A Pluto Mercury Transit Is Good For A Writer

A Pluto-Mercury transit can be fantastic for a writer. 

This anecdote from a Mega Mystic member proves the point brilliantly. Louisa Deasey’s Pluto transit worked on multiple levels and inspired an amazing book.

It’s hard to believe it was only three weeks ago I received a Facebook message from Paris. I remember waking that day and thinking “this year I’d like to go to Paris again.” I even wrote it in my diary, changing my profile picture to one of Le Louvre.

Pluto was conjunct Mercury in my 8^th house, and all the ‘dark side’ things we associate with Pluto were manifesting: A stalker, a psychotic neighbor, a call to the Police, a funeral, a trip to the ER, an identity thief, a painful revelation that a friend was not so trustworthy. I was having heart palpitations upon waking.

But then, this. Immediately, I knew it was something special. My stomach flipped and flew like an airplane was whizzing past, and I had to catch something being thrown at me, quickly.

Dear Louisa, forgive me if this is disturbing you, but we are wondering if you are any relation to Denison Deasey…

The Frenchwoman’s beloved grandmother Michele had just died, leaving behind a pile of letters from 1949, in which she writes about an Australian man — Denison Deasey — she met on a train in London. In her final months, the granddaughters would often find her sitting with a secret sort of smile on her lips, re-reading the letters. My dad would have been 29 at the time.

The children were keen to find what had become of this man she referred to as “Deasey.”

I replied: he is my father; he passed away when I was six. I will try to find anything we have of his from 1949, to find any mention of Michele. Thank you. Thank you. It felt like they had raised him from the dead, some miracle seeing his name there in handwritten pen, a thread to his life still active.

I knew he had letters at the State Library, but after a miserable attempt to look at them ten years ago, where all I found entries of pain and sadness during the separation from my mum, I’ve never had the strength to go back.

Also, the size of the material is Sisyphean. The inventory of the material alone is 45 pages! Dad, a writer, kept a journal every day of his life, wrote dozens of letters, essays, fragments, mostly typed, and some of it is out of order. They didn’t have laptops back then, and he only dated half of what he wrote on a typewriter.

But, this time I would stick to 1949. So I marched to the library, making a special appointment to see six folders out of about 100.

Try to imagine never knowing anything about your father and then not only discovering he had the most intense, crazy, exciting life, but also that he writes like you, feels like you, struggles with the same dilemmas, and is driven by the same things..? I feel like I’m in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are. He talks of places I’ve always felt strangely drawn to.

There are things he wrote I have written in my diary. There were complete passages in one of the essays that I have written in my book. And then learning of how he lost his dad when he was away at War, and his mum when he was in London, (not long after meeting Michele). Searching for Michele led me to find dad. How interesting that she was French, France was his paradise after the war!

He loved to talk to strangers; I love to talk to strangers! He was impulsive and friendly and funny and got in bizarre situations, such as being mistaken for M16 spy Donald Maclean and being arrested in his underpants, shrugging the whole thing off as ‘fun’ because that night the hotelier opened a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in his honor!

I found that Albert Tucker had helped him travel to Europe, Arthur Boyd had written him sweet notes from Melbourne, and dad had been part of a ‘poets villa’ in the south of France where he met the writer Henry Williamson and learned that Nightingales also sing during the day.

And so much more. A twenty-page essay on his horrendous time in the commandos in World War Two where they lived like Prisoners of War because of the botched job of the government.

An account of his trip to England by boat, where he contracted Tuberculosis (they were eight to a cabin, and the captain was apparently “insane,” shouting abuse at all Australians on the loudspeaker, not letting them out on the deck).

The seven years following he lived in France, first in the Hotel Floridor for a year, with a cast of fascinating characters like something from a Wes Anderson film.

Hours passed in the library. I didn’t eat, drink, or go to the toilet.

I kept looking for Michele. My god, he wrote so much.

And then this week, an even bigger miracle.

I have always had the impression dad was never a ‘successful’ writer. I knew he had a book published, and a couple of small stories, but I had no idea there was more. Another man’s memoir mentioned him as “an amateur,” and other quite cutting statements, which I’m embarrassed to say now, I had just accepted as the truth. I’d never actually seen how much my dad produced.

He wrote every day of his life until his death in 1984.

In his unpublished manuscripts are two memoirs, a children’s book, dozens of short stories and essays about the war and the time in Europe, numerous radio plays and film proposals, two biographies (one, which was under contract for publication when he died), and much more. From a publishing perspective, I have such admiration for him, working so prolifically in a time when everything had to be typed by hand, redrafted by hand and posted by air mail. And through it all he also worked: as a translator, a teacher, always battling tuberculosis, his life a balancing act of money, art, love, and energy expenditure, much like my own.

And I did find photos, too. Beautiful pictures of him recovering from tuberculosis in the south of France in St Clair, at the Poets Villa where he was so happy as the wine was unrationed! And photos from the War, and others, too.

And there, in scrawled handwriting, “Lunch with Michele, dinner with Michele” in June 1949.

Dad was a Scorpio; they specialize in secrets.

Last night I dreamt we were able to email even though he is on another plane. I woke and realized I’m the messenger. I need to get his messages to other people, like the families of the men he served with in the Commandoes, but mostly to my brother and sister, who never knew any of this, like me.

When Pluto knocks, it’s not always bad. This Pluto Mercury transit bought a gift from the other side.