Catch-22

Yesterday while sitting in a cafe I started thinking about "Catch-22s." No-win situations where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Something about sitting in coffee houses watching guys with pony tails and berets pounding away on computers that makes you revert back to college ponderings. And I guess it must be Mars tripping through my 12th house. Mars in Taurus sure has me looking up a lot of Taurus Sun charts recently. That sign just really fascinates me right now.

At any rate I wanted to find a couple of symbolic charts in order to maybe figure out a way to backtrack through and see if the configuration of Yods has anything to do with Catch-22s. Yods are triangle shapes made up of a sextile between two planets that are both connected to another planet through inconjunct aspects. Inconjuncts connect two planets that have nothing in common through element or modality. As such they irritate each other and never find a common or easy resolution for their expression. Sometimes they can lead their owners to resolve very difficult complicated issues which is maybe why they can be called "Fingers of God." Sounds like good Catch 22 fertilizer to me. On the other hand, one could look at a plain old Opposition aspects which acts as a Balancing Act between two planets in a chart. Or one could look at a chart with a lot of Gemini or Pisces or Libra emphasis, double signs which are known for indecision or scattered energy or double talk or vague ideas or too many ideas or, you know how you're feeling right now as you read this sentence, oh yeah, nobody's reading this sentence because nobody's reading this damn blog. Yeah, you know, THAT kind of energy. Bureaucracy, according to Rex Bills, is ruled by Jupiter___.

I haven't read the Joseph Heller book which coined the Catch-22 phrase but decided to look it up on Wikipedia and there you go, Joseph Heller had a Yod. He was a Taurus Sun born May 1, 1923 in Brooklyn, NY. Interesting about his chart is that his outer planets are all in aspect to each other which connects through Uranus (Age of Aquarius thinking). His Yod has Uranus in Pisces at its apex. Uranus is inconjunct on either side to Saturn in Libra and Neptune in Leo. Libra and Pisces are well represented in this Yod. The Gemini element is missing but, hey, Heller had an unaspected Mercury at 1 Gemini. He was the "messenger." As these are all slower moving, generational planets, Heller spoke to a whole group of people who hooked into this Yod energy.

Catch-22 was published in 1960 and became very popular during the Vietnam War as the perfect satire for the "circular logic" (Wiki article) of Bureaucracy. That was a War that couldn't be won. Interesting that with Uranus in Pisces once again we are stuck in another War that can't be won. Both times Uranus is conjunct the Nodes. Heller's was conjunct Pisces South Node. This last year Uranus has been conjunct the North Node.

Heller's Uranus links his Yod to the Grand Water Trine of the rest of the Outer Planets. It is trine Jupiter Retrograde in Scorpio and Pluto in Cancer. He was able to write one of the main books of his generation that held an extreme sensitivity (Grand Water Trine) to situations that never quite resolve (Yod).

I briefly spoke about Heller's Mercury in Gemini. What gets extra interesting is his Taurus Sun. He coined a phrase for his generation. The vision was very clear for him because all the outer planets were in such strong configuration in his chart. This hooks into my earlier blog (The Spiritual Side of Taurus) about Taurus being able to give an idea form especially through naming. And that Gemini Mercury helps a whole boat load as well.

The story doesn't end here, hehe.

At the end of the Wikipedia Article on "Catch 22" there's a list of earlier phrases on the same subject. "Hobson's Choice" was coined by Joseph Addison in an article published Oct. 14, 1712. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_choice. It's names the idea of a offering a choice that isn't really a choice at all. By interesting coincidence, Joseph Addison was born May 1, 1672 Wiltshire, England, same birthday as Joseph Heller. He also had Uranus 18 Pisces conjunct North Node at 14 Pisces!!!!!!

I wonder what great things the little kids born just this last May will write about the messes that are being handed down to them.

There are a couple of other even earlier phrases "Morton's Fork" and "Boridan's Ass" whose creators', or "coiners", birthdates aren't available. Is this idea of "Coining a phrase" a Taurus idea or what?