The Prophet of Gen X
Art by Dirty Lola
It is 30 years today since Gen X lost our prophet to the weight the world had placed on him, stupid and contagious. Well ahead of the times he occupied as we all came of age in a world that appalled us with its judgements and dictates. It spawned an alternative culture that we still harbour beneath long sleeves under t shirts, tucked somewhere deep inside Gen X's painfully salty identity wounds.
We are the Chiron in Aries kids. Latchkeyed and wildly unsafe, moving in a world before witness that pre-dated phones and the internet and ubiquitous constant absorption. We weren't connected to it. We were connected - most often by music and art - to each other, building alternative worlds to the ones we grew up in where we felt accepted, seen or safe. Not all of us made it but everyone was welcome to come as you are.
It's our time now, in a way we absolutely refused way back when. Chiron in Aries pokes identity wounds, playing in the shadows of the soul-sore self that we protect at all costs. He draws our attention to the places we feel hurt or misunderstood knowing that we cannot heal anything we deny or refuse. Chiron conjures authenticity from the shadows it hides behind in spite of all the old worlds that flat out refused it. That was then. On the other side of our Chiron return at 50, we become who we're meant to be or we still have not made it out alive.
Next week Chiron will be tangled in the Aries solar eclipse, rendering it a ménage à trois more than a slingshot. Chiron's ramrod presence now - personally, generationally and collectively - is beckoning the light of our tenderest understanding where it has long been needed the most. So to heal our wounds and rebirth our worlds, once and for all.
Expect an intense labour. This weekend the dark moon that precedes eclipse conjures these darkest shadows, ricocheting and magnifying the lot. This is our greatest revision test : how we save ourselves from what now passes into history. Perhaps the most fitting legacy there could be for the Kurts we crucified and lost along the way.
Nirvana means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.
~ Kurt Cobain
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2024