A short piece on a brief birth time rectification done on an astrological map for Gabor Maté, author and expert on trauma, addiction and mental health.
From my recent time in Switzerland I became acquainted with a genre of art referred to as ‘Outsider Art’, or Art Brut. I found the works confronting, exciting, compelling, intriguing, sometimes beautiful, and almost always touching. Given the number of these artists creating out of mental torture from within asylums or psychiatric institutions after often excruciating starts to their lives I was fascinated by implications: who defines ‘normal’ or ‘inside’ (as opposed to ‘outside’)? Is the impulse (and therefore perhaps all art?) Self-generated ‘healing’ or self-soothing? If so, could it lead to ‘cure’? How might the average person, less troubled than these, learn from this? What might we learn from their horoscopes?