I like the cliche that Aquarius Sun is an alien. I know that it is a stereotype but I still like it—why? Because aliens are inscrutable.

We have never seen an alien. We don’t know how they exist, if they exist, and we make all sorts of assumptions about aliens that are really just about the human. In my reading group we are talking about aliens in relationship to the concept of detriment because a planet in detriment is a planet in exile. It’s an alien planet. An immigrant planet.

Aliens are described but they have never been seen. We all know what an alien is but we never know what it really means to be an alien. There is no one way to be an alien.

The Sun is about power. It’s dad. It’s patriarchy and it’s visibility. The Sun is about the future and your projection about the future. Sun in detriment people live in opposition to these things. They do not accept your attention, they resist being seen, and they resist the idea that the future can ever be predicted.

What Aquarius Sun is good at is marveling at the unknown.

It’s funny because detriment Sun people know so much. They’ve read this and that book, lived this and that experience, and talked to almost everyone under the Sun. They’ll tell you about it if you don’t ask. But, if you ask? Zilch. Nil. Not a word. They pretend not to know. Or, rather, they collide with the impossibility of knowledge. They feel that they do not know anything when someone asks. Part of why they happen to know so much is because they are continually frustrated with an incomprehensible and illegible world.

To Sun in detriment people, the world is unknowable. And I’m not talking about lofty subjects like what it means to be or whether particles are really waves and vice versa, though those subjects interest detriment Sun people too because being is a puzzle and a theory. I’m talking about everyday stuff. Sun in detriment feels that there is no known way to doing things. They don’t know how to make a friend, even if they’ve been doing it all their lives. They don’t know how to join a game, fumbling and stumbling around until someone pulls them in. They don’t know how to teach, even if they have been a professor for ten years. They’ll walk into a classroom and stare at the pupils like a deer caught in headlights.

Then, they figure it out.

Every moment is a beginning for Aquarius Sun. Every jaded moment is abrupt, experienced as if it has never happened before. This is why Aquarius Sun, while brushing their teeth, often marvels at the human ritual of applying a plastic stick with bristles towards their mouth bones as if, well—as if they are an alien to their own species.

And knowing is both convoluted and frustrated for Aquarius Suns. Knowing carries the risk of ego and Aquarius Suns hate it whenever they are seen as proud. They hate it most when someone, acting like an expert, prattles off facts that Aquarius Sun already fucking knows. They don’t like that. They don’t like their condition of unknowingness to be misunderstood. They understand that confusion, which is the site of learning, is stolen away when it is not allowed to just be. But ask them to jump in and explain the thing in someone’s stead? No, no. That’s much too crass. They’d prefer it if everyone did their own thinking for themselves.

Aquarius Suns are much more interested in dystopia than utopia. It’s Leo Suns, domicile Suns, that I see doing community work wholeheartedly, believing that if everyone can come together and see one another’s struggle that we will birth a new future together. Aquarius Suns are nihilists. They don’t believe in the future. They are fascinated with the concept of a future but they don’t believe in time. They don’t believe in futurist aesthetics or hovercrafts or AI. Aquarius Sun behaves and lives as if no future is necessary, as if hope is unnecessary.

This is why Aquarius Suns are extremely fascinated when futuristic aesthetics exist in the present. Everything that we project onto the future, really, is about right now. When detriment Sun imagines a future, they imagine a world that is falling to shit. They look at the aesthetics of the future with a good sense of dismay, sometimes regret, and often the trembling fear that they live in a world with no God.

The future, like the alien, is an unknown. We work with the concept of the future and with the alien but only because it represents something that we can never know. Sun, in Aquarius, finds itself in a state of not knowing. It doesn’t get to know and it becomes either enraged or embarrassed when anyone pretends to know. This embarrassment is a symptom, for the Sun in detriment, of the state of being.