Common Ground: The Singing Astrologer

January 2006

The Singing Astrologer

by Traci Hukill

It was Rob Brezsny’s suggestion that, as long as we were outside, we sing a song for the trees and the insects.

“Especially the poor, underappreciated insects,” he said.

I hesitated. Years ago, I’d adopted Brezsny as my unofficial guru. Each week I rushed to read “Free Will Astrology,” his weekly horoscope column found in 130 alternative newspapers across the country. In these potent little gems, packed with humor and trivia and presented in the wise and playful voice of a bodhisattva moonlighting as court jester, I regularly found the window to a more interesting universe. The possibilities were larger and more generous; my quest to find them more fun.

And here was Brezsny himself, sitting before me under an oak tree, dressed all in black with his iron-gray hair flowing, with his quiet focus and suggestion that we engage in an egoless pro bono performance for the native flora and fauna. Of course I wanted to sing for the trees and insects!

But I’m a reserved gal, a Virgo with a tidy closetful of hang-ups about my dignity. I did a quick mental check: How likely was it that someone would come walking by? It was about 2pm on a Thursday. We were on a parched hill at the end of the street in San Rafael where Brezsny lives. Not very likely. I signed up.

Brezsny began, lifting his chest a little and projecting toward the trees on the next hilltop. “I have a dream,” he boomed in a big, blues-inflected voice. (Brezsny is a rock musician with several albums to his credit.)

“I have a dream,” I warbled after him.

“That in the New World, there will be a new Bill of Rights. The first amendment will be, ‘Your daily wage is directly tied to how much beauty and truth and love you provide,’” he sang.

“Hallelujah to that,” I responded, visualizing an insectoid audience. I was beginning to loosen up a little.

“I have a dream that the New World will have rapturists…”

“Rap-turists!”

“…And they’ll vastly outnumber the terrorists…”

“Terr-orists!”

I didn’t realize it then, but we were singing the thesis of Brezsny’s new book, Pronoia Is The Antidote for Paranoia: How The Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings (Frog, Ltd). And I was feeling — like I do every time I pick up this generous workbook-sized guide to “rowdy bliss” — new and creative and refreshed. It is probably unwise to believe Brezsny is the source of this magic, but he knows where to find it, and he definitely knows how to deliver it.

The Universe is Your Ally

Pronoia is Brezsny’s current crusade. The term itself was coined in the 1970s by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who helped found the Electric Frontier Foundation, but it wasn’t until an epiphany at Burning Man in 2001 that Brezsny fully grasped its power. As defined in his book, pronoia is “the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of training your senses and intellect so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.”

The key to being a pronoiac, says Brezsny, is finding truth and beauty everywhere. In his view, media is committing “genocide of the imagination” by convincing people that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and that tales of destruction are more interesting than tales of joy. It’s the pronoiac’s duty to challenge this notion that cynicism equals insight, says Brezsny. And, as with breaking any taboo, there are risks.

“If you cultivate an affinity for pronoia, people you respect may wonder if you have lost your way,” he writes. “You might appear to them as naïve, eccentric, unrealistic …. Your reputation could suffer and your social status could decline.”

Part of the problem is that joy has a bad rap. But pronoia is not to be confused with pretending everything is fine, Brezsny told me as we trudged up the trail on our walk. “Some people have the sense it’s about being happy all the time, being famous, being powerful, having a cute lover,” he said. “Of course, that’s not my version of pronoia at all, although other people are free to create their own definition.”

It’s more like embracing every experience, including the difficult ones, with a special effort to seek out the joyous ones. The payoff? “It’s a gift to make you smarter and kinder and wilder and trickier and to force you to accept the Goddess’s strategy, which is to keep changing things all the time,” he said. “Most people resist that aspect of the Goddess’s strategy, but that’s what she’s gonna keep doing no matter what we think.”

Pronoia is a complex and elusive concept, so it makes sense that the book is impossible to categorize. According to its author, it’s an inquiry, not a dogma. It pokes out in all directions, into diverse literary forms and subjects. It’s nonsequential, so you can open it anywhere and find intriguing observations, quotations, factoids and suggestions, all in support of the pronoiac worldview. Here are some examples:

“Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy.”

“Some piranhas are vegetarians.”

“The number-one trait of happy people is a serious determination to be happy.”

“Pick out two strangers you aren’t attracted to and who seem lonely and dull. Discreetly discover their names and addresses. Write them each a love note and sign it ‘Your Secret Admirer.’”

“When you come home after a day of triumphs, take out the garbage.”

“Open-hearted skepticism is the light in our eyes.”

Fuzzy and Mercurial

One of the effects of all this crackling mental energy and creative variety on a swooning fan like me is the discovery that Rob Brezsny is even more fabulous than previously suspected. And it turns out that Brezsny struggles with this. He refers to himself in self-deprecating terms as a “D-list” celebrity, but he consciously promotes himself in a certain way — even as he tries to remain aware of the pitfalls of doing so.

For example, Brezsny avoids revealing too many biographical details, like age. In an email, he explained that part of his usefulness to people lies in his role as a projection screen. He says he tries to remain “fuzzy and mercurial,” blending the archetypes of “the disciplined elder and the wild-eyed apprentice” in order to be whatever readers need him to be. Cultural biases about age would impede that, he wrote.

“So am I just another vain, F-list celebrity trying to seem younger than I am?” he queried, demoting himself in the process. “I wouldn’t be mad at you for thinking that.”

Under a Marin county oak tree, we talked about ego and Brezsny’s complicated relationship with the cult of celebrity.

“I recognized that was part of my work some time ago,” he said. “Given the conditions of the culture, I had to make my personality part of what I offer, because that was really the only way to attract people to the information that I had to give.

“It’s a dangerous road to take, because you’re always at risk of believing in your own hype, painting your own personality too beautifully and just reinforcing the cult of celebrity.”

One way Brezsny combats that tendency is to laugh at himself every chance he gets. As we walked back down the hill toward the neighborhood where my car was parked, he told me the story of how he was shot in the hindquarters one night in Durham, North Carolina, many moons ago.

He had just been to a student demonstration that day, so it could have been reactionary Southerners who confronted him at the bus stop with a sawed-off shotgun. Or it might have been his girlfriend’s disapproving, Mafia-connected parents who were behind the incident. Either way, Brezsny took the shot in the butt-cheek and survived with little lasting damage, aided, the doctor told him, by the wad of paper in his back pocket. Brezsny had written a 24-page poem, folded it and stuck it back there for safe keeping.

As I listened, my mind spun out a bouffant of sentimental cotton candy about the metaphysical implications of being protected from harm by the divine hand of the muse. Brezsny had a better version:

“Poetry saved my ass.”

Traci Hukill is a regular contributor to Common Ground.

Visit Rob Brezsny’s website at www.freewillastrology.com

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