An Album for the Moment: Pink Floyd's The Wall

It goes especially well with the transits of current 37-year-olds!

Putting the finishing touches on the paperback version of Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces has been making me crazy. I have been listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall to try to finally tear down the wall and get the book done.

This morning, I looked at the astrological chart of the album’s release date. As noted in another post, all current 37-year-olds including me are now experiencing both a nodal return and transiting Saturn square natal Saturn. The chart of The Wall definitely speaks to both of those transits. Although this is an untimed chart, it has Moon in Aries opposite Pluto in Libra — thematically, how could The Wall NOT have a Moon-Pluto hard aspect? — very close to my North Node in Aries and South Node in Libra.

For me, transiting Saturn in Pisces square my natal Saturn in Sagittarius has involved feeling judged for not living up to society’s standards. It’s hard to tell how much of the judgment is truly coming from other people in the present moment and how much I have internalized over time. Anyway, The Wall’s “The Trial” is the perfect visual for that experience.

The original video above is intense and evocative. More recently, someone fed each line of the song into an AI art generator for a new music video — sounds like the sort of thing

Aletheia

would really get into!

Of course, the natal chart of The Wall has a prominent T-square of North Node-Mars-Jupiter Virgo/Sun Sagittarius/South Node Pisces that suits the theme of judgment well. This configuration is now getting hit by the current transit of Saturn in Pisces.

The lyrics of “The Trial” begin:

Good morning, Worm your honor.
The crown will plainly show
The prisoner who now stands before you
Was caught red-handed showing feelings
Showing feelings of an almost human nature.
This will not do.

Of course, the prisoner was not the only person guilty of showing feelings. His mother, his schoolmaster, and so on victimized him with their out-of-control feelings for his whole life.

To have the second-biggest feelings in the room is to have no feelings at all, though. My essay “Rules of Combat” in Impossible Dreams goes into these sorts of icky realities of emotional warfare. With practical Saturn giving structure and clarity to manipulative Pisces, perhaps certain unfairnesses of life will become easier to bear if we admit them more honestly.

I recently overheard my mom listening to some commentator — I don’t know who this was — talking about how American young adults, proudly full of right answers on every other topic, are uncharacteristically quiet regarding the current war between Israel and Hamas. Based on the available information, the conflict doesn’t easily fit into the usual norms for determining who deserves sympathy and who doesn’t. As a result, those who would be expected to judge from afar are instead reluctant to go out on a limb in either direction, fearful that public opinion might later coalesce in whatever direction they didn’t pick and come back to mercilessly bite them.

I find this observation completely believable. Personally, I have never been very well informed about the politics of the Middle East to begin with. Trying to learn in the heat of a rapidly shifting situation, in a time when the media is less trusted than it used to be, is confusing.

I have no idea what the right answer is in the Middle East. I do know that the right answer does NOT involve beating up your local Jewish person or your local Muslim person, and I oppose attacks of that nature that have happened in the United States.

I am just a little bit relieved that confident sanctimony has started giving way to the final resignation of Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” when “the poets down here don’t write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.”