Only afterward, when the sobering influence of maturity returns, does Capricorn feel a vague sense of remorse and melancholy for having succumbed to the temptation of forbidden passions.

The Capricorn Love Mystery

Now the chilling blasts of winter grow more insistent, forcing the experience-weary soul to symbolically retreat back into the haven of the family circle, to submit once again to the meditative, negative-feminine Night Forces.  On the Capricorn level of consciousness, for the fourth and final time, the soul feels the powerful vibrations of Cardinal leadership.  But this time it leads through the stable Earth Element, from a position of strength inside the home, beside the hearth.  Why should the Goat expose himself (or herself) to the icy temperatures outside, just to be seen and heard – applauded and praised?

Capricorn souls, now sure of both their ability and their right to take command, no longer feel the need to display or aggressively flaunt their power – either for public adulation, or for inner security.  By this stage, the soul has learned that true peace comes from within.  Being appointed Leader is a responsibility to be handled as carefully as possible, with no special recognition due for doing what is obviously one’ duty.  The Capricon’s relatives (especially parents) now assume marked importance for either good or ill, because the symbolic “old age” of the soul has arrived – and along with it, a sense of  the priorities of life, the most important being the security of belonging.  The excitement of romance and the freedoms of youth are not nearly as enticing to the Goat as comfort and contentment with those he can depend on to care for him (or her).

Capricorn is both prepared and willing to impart the hard-earned Saturnine wisdom, but only when invited to do so.  Because the Goats know the folly of forcing people to mature before their time, they smile with the benevolent indulgence of a fond grandparent (whatever his or her chronological age) upon the playful antics of the still young at heart.  Secretly, the Capricorn soul longs to abandon duty but is by now resigned to the knowledge that sheer idealism is impractical – and spontaneous enthusiasm can never replace experience.  Acutely aware of the dangers of impulsive action, the soul has become more conservative – and the Goat’s refusal to either scatter efforts or to indulge in sentimentality brings on accusations of emotional coldness from those born into the Fire and Air Elements.  Capricorns respect authority because they see the law as necessity for the protection of human rights and safety.  They shyly worship the famous and successful because Capricorn’s ruler, Saturn, teaches them to revere achievement, knowing full well its price.

Although Capricorn may appear to be serious and unyielding to more liberal souls, Life has also taught the Goats its humourous side, and their subtle jokes are tinged with the irony of existence.  Because the new Saturnine duties as counselor to the foolish weigh heavily on their shoulders, they sometimes try to drink the last full measure of Life’s rare pleasures, calmly accepting them without false modesty or undue inhibition.  Only afterward, when the sobering influence of maturity returns, does Capricorn feel a vague sense of remorse and melancholy for having succumbed to the temptation of forbidden passions.  In this soul vibration there is a compulsion to acknowledge the necessity for being practical, as Capricorn admits, “I USE”.  But a gentleness of spirit softens the severity of the surface sternness commanded by Saturn, for the Capricorn consciousness brings with it a sympathy for human mistakes, born from understanding gained through ten stages of Life’s – and Love’s – mysteries.

Capricorn’s positive qualities are determination, stability, wisdom, dependability, sureness and tranquility.  Expressed in their negative form they become selfishness, narrowness, ruthless ambition, rigidity, snobbery, depression and loneliness.

To Capricorn, love is a quiet and undemanding exchange of personal gratification.  The Goats have fully learned the valuable lesson that love is not measured by excessive emotion.  But because they equate it only with the necessities of mutual need and desire, they have not yet experienced the release of its inner longings.

Boris Pasternak (1890 – 1960)

A song from the film “Fate’s Irony”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjRbmBXywH4

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,

skirmishes against the author

raging along the borders of every page

in tiny black script.

If I could just get my hands on you,

Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,

they seem to say,

I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -

“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -

that kind of thing.

I remember once looking up from my reading,

my thumb as a bookmark,

trying to imagine what the person must look like

who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”

alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest

needing to leave only their splayed footprints

along the shore of the page.

One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.

Another notes the presence of “Irony”

fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,

Hands cupped around their mouths.

“Absolutely,” they shout

to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.

“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”

Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points

rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college

without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”

in a margin, perhaps now

is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own

and reached for a pen if only to show

we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;

we pressed a thought into the wayside,

planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria

jotted along the borders of the Gospels

brief asides about the pains of copying,

a bird singing near their window,

or the sunlight that illuminated their page-

anonymous men catching a ride into the future

on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,

they say, until you have read him

enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,

the one that dangles from me like a locket,

was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye

I borrowed from the local library

one slow, hot summer.

I was just beginning high school then,

reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,

and I cannot tell you

how vastly my loneliness was deepened,

how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,

when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears

and next to them, written in soft pencil-

by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

whom I would never meet-

‘Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.’

Billy Collins

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will...

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/kallini2002/1c282c91b7e37178e9c3205bd828a70c/

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

“I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

“La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté

Luxe, calme et volupté

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.”

“Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?”

“He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.”

“The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”

“What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”