Last year, the Drone took its meaning from the hive. This year it is born above the Gaza Strip, whose living conditions have gone way past intolerable, and thanks to a band of morons who thought it was a good idea to kill two Israeli police officers at the Al-Aqsa mosque, well on the way to becoming even worse, therefore the meaning of ‘drone’ seems more appropriately to accord with its usage in music, most notably in the threnody, and derived from etymological roots in ‘hum’, ‘drum’ and ‘dream’.

The Palestinian problem is insoluble because the pathways available towards rational compromise are humming with two different threnodies. The instincts of Israelis and Palestinians are incompatible, and the Zionists of the forties can only be forgiven as survivors of a conflagration of instincts they believed had been extinguished by reason. I situate my thought in a three-thousand year tradition of mutual fertilization of instinct and reason which trusts neither, but on both sides of the conflict in Palestine, the nexus is paralyzed in history and the fabric of the universe.

It is well known that the seasons of astrology are out of phase with the constellations which invested them with celestial meaning. This is not a problem for the Southern imagination, because if you turn things upside down, most of the Signs make perfect sense, but it’s a huge issue in the North, because our Crab’s tendency to bury altruism in the sand is one thing, but no way can she be imagined as the King of Beasts.

When the second wave of Out-of-Africans passed through ‘Palestine’ on their way to ‘Europe’ twelve thousand years ago, Cancer was rising heliacally in the last month of winter and the King of Beasts announced the arrival of Spring. If instinct had not been moderated by reason during the Ages which followed, as Spring moved backwards through Cancer (Civilization), Gemini (Trade), Taurus (Agriculture) and Aries (Conflict) to Pisces (Spirituality), Northerners might still be dressed for winter in July like Southerners, and worshipping Moon-Goddesses as crustacean embodiments of the tides.

It might have gone better for Palestinians had they been invaded by astrologers moulding the instinct to the seasons and the clockwork movement of the Milky Way, and Buddhist ones at that, dissolving instinct and reason into houses of madness and emptiness, but they got stuck with invaders who believe in submission to the will of God, just like themselves. Why do we need organized religion, nationalism or socialism to bind us in common aspiration and obedience, to bring altruism out from the instinct where it belongs, and codify it and enforce it rationally? Because your altruism is my vanity. Altruism hardens into idealism, and your idealism is always in danger of causing you to undermine my idea of the good!

The remarkable thing is that we have evolved some control over our instincts, but to the extent that we allow them to rule us, our relationships, our polities and our lives tend to fall apart, no matter how zealously we pursue the greater good, as we see it. Yet we challenge reason all the time with our ingrained blacks and whites, our impatience, blame and resentment. If we are not victims of this -Ism, we will be victims of the next. If we are not victims of the other, the other is ours. How unfair it is that our success or failure depends on the ignorance we try to dispel. How dare you offer me help to overcome my self-defeating mechanisms, when your mindset is what’s wrong with the world?

The whole thing is such a mess that it is not only human community which amazes with its perpetual delusional resurrection, but the resilience of personality itself. How can we be connected to all those disasters in the past and still hang together? What is the mechanism for staying wrong? How do you define sin? A two-state solution? I doubt it.

The First Crescent will probably not appear on Australia’s eastern seaboard on Monday, but it will be visible at Coober Pedy, if the locals would like to emerge from their subterranean homes.

Weather permitting, it will be visible from Melbourne on Tuesday. All over the world, what a sight it will be!

The cultures of some immigrants to Australia are nearly as old as the Indigenous one. The other day I got talking about the Moon with an old man in Arab dress on the tram. We old men have less and less to hide from each other. He told me that civilization emerged from the recognition that the Moon was the Great Mother. My stop was coming, so I just listened, but I wondered, when did ‘civilization’ discover the Anima in men? Woman (or Rabbi and Imam) casting magic spells on man, man accommodating his ideal to every poison: can we please just say goodbye to what we never had? ‘You’ are not ‘it’. She, and country, are the ‘I’ ‘It’ is learning to be!

Incidentally (or not), Khandha is my name for the star known by astronomers as Gamma Velorum, and it means ‘connection’ to me because it is a multiple star system, very bright, which includes one of the nearest supernova candidates to the Sun, and which stimulates thoughts of the five aggregates of attachment to suffering: form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness.