WHY ‘BORN UNDER SATURN’?

Saturn is the gloomy, brooding god. To be born under Saturn is to be full of anxiety, full of madness, full of sadness, to find yourself incompatible with the world’s accepted categories. It is to be an artist.

ABOUT THIS SUBSTACK

Born Under Saturn is a serial on writing and art, love and existence, and the illimitable suffering of the artist. It is a passion project and an experiment, and, like myself, is subject to the whims of life and inspiration.

Over the course of its writing it has grown and transformed. While I started it with the hope of creating a sustained auto-fictional serial, it has become much more eclectic. Think of each instalment not as the direct continuation of the former, but as variations on a theme, reincarnations of an idea, episodes of the same drama except as it exists in manifold parallel universes.

Several of the existing entries I have written as myself and several I have written as someone else, a dream of a person like myself and yet other. However, I like to think of the entirety of this Substack as written by an alter-ego, an invented narrator who differs from myself only in that she consists of words, is trapped, in fact, between the words and the world, and comes into being only when she is read.

As much as any of us would like to think that our writing belongs to us, it never does—not entirely. This is because the language we must use isn’t ours; it is given to us, pre-exists us. In the moment between the idea and the rendering of that idea in language, we shape the formless truth of our being into a limited and alien structure, carving away all that cannot fit, morphing all that can, until the original essence of ourselves is lost. Thus, my words are never myself, and can only belong to someone else, the most intimate kind of stranger, a stranger who has no substance and little reality, but who nonetheless is never me.

New content will arrive at indeterminate intervals. Some posts will come quickly, others may take many weeks (or many months). Some posts will be short, some long. My hope is that all serials will offer some insight, some knowledge, some relatability, and if nothing else, some beauty.

Subscribe to make sure you never miss out. All new content will also be announced on Instagram at @shayebytheshore and @shayedoeswriting x