Charlie Kaufman

Not one of his ten planets sits in a cardinal sign, and not one sits in air. Water takes five, fire three and earth two, with six of the ten fixed and four mutable. The Sun, Venus, Jupiter and Neptune spread across twenty four degrees of Scorpio. The record calls Kaufman the American writer of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine.

Two absences in one chart, one of them a mode and one an element, is the fact to take from this. No cardinal planet means nothing here initiates: there is no part of the chart whose business is to start a thing from nothing. No air means nothing in it circulates or compares either. What is left is six fixed planets and five in water, a chart that holds a position and feels its way around inside it, and that is about as far as a balance can honestly be pushed.

This is also a loose chart, and loose in an unusual way, because nothing in it comes inside four fifths of a degree of exact. The closest is Jupiter a fifth of a turn from Pluto at over four fifths, effective power, which is reform that succeeds and the ability to recover from setbacks at scale, and that is a vague reading at a wide orb. For a writer the record gives two films and nothing else, there is no contact here tight enough to be worth attaching to either of them, and padding the list out until something turned up would be the dishonest option.

Jupiter also sits in hard contact with Uranus at just over a degree, growth arriving disruptively: opportunity that costs stability, and restlessness that discards something workable for something merely new. Mercury sits in mild friction with Neptune at nearly a degree and a half, thinking that gets misty, and the Moon in easy contact with Jupiter at a degree and a half, optimism as a resting state. The Moon's sign is certain at fourteen degrees of Pisces, and the Sun sits on the twenty seventh degree of Scorpio with Venus two degrees further on, both near the end of the sign. Mars alone was retrograde. Jupiter came back to its Scorpio birth degree on 16 August 2018, at fifty nine, and four laps precede it.