Entry #3: Astrology, Poetry and Fairytales: In the Creation of my Novel

Any writer will tell you that ideas for a book will accrue over time into a surfeit that might cripple a book’s execution. Here's how I escape the trap.

From the bottom of a pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

—Sylvia Plath

A BIT OF WISDOM THAT I OFTEN REPEAT to folks who challenge astrology’s integrity comes from culture critic Camille Paglia who wrote in her seminal book Sexual Personae:

“People who dismiss astrology do so out of either ignorance or rationalism. Rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts. Interpretation of poem, dream or person requires intuition and divination, not science.”

Unlike most skeptics who deride astrology while never having studied the subject, Paglia knows the art intimately. When she had freer time in college, she learned to construct and interpret horoscopes. She explained this in detail and shared precise delineations of her birth chart with one of my editors years ago

In the first two entries of this diary, I've written about how, as an astrologer, I’ve based significant plot and character developments on my comprehension of Jeffrey Dahmer’s natal horoscope—associating his aggressive pathology to the disruptive square between the planets Mars (demand) and Saturn (denial).

Now I want to highlight other approaches that I’ve employed both in biographical research and through the peculiar transmissions that come from the world of poems and fairytales.

Poetic License

Two books have acted as compositional touchstones while writing my novel—Sylvia Plath’s split-your-brain-in-two collection of poems, Ariel. And Jungian Marie-Louise von Franz’s revelatory Shadow and Evil in Fairytales.

Ariel was given to me by a bohemian friend, a girl that regularly delved into occult and taboo topics throughout the year leading up to our graduation from high school.

The two of us would meet in the morning, before class, smoke cigarettes, and talk astrology, pop music, and eventually poetry.

Our watering hole was at a designated ‘outsider’ location across from the school’s front lawn and involved foolish pastimes like boozing, drugs, and unfettered flirting. We were also discussing tragedies.

Namely, two home suicides by distraught teens succumbing to love life catastrophes. Enter the witchcraft of Sylvia Plath.

Growing up in my suburban ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ town, I had no interest in poetry. But at first read, the injection-like quality of Plath’s poems entered my brain with a shock.

I became spellbound, not by the cult of Plath but by the possibility of conjuring magic with language.

“Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.” ―Sigmund Freud.

Now, whenever I stall at a section of my book’s narrative that requires a disturbing description of dark sex—or the construction of a paradoxical dream—I will stop, step away from my desk, and read something randomly from Ariel.

This pause flips me into the groove I need to travel into my trove of impressions and weird reveries that exist half-sketched, half-erased in palimpsest form. The pause helps me to discriminate.

Any writer will tell you that ideas for a book will accrue over time into a surfeit that might cripple a book’s execution.

Reading poetry can instill the prose I write with the same strange metamorphic permission that poetry affords language. I can then apply a fresh way of seeing and composing my narrative.

This marks a way for me to fill in my book’s protagonist—a charmed but conflicted character intimately entwined with Dahmer. And to clarify the young Jeffery Dahmer’s blurry ‘on-the-spectrum’ aura.

Going Under

In the introduction to Ariel, the poet Robert Lowell tells us that Plath’s poetry, “and life are not a career; they tell us that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it.”

This mirrors exactly what a young Jeff Dahmer dropped into—a life not worth it—after committing his first murder—straight out of high school at eighteen.

After taking the life of a fellow human, Dahmer sank into the underworld—and became privy to all of the numinous qualities associated with that twilight realm. He then, nearly a decade later, and without interruption, went on to commit sixteen more murders.

Trying to construct a disciplined ‘daytime life’—living a life you and I would recognize—proved impossible. The die was cast on his teens, which blew open a door to schizoid withdrawal and moral degradation.

I’ll say quickly—having a younger brother who took his own life in his teens—that suicide, like murder, partakes of otherworldly—‘divine’ or ‘demonic’—devices.

The writer A. Alvarez called suicide ‘the savage god.’ And we associate the taking of one’s life—or another’s—as an act reserved for the gods. Not fellow mortals (or oneself).

The Problem with Evil

In writing what is unequivocally the best close read on the serial killer, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, the UK biographer, Brian Masters makes a keen observation about using the word ‘evil’ in association with Dahmer.

He notes that evil:

“…is an occult word, meaning nothing precise or measurable, and is simply an excuse for not thinking. It signifies in effect, ‘I don’t know’ and should therefore not be a part of the writer’s vocabulary.”

After the tremendous success of Ryan Murphy’s series on Netflix, the re-emergence of Dahmer back into our collective imagination brought with it two terms that I’ve always rejected. The terms ‘monster’ and ‘evil.’

In the spirit of Masters’ observation, these are what I call ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ definitions and convey nothing psychologically enlightening, especially when the mind collides with the big moral dilemmas that Dahmer forces us to ponder.

‘Monster’ is a term that one could associate with the realm of myths and fairytales, in the way that trolls, witches, ogres, and giants are evoked. But even then, the word draws a blank.

What does it definitively convey that allows one to settle into deeper contemplation? Some might say, ‘who cares?’ I’ll take it, and move on.

That’s understandable, but one of the reasons I decided to write this book was to allow me to accomplish what writers do when they write—ascertain something in a new way, to coax forth a revelation by mining with language.

I’d say most of everything I write is not because I have some etched-in-stone facts that I want to convey, but because I’m discovering as I go. I’ve found that, energetically, this is the sort of writing that a reader will track and stay with.

More troubling than the term ‘monster’ is the widespread, never-questioned, blanket term of ‘evil.’

The catch is that the description calls up religious or philosophical connotations. And creates what deconstructive writers call an ‘aporia’—an impasse that stops the mind cold. Dead end. Facile—not interesting.

And this is where Marie-Louise von Franz’s inquiry into evil as conveyed in fairytales brings forth the gold.

In the next entry of The Dahmer Diaries, I’ll detail what can only be called a phantasmagorical dive—by von Franz—into evil as it relates to the laws of nature. And how violation of those laws dredges up yet another face of the savage god.

Until next time!

Opening image: Dahmer arrest mugshot collage by FW, ⓒ 2022