* is reached in sober assessment) and that is because the construct includes not only the ‘raw’ man and the hype machine, but the history of the relationship between those two polarities and how they have impacted each other (and are continuing to).
Fascinatingly, it is where we intersect at any point in our process (past, present, future) with any point in that external dialectical process (past, present, future) that furnishes the scope for helpful awareness, rather than a confusing web of power plays and loss of self (where others force interpretations upon us and guilt trip us to ‘shut up’ or be ta-‘boo’ed). We must continue, on some level, to take these raw materials as the basis for our journeying to our core. This is where my freedom may be touched, just as you may touch yours and others are touching theirs (or not).
These areas of discussion always draw us out from ourselves. And that is what is truly interesting about them (and useful, if we recognise what the axis is.)
HdW – ‘A brief and sober assessment that sums the whole issue up fittingly, methinks! Thanks’
Agreed. I was going to say that I thought you had put something of note out there in your previous post when this latest one came up. Still, I do think you introduced *something* in mentioning the survivor mission (whether related to abuse or not, type known or not).
The man in the mirror…wonder what he saw.
A brief and sober assessment that sums the whole issue up fittingly, methinks! Thanks, savas 😉
You know at the end of the day the bottom line I can’t deny is this: people can say whatever the hell they want about Michael Jackson and sure people die every day and certainly many people in more honorable ways than he did, but today I’ll choose to remember him fondly because there were a few years years there where I thought he was simply the coolest human being on this planet…. although I have to say that person seemed to disappear soon after.
“R.I.P. Michael Jackson, tabula rasa… please add comment here” might be a fitting inscription for the head stone. As without, so within. Your reflection is just as far away from you as you stand from the mirror. Let’s get closer in to take a peek, maybe I’ll see more of me? And is that not the human condition at all times, but especially in this media-driven, exaggerating age?
Of course, we must turn our taboos outward, because even to speak of them is evidence of guilt and the sinister, lurking in the shadows. Do we need Sigmund Freud to tell us that everything is sexual, or has the capacity to be sublimated, so that we can accuse him of gross distortions or oversimplifications? Or can we embrace it here.. and now?
Sexuality (notice I didn’t say ‘sex’) and children is perhaps a (notice I did not say ‘the’ for *fear*) final frontier.
The ‘menacing paedophile’ is the container of all society’s projected fury against the thieves of our collective innocence – lifers are able to justify atrocities against sexual offenders precisely because *all* unleash their venom at THAT particular frontier.
And we all struggle to point the mirror anywhere but outward in these matters.
Arguably, this mj focal point grants expansive scope to the public debate around our sexual values and taboos in a potentially helpful way (perhaps for the non-voyeurs among us that’s why we take up the cudgel with zeal). Equally however, this focal point carries the worst type of distortions along with it.
Many abuse survivors develop a sense of ‘specialness’ in their sense making of their own identity/role, which is at once understandable/helpful/hindering (all to a degree). When people lose power in one area of their life, they often compensate by finding it in another area (and make that a place that will NOT ever be defiled, EVER.. do your hear me?)
Here, for Jackson, was a potential method of ‘sublimating’ his pain, of righting wrongs, of using his privileged position with respect to the power of celebrity, to create, not simply a personal, psychological safe haven, but a real-world, ‘haven’ for little ones, a world necessarily cut off from the ravages of that ‘wild and unsafe world out there’. And THAT very construction of safe haven, becoming necessarily (from Jackson’s ‘protective’ standpoint) detached from healthy social moorings becomes a *new* foundation for ‘abuse’ – for it is a covert, hidden place not a public space.
Jackson may have thought he could save the whole world, single handed, and starting with children… but he was wrong..
He needed help with HIS pain at a time when it might have made a difference. But collective responsibility failed him, as with so many. Instead he must have felt compelled to find his own way (to make it RIGHT, his survivor mission).
I would recommend heartily, at this point, the Sean Penn inspired performance in the film that mythologised an assassination of Richard Nixon. It takes a close look at how folk in a pressure cooker psychology, who try to fight the demons of the past and present from the point of view only of a resilient survivor psychology, inevitably begin to fall foul of the pitfall of constructing themselves as demi-Gods who, in themselves, embody the righting of all wrongs, but then fail to see the *new* wrongs that their passion for the old ones, introduces under their conscious radar.
When we think on this subject, remaining calm and looking within may help us to find a lost part of our missing voice. There are no taboos in that place, only the sharing of our missing pieces with those who might help us to find them.. If we dare.
Well, do you?
Belle, you’re an astrology student. Let’s find it in the chart. That’s one of the things we’re here for. I’m working with Anatoly to get the natal, progressed at death and 911 call posted.
@Belle: You know I have found myself conflicted with this all day–having argued with friends with kids who claimed that as a person without kids that I “couldn’t understand” what a “monster” he might have been. But I have to agree that the celebrity surrounding him clouds so many things about the situation it’s difficult to discern the truth and unravel the thread. And quite frankly your entire paragraph: “Some part of me wishes I had been a fly on the wall during these sleepover romps of his. I’m thinking they were just noisy melees with lots of popcorn and movies, etc., with him being the benevolent and generous host at the center of things. His Neverland Ranch seemed to be the thing of which he was most proud to offer of himself and his life’s work. It doesn’t stand to reason in my mind that we would be opportunistically luring boys there for his own sick pleasure. You have to remember that he comes from a background which taught him rather strictly that he was not in showbiz to become a celebrity himself, but to perform for the public and take the business seriously. Someone with this set of ethics is not likely to let it all hang out either literally or figuratively. He was a very public person in all his public ventures…. and that would suggest he was aware of himself and/or his conduct most of the time.”
I find this disturbing. I happened to know one of the architects of Neverland and lived in Hollywood and although I am reluctant to say he actually did anything untoward, the fact that he WAS so aware of his celebrity, and IT was a construct, let us not forget, a very determined construct, as was his face, skin, etc. It seems to fly in the face of, indeed completely contradict what you posit… if that was the case, I think we would have seen MJ children’s specials where there were no privacy agreements, etc. Like I said I don’t (nor does anyone who wasn’t actually there) know for sure, but your argument would lend itself to a much more public showing of affection–and look, celebrity and music in particular, pulls at such visceral memories and heart strings and certainly with someone as talented as him, even more so… but I can separate the art from the artist and the person and have also seen incredible wealth and fame skew individuals perceptions and give celebrities such a wide berth as to them no longer knowing where the limits are… so, sorry babe I disagree whole heartedly.
Certainly Michael crafted and wore his inner-self, his death-mask outwardly for many years. We just did not ‘see’ it.
Hey everyone,
I thought I’d bring the topic up again here…no room below 🙂 nothing much to do on a Saturday morning down here in OZ, so might as well argue about perceptions and morals…
Oh yes, ‘Billie Jean’ I remember dancing my heart out in communist Yugoslavia at that time…it was so very liberating for us…
Eric writes”we are often kind to dead people, it’s part of being afraid of death”
We certainly honor dead people whether deserving or not…honor dead theorists, prophets, psychologists, quote them and live our lives according to some dead guy (it’s usually a guy) not wanting to question and probe…yes keep it safe, under the carpet, brush it off…I understand the energy that brings people in grief…it stretches your heart open and it’s overwhelming… I suppose it’s that feeling that people want to chase and be a part of…and it’s so easy to succumb to it, we all want to feel we belong…
We can all see the ‘innocence’ in MJ’s life and actions…yes, he never grew up – which was his choice as an adult…Let’s try and picture the innocence in childrens eyes…pure trust, love and surrender…I have dedicated my life to protecting this kind of innocence and don’t feel bad about it at all…As an adult, it is my responsibility…Aren’t we all, after all, trying to get back to that innocence/love??? Isn’t that what is life all about???
Much love and innocence…