#williamburroughs

Part 2 from 'William Burroughs and the Algebra of Need'

2: The Return of the North Node

But for Burroughs love expressed itself more like obession as revealed in Luca Guadagnino’s latest film ‘Queer’ based on the autobiographical novel from 1985. In that work Burroughs comes close to revealing the underlying drive for finding love usually with young men. He seeks a kind of ‘telepathy’ from his lovers that goes beyond the usual connection, a wordless communication of feelings. The character of William Lee (Burroughs) is self loathing and socially awkward. He is also emotionally sensitive which reflects Burroughs' Neptune in Cancer inconjunct to his Ascendant. That is likely to make the native experience emotional disappointments, escaping into drink and drugs. So he's a loner, an outsider, never getting what he wants. The search for telepathy is the solution.

Guadagnino (Leo) suggests  that this may happen using the tropical mixture of Yagé now known as ayahuasca. Whether it is a hallucination or not, there is an extraordinary fusion in a choreographed scene where Burroughs (Daniel Craig, Pisces) and Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, Scorpio) blur the boundaries of body and soul as the two melt into ectoplasmic single entity. Telepathy is a very Pluto-in- Aquarius phenomenon to be talking about right now- and for the next 20 years. Burroughs supposed that telepathy occurs through Egyptian-style pictographs but that was in the era before AI.

Whenever someone like Burroughs comes back into greater prominence in a celebrated film, I supect the astrology has something to say about it. Sure enough, the North Node continues to work posthumously. His North Node is at 16° of Pisces. The North Node has just arrived in Pisces so we are being reminded of all Piscean qualities including art, music, addiction to drugs, self sabotage, escapism and clinging to illusions, so Burroughs from his discarnate position somewhere beyond will have a transiting Node to natal Node conjunction. This point is significant because the Node slows down on that 16° as if to emphasise exactly that point. The North Node is always retrograde but from November 4th to November 17th 2025 it hovers at this degree momentarily going direct. The Nodes do this dance about 10% of the time.

The film is already in the news and has been favourably reviewed. So in November it could be the time when Daniel Craig receives further nominations and recognition for his portrayal of Burroughs. Or, either the film or William Burroughs will come back into the news again for another reason. The film’s UK release date was December 13th 2024. This was when transiting Saturn was on Burroughs’ Chiron/North Node in Pisces, and the Moon aligned perfectly at 11° of Gemini. And a Gemini Moon highlights someone who thinks their emotions rather than feels them.Guadagnino’s North Node/Mars happens to land on Burroughs’ Venus/Uranus in Aquarius and he talks of a long-standing motivation to make this film going back decades.

Burroughs included references to astrology here and there in his writing. Usually it’s a side swipe, poking fun at people who believe in the stars and planets. In Queer there’s a character called Tom Weston who is an 'amateur astrologer'. He does not get predictions on the races correct and misleads the narrator. Weston is called 'an old whore'. He crawls into a bar and the narrator says that "That Saturn Retrrogade dragging your ass, man?'"Weston replies, "My ass is dragging because I need a beer." Then he goes on to say it's not good 'auspices' to have a beer because "Venus is in the 69th house with a randy Neptune". It is part of Burroughs' darkly comic style. Some might say 'twisted'.

That it is there at all gives astrology some status in the 20th century novel. Yes, the astrologers are portrayed as wackos and not the finest of exemplars of this intuitive science.

At the beginning of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1969) there is more fun with the use of astrology. He introduces a character called Tía Dolores who sits under a stairwell in a lair padded by rats and astrology magazines. She talks of her 'noonday eye' because her eyeballs are like two spinning clocks: one going clockwise and the other counter clockwise.  It's satire but the fact is that Burroughs knew some astrology enough to make it a device in his work.

Burroughs thought there was no such thing as coincidence. For Burroughs every event in whichever order it happened was imbued with significance. This is also how astrologers see the world as they interweave the hermetic notion as above, so below, as within so without into daily life. Nothing is dismissed as trivial or unimportant. While he never specifically referred to Jung's idea of 'synchronicity', it appears he intuitively 'got' that point - that coincidence can be 'meaningful'. This allowed his cut-up technique where the pattern that words fall into creates multiple new interpretations more like a divinatory art.