I really do understand. When I took on the project of turning Northern Hemisphere tropical astrology upside down, I was concentrating on the benefits for observers of life and spirituality in the Southern Hemisphere of connecting Southern seasons and asterisms with historical mythology. But since COVID-19, the googling of Moon phases and Southern Hemisphere astrology has increased to a level which demands I make a few things clear
Did (s)he really tell you that you were meant to happen? Amor fati: the ultimate weapon of the control freak is stoicism.
Another way of saying, ‘Go with the flow’ is ‘Float on the Rip’.
You will tell me what I need to know, but there’s no greater joy than discovering my ignorance for myself.
“In exhibiting the horrors awaiting all human beauty, already lurking below the surface of corporeal charms, these preachers of contempt for the world express, indeed, a very materialistic sentiment, namely, that all beauty and all happiness are worthless because they are bound to end soon. Renunciation founded on disgust does not spring from Christian wisdom.” Huizinga, J.. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and The Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (p. 126). Normanby Press. Kindle Edition.
“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.” From “Tenderness“, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.Naomi Shihab Nye.
Imprisoned in time by a pandemic, we are all old now, reprising bad decisions and bad relationships, the only ones we will now own. As the Other withdraws over the event-horizon it seems that we only exist as Other. The Moon is meaningless: it has its own sky. And yet it is still there in ours, like the immediacy of memory, or the sharing of infant seriousness. Has an entire system of meaning traumatically collapsed? Perhaps, but the fundamental system remains: sensuality. Even after death, sensuality remains. Corpses stink. And our death meditation remains what it is, the sensuality of timeless country. Where is the mouth to the cave of sensuality? Kindness! Country is kindness. It owes its existence to me as I owe my existence to it. We share something of infinite tenderness: sensuality. Sensuality is kindness, two-of-a-kindness.
I have been sharing all my life, in much the same way that my youngest darling grandson is currently learning how to speak, by learning cues by trial and error, and saying the first thing that comes into his head, usually with transformative consequence. His adult erudition is inevitable, because none of his loved ones will ever allow its infancy in insignificance or irrelevance to be forbidden. And because of that, his speech will be shaped by kindness, and I hope one day he will open the box of my notebooks, and share his tears. (The catastrophic slithering of a memory of mammoths plucked from the ice of the primordial Yarra at a lichen-encrusted Abbotsford bench; the magic of architecture which unfolds of its own accord: the desirability of innocence.)
There is nothing the old, like the Moon, can teach the young; the young have assumed an inheritance from still extant benefactors hanging on their capacity to embody the joy they give the old; the old and the young are quarantined from each other. The Moon is outdoors; country no longer has an outdoors. The Moon is not to know this of course—how could it know anything of Earthly affairs it supposedly influences? It can barely distinguish continents—but a rumour has gone viral that country may never have existed. For the time being, the young are sacrificing everything they value to preserve the old, as though given enough time, values will become their own monuments to something other than the waning of youth, the health of the pharmaceutical industry, the power of the Hippocratic Oath, and the harvest of seed.
But how long will this last? So many signs holding the life of a human together depend on constant reinforcement of the roles humans learn to play by forgetting woe. Too many humans have lost their roles and traumatically thereby their experience. Too many roles were incompletely learned before they were expunged. Can they be assumed again? Is there a template? Many generations of humanity have died without hearing an orchestral recital, let alone the performance of works their enjoyment might have confirmed as immortal, such as Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, or Wagner’s Liebestod. In too many spirits they were never composed. The cave leading to the eternal underworld may be ringed by your parents’ assays of serious music: Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Fauré, Elgar, etc., or perhaps the Reader’s Digest collection of operettas, but my grandfather could never plier, and I doubt your grandmother could ever whistle, let alone queue a playlist.
The openness of a vowel is non-gustatory; the emptiness of a bowel is non-binary; the orbit of a satellite is non-accusative. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust. Let no one deride the rites of death. Let all be present in its cavernous jaws. Grasp an opportunity! The ocean is full of tears: taste yours! Make something of this crisis! Relate to country! Imagine it wearing your clothes, the slippers your kids will give you for Mother’s Day! Weigh your emptiness! Be kind to the Moon! Share your isolation! We’re all in this together!
Sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Horace, Odes I xi.
[Be prudent. Let the wine flow. And since time is short, leave off far-reaching hopes. Even as we speak envious time has escaped us. Reap what the day offers and put as little trust as possible in the future. Trans. B. Muir]
For there are pleasures which they must have, and are afraid of losing; and therefore they abstain from one class of pleasures because they are overcome by another: and whereas intemperance is defined as “being under the dominion of pleasure,” they overcome only because they are overcome by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that they are temperate through intemperance. Plato, Phaedo. Trans. B. Jowett.
Goodbye Michelle it’s hard to die When all the birds are singing in the sky Now that the spring is in the air With the flowers everywhere I wish that we could both be there. Brel/McKuen.
In the Southern Hemisphere there is a trail leading from the high country, which lies in the direction of Sagittarius A, down across the ridges of Pisces into the meadows of the Ram and the Bull which line the River Lethe. All of the planets are strung out along this trail in this time of calamity, all of them obeying a primeval rule: mind the path! For the trail is precipitous, and fall is fatal. It only seems like yesterday the Full Moon was diplomatically avoiding the subject of castration with the old drifter on the ridge, Uranus, and here we are for the third and last time for 30-odd years in Aries at Ramadan, the two of us quarantined together, fasting in the jaws of apocalyptic pestilence, with the invisible stench of our homeless Father Sky a few days further down the track tainting the decomposing autumn sunshine.
You are welcome to dismiss this metaphor as a guide on your journey, for who would deny the narrative you are at pains to construct for your life? Alas, you may need a Covid-19 test if you deconstruct narrative as relative but cling to your own. Who on Earth began a ‘journey’ at your birth but your ancestors, jostling for reincarnation? And if we go back far enough, 4 billion years, yours are mine, so don’t take it personally when I scorn your journey! And does your journey have a social and linguistic background which makes your claim to ‘go your own way’ a little quaint? Don’t the seasons and the Covid-19 shutdown define it? Remember the Ramadan weather twenty years ago! And that the faithful are heading for the Lethe while Ramadan is working its way back to the Acheron!
If you think that opportunism is the cynical advantage of prevailing anxieties the unprincipled take to enrich themselves, then you are far from sharing the preoccupation with death that tempts the celebrants of enrichment into the giddy abyss of eternal forgetting. What is that smell? The stale toejam of the tragic bride, Andromeda, the bowels of her water-boarded mother, the crotch of homelessness and the hormones of a rutting ram! A lot of bull, perhaps? Is the pursuit of knowledge and truth the foundation of civilisation or the talisman it vouchsafes its loved ones as it lowers their impoverished corpses into the Underworld, or floats them away on the Lethe?
I’ll grant you that when you came into this world what you didn’t know was very important. But as you leave this world it no longer seems important at all, does it? Even though an entire culture be evolving in the pursuit of the knowledge certain others seem to have gained by ignoring yours. There is a germ at the heart of every organism as resilient and adaptive as any virus: you are taught to know it as love. But its formula can be rephrased in terms of what love has taught you to fear, love as a disease overcoming its absence, the disease of limerence. Life has taught you not to fear, not to look down below the ridge. But limerence retreats to medical definitions, and thus do ‘we who are about to die’ fear dying of a virulent coronavirus. The opposite of love was never fear. Only intemperate individuals could cling to such an idea, as dark energy to matter seems to cling, because the opposite of love is its narcissistic dark temperance, silence.
To revisit the concept of ‘country’ as death meditation: if it is true that what you know, including what you instinctively or unconsciously know, is a collaboration between the world as it has formed you according to its needs, and you as you have formed the world according to your needs, then it is true to say that what you know is a constituent of what you don’t know, or that your essence is somewhere between the two, like the history of Australia before 1788, as the essence of a tree is in the quantum uncertainty of the sunlight of its chloroplasts, or as country grows the timber of its nearby star. I strenuously suggest you grab whatever low-hanging branch you can, because to be made of stars is to burn out like them. Better to warm like wood in the hearth of your desire, than to illuminate emptiness a million years after your death.
And should I seem terse, or scarcely adequate to the leadership you desire, just continue in the direction you are heading, as you must, in fair weather and foul, under deluge and darkness, one foot in front of the other, on your journey, if the evasion of dizziness can be called a journey. Who did you think you were, once the plug was out of the bath, if not a variation on a universal theme? Strive, one foot in front of the other! Plant your foot carefully in the print of the horde! Live as though you hope for mercy! Carry a rooster in your bag! Saint Peter’s love has not been tested for limerence! Hello? You’re breaking up! God is saying goodbye! Carpe diem!
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
John 1:10. King James Version.
Jesus was a carpenter and He worked with a saw and a hammer
And His hands could form a table true enough to stand forever
And He might have spun His life out in the coolness of the mornings
But He put aside His tools and He walked the burning highways
To build a house from folks like you and me.
The artisan did not amount to very much. You traded his tradition for relativity, the working class for a mickey-mouse education, and his product for tourism, so what did you expect? It is not easy to embody raw energy harnessed to regrowth when the world is licking its wounds, or to symbolize restraint when pestilence is roaring unchecked, but the artisan should be fortified by the respect earned by the workers who rebuilt the economy after the last world war, and be ready to do it again when the mighty have crashed all around us. Unfortunately, he will have to deal with his substance abuse first, the violence embodied by the collapse of civil obedience and the irresistible fate of tradition in the disappearance of the past. Somehow, he will have to stop behaving like an ape behind the wheel, and deprived of his tribe in the pub, find a sober way to protect his self-esteem from the barbs of his similarly incarcerated loved ones aimed at its gargantuan absence.
I wonder what happened to the student who chalked the mosque outside the Quarry Hotel, and all the revellers who spilled into the intersection to marvel at a religious icon in a galaxy they couldn’t see. He will be a qualified architect by now. Or an Imam. Or both. Many of his elders have gone to paradise, no doubt, and I feel sure that you would wish me to convey your condolences to any of his community who might be reading this. Actually, all of the communities who gathered at the Quarry that year will have lost elders. Kyrie eleison is an injunction, not a supplication: it reminds God that She might have made the world, but we invest Her with our loving-kindness, the merciful self-love which is our escape from Her cruelty. It is not self-sacrifice or blind faith to leave staple commodities on supermarket shelves, but simple mercy. O Lord, thou art merciful! And there is no more profound recognition of mercy than the identification of the crucifix symbol with the midnight keystone of the Galaxy at Easter, the Southern Cross and the head of the Emu. May it rekindle your faith in celestial kindness!
In one human lifetime, our understanding of the universe has expanded from the consciousness of being surrounded by stars to the consciousness of being surrounded by galaxies, the remnant light of an original conflagration, and the mysterious dominant forces of karma, namely, dark matter and dark energy. In one year, our understanding of country, the context and legacy of our brief lives, has replaced a celebration of global structure and connectedness with a bunkering of independence and social distance, and introduced to discourse an influence on human history and evolution which all along to the intuition was real, and in a bottom-up view was obvious, the dark matter of disease, and the dark energy of the ‘healing’ or pharmaceutical industry, the First Horseman of The Apocalypse. Intergalactic travel may be no more outlandish a cosmological joke than global multicultural connectivity when the expansion of the distance between food source and kitchen door can end in 60km traffic jams.
Before Euclid and Pythagoras, there were four cardinal directions and a hunt for correspondences. Who was that physicist who agreed with Jung about synchronicity? Somebody whose memory endures in an age in which things have names, no doubt. As a matter of fact, a word might capture the meaning of a thing, but meaning is not a thing, nor is a word, nor a thing. For five thousand years, locals around here have been trying to come up with words to explain what happened to the overhead bridge on the Milky Way East-West Arterial at Early Winter Equinox, towards which a dark emu rose vertically from the sunrise side. Best they’ve been able to come up with is an injunction to imagine it was there once, and therefore still is. What are the chances of the annual tradition of commemorating a crucifixion coinciding accidentally with the midnight transit of a Constellation called Crux at the apex of an arc of the Milky Way stretching across the southern sky from due east to due west?
Are you in, or fast approaching, your seventies? Denied subjectivity by the object of your faith? Or merely awash with Dark Energy? On behalf of The Creator, and Her undercover artisans everywhere, let my apology for transcendent finitude resound in the gateway to your country. The rest is astrology.
These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.Jude, King James Version, Verse 12-13.
There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who are envious of their neighbours for their lockups groaning with toilet paper, and those who are not … ! This speaks to me not only of the timeless wisdom of social distancing, but also specifically, of the civility practised a while ago in this season by Pontius Pilate, which this year will need to be honed to a fine art by all of us as we learn to self-isolate for a common good decomposing somewhere in the underworld, on and on, and over and over again. Sidereal Pisces it was which got us into this soteriological fix, and the tropical Signs of Aries and Southern Libra have only made it worse. I’m inclined to wash my hands of the whole damn thing!
If you have dreamed yourself safely tucked up in your childhood with a universe of goodness sparkling on the painted window-pane, and awoken none the wiser but richer for the benevolence of the painter’s condolence, then in seeking kindness from the heavens you have probably plotted the Moon’s course among the stars, trusting the rise and fall through phases and seasons of feelings which would otherwise seem to attach to flimsy relationships with others not painted on the pane. Your imagination, like mine, may have entertained the idea that not only time, but the getting of wisdom, might be measurable by synodic cycles equivalent to the adventures that befall a chick on a training flight.
Let divinely-infused faith, hope and charity be not thwarted, but confirmed, by the subjectivity of the Sun and Moon, since in giving selves to celestial bodies, and the animals and plants in our diets we have treated bestially for so long, we might compel our hearts to reconsider self-denial as a denial of the most important element of identity, its appearance. And how can you deny that, unless you do not discriminate at all? It’s not for nothing your underworld Sun sets in your East. For it is only logical that the exclusivity of culture which keeps it together and gives its adherence identity must ultimately succeed in protecting every other culture from its judgment until nothing is interconnected but through blindness. A world of victims is a mortuary, and the selflessness myth its painted pane.
And so let us reconsider the punctuation of the New Moon, initially from the Migrant’s vantage-point. If the Sun were truly the parent and the Moon its chick, both would be observing the Earth as though the Sun were illuminating it from behind the Moon with the express purpose of lighting the way. So beware little chick so accustomed to dependency and unadapted to change: your parent is behind you, and you are about to discover the imperative of flight! When you come back, you will be someone else: parents never tell you that! Get your bearings!
But the Earth spins! And flies faster than I! Context and judgment, cries the disembodied voice no longer behind the Artisan. Watch the passing parade: Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Sea-Goat, Water-Carrier and Fishes. As I stay in Pisces, and you watch your Earth, you will see me in the procession of trolls pass behind it, leaving it quite dark, but there I will be on Tiger Snake Ridge, shining full on your face with activist pride! Now practise your counting: how many Earth rotations to an Earth phase? If you’re clever enough you might go up there one day! This is crazy!Did you have to do this? Of course, beams the Sun through her teeth, the whole world knows how to fly. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Random House, 1980, p. 218.
Sagan highlighted our connection to the cosmos, but so what? All of us must make that apple pie for ourselves, or it is merely words to say that we are star-stuff. The name of our construction is like the name of God, beyond words, but I create mine myself as a panorama of language and emotion and finitude on the three-dimensional backdrop my senses give me, begging for more at the depth of a finger, and I call it Country. I create mine with every effort to resist the centrifugal force of forgetting and boredom, but it is not that resistance I will mourn as I die—how undignified a deathbed recantation of nihilism!—but the mountains, deserts and streams of my youth, the ache of love, the subject and source of beauty and humour and honour, the music of Dostoyevsky, Hardy and Faulkner, of Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler which my youthful heart immortalised as Humanity, and my own most familiar beauty which immortalized them. No, if there is nobody to hear it, there is no sound. And so, children of your own time, place your hands under my thigh when your time comes, and swear to leave your country, not somebody else’s, not your teacher’s say, or your doctor’s; and by that effort you will perpetuate mine.
What is your country, Migrant? Are you bringing it with you, or leaving it behind? Your resilience is not in question, but your instinct is. North and South are not hard to find, if you don’t confuse East and West with left and right. Just ignore your shadow if East must be where it was, left or right. It may be in front of you, screaming noon, but nobody need know you’re lost in their instinct. We all know the resentment of being peripheral, and relevant only to alien perspective, and that is not cause for anger. It remains that who you are is up to you to desire. Go ahead, create a new centre at the periphery. Whose? Those whose self-centredness stayed behind, or those whose reflections of you are your haunting, your country. The task is in front of you. Without stealing my country, without appropriating any earthly culture, with no reference to climate change or corona viruses or global panic and economic recession, I challenge you to reject me from your instinct: no seasons; no hours; no houses.
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.” from “Defeat“, by Kahlil Gibran.
One of the first conventions we learn as infants is that the difference between zero and one is the same as the difference between nine and ten. Who knows how many tens of millennia we took to dismantle the convention that the difference between zero and one is infinite? What is ‘country’, as I use the term, if not an attempt to restore the sacred awe implicit in that ancient convention? Of course, conventions have ever been challenged by the truth. If, after half a millenium, our horoscopes are still governed by Northern Hemisphere seasons, and we still have trouble recognizing the Zodiac because its Constellations are upside down, don’t blame me.
However, it is not truth, but convention, not righteousness, but compassion, which hold communities together, especially when they originate from all over the world. A lot of healing is in progress: it has been a summer out of hell across Australia, grief never far beneath the surface. Community resilience is not in question, or the courage and kindness of good neighbours from all over the country and the world, but in the debate worldwide about how to prevent a repeat, it is difficult not to hear the same divided bickering that characterizes our efforts to deal with the racist, sexist and colonialist conventions we were all made of.
Has not the extant population of Earth, like a forest held together by subterranean fungus, arrived at an optimism, a raison d’être, a motivation for getting out of bed, deriving from a sense of powerlessness normally associated with depression, which is invisible, and ultimately unbelievable? Are we not, like a wind turbine in a coal-driven economy, or an ego in a yoga routine, going through the motions? Does not the survival of humanity beyond the next generation lurk in the legacies of the beneficiaries of our last wills and testaments, framed and interpreted by nobody who ever understood or respected the pain we old ones put the world through?
Pessimism looks like another secret to keep from our grandkids. How much easier that would be if they just had partners who preferred refined white bread because they ate it as children, revered secrets because their mothers were narcissists, and also cannot wait to get the kids out of the house for the sake of some me-time. Pessimism looks like a race to see who grows up first, the coffin we need to lose a huge amount of weight to fit into, in the grey area between one and zero. Hey kids, the song of the magpie out there means another perfect day! Off you go now.
One day, we might agree that hope and heartache both start with the same letter as hallelujah and hell, but apparently not yet. In the meantime, it’s in country I need to recover some equanimity, lest I go conventionally mad somewhere between nine and ten.
Country is the body of my idea, the underworld of my zenith. Country is the bush, the planet, the sound of one hand clapping, the whirr of insects, the roar of surf and wind, bird calls, traffic, someone singing, silence, the underworld sky. It has been mortally wounded, not only by drought and fire, and fear of climate change, but by an enormous sadness which seems to weigh on everyone, no longer possible to ignore, making even hope heavy. But healing is in the nature of things. You could say that adaptation and evolution are healing processes. The present is the past healing, you could say, the idea of time’s body, perhaps. However, never complete or permanent, healing is definitely not the same as salvation. Is that what makes it so sad? Doctors, of flesh and spirit, heal their compassion by trying to alleviate human suffering, knowing that neither suffering nor compassion can ever be cured. And if anyone is to blame, everyone is to blame. Does the sad doctrine of original sin mean other than everyone is wronged and everyone is wrong?
Australia needs a doctor! We grieve the deaths of millions of animals who trusted the bush. We grieve the passing of a world in which the conflagration of bush-change was as inconceivable as the inundation of sea-change. Actually, there is a profusion of shingles advertising pyres for deniers of climate change, but proselytizers always abound in the projection of shame. The Healer makes no claim to timeless wisdom, but engages in what must change: understanding, tradition, discrimination, self.
Scene: The Healer’s waiting-room. Whimpers and groans issue from an assortment of shapes around the room, and all that is visible of most lowered faces is distorting disgust and anger, while they rehearse their soliloquies.
“Human languages have evolved away from their original capacity to communicate with inanimate objects, and have limited things within a vocabulary of peculiarity, e.g. sick man, old man, dead man, holy man, which negates their subjectivity, and masks who else it is doing the dependent co-arising. Making universal gods of the vital elements of human experience, the inner voices of paleolithic biochemistry, should have led to something other than abstraction, objectification, copyright and forgetfulness. It should be the birthright of every human child to grow up in a world of interwoven spatial and temporal languages: mathematical, chemical, linguistic, gravitational, ecological.”
“What would happen to terrestrial tides and nights if there were no Moon? What would existence be like if there were no Earth? What might the gods be discussing with you if you weren’t demanding they inhabit the detritus of your attention-span? What community might we belong in if we could overcome our recently acquired faith in an immortal society?”
“What being actually feels like is uphill and downhill, like a subway elevator on our way to and from work in periods of growth, learning and self-actualization, utility, creativity and self-assertion, or harmony, withdrawal and reconstitution. For reasons best explained by storytellers, elevators get no mention in the sequence of these periods which may form a lifetime, a year, a day or an hour, but suffice to say, nobody likes to think of themselves as going around in circles, regardless of how many others are employed by our need to do so: ‘Shut up, or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor!'”
“Linear narrative has come to bestow on its proponents many seductive advantages, such as property and common law, historical grievance and the justification of war and terrorist reprisal, but above all, narrative has sacralized the hippocampus as the altar of knowledge and expertise. Narrative is primarily responsible for the curse of our age, identity, and our horror of the mental illness we define as dementia, its collapse.”
“Time tries to heal too. The moment is oppressed by memory. The future cannot come into being until versions of the past are forgotten. Snippets of music from the past, golden oldies, are private property anchoring their celebrant in the past, to the extent of encouraging regret for the passing of the moment. Ultimately, not only must private property be abolished, but also the wellsprings of avarice and envy, the human spirit. Any amount of educational experiment is welcome in place of the abolition of flesh and blood. Since rationality is the invasion of the moment by the past, children must be taught to cease any effort to understand.”
“Think about this, think about that. What belief are you pushing, Healer? What is wrong with you anyway? It’s your job to fix things, but you never! Your altruism consists of dog whistling the fools who think people like you are somebody. Actually, your compassion is pitiless. Hello? Wake up to yourself! There’s no time left for you to understand the darkness in which we feel less alone, to let the stars in, and acknowledge the Moon as the poor healer who killed himself in your waiting room!”
She has licence for hyperbole, dear soul, after what she’s been through. And the Moon does seem to be seeking a different way to heal. The heat has quite gone out of his competition with the Sun. Indeed, the deities of each are withered on dead placentas, their genders archived where salvation doesn’t shine. Humanity is its own body within a body now. Long live the Earth in the Zodiac of Moon Country! We don’t know enough of our planet’s companionship! Earth’s terrors are reduced at Moon distance to a human fingerwidth at arm’s length, and the disjunct of Sign and Constellation is healed in the absence of seasons. The geographical location of the overhead Moon is the centre of the planet’s disc at lunar zenith, during lunar daylight and terrestrial night between First and Third Quarters, lunar night and terrestrial daylight between Third and First, and equal in geographical latitude and sidereal time to the Moon’s declination and right ascension. Precise calculation of Earth’s position is one of the most difficult problems facing lunar mathematicians, but ‘among those stars right above us’ will do for now, until a fully-fledged astrology evolves.
“Let me in,” cries a voice in the stone-age bicameral mind, in the Pacific Ocean 460 kilometres off Colima in Mexico. Didn’t a mysterious stranger get hauled out of this sea once? In fact, there is nobody in the Healer’s consulting room but someone closer to the head of the queue, an old man aimlessly brushing sand from the hieroglyphs he occasionally unearths under the plaque of his wandering. With bewildered effort he can remain vertical, this encrusted column sinking into the sea in line with the others where once there may have been a causeway.
“I’m looking at the river, but I’m thinking of the sea.” Randy Newman, “In Germany Before The War”, Little Criminals, 1977.
Today is an important day in Townsville, Australia. Locations south of Toolakea witness their noonday shadows to their south for the first time since the Sun’s declination moved south of Townsville’s latitude on 19 November. In astrological terms, the noon Vertex moves from the 9th House to the 4th, or in simple geometrical terms, the overhead intersection of the Ecliptic with the Prime Vertical crosses from the east to the west, transformed from anti-Vertex to Vertex. Another way to relate to this phenomenon is to imagine the complete reorientation of your sense of direction when the Sun goes from rising on your left to rising on your right, how mindful of your shadow you would need to be in terrain with no landmarks, and how familiar with landmarks you would need to be in the tropics. You would expect our ancestors in the tropics to travel a lot at night and know the stars like the back of their hands, wouldn’t you?
The longing for the divine partner underfoot in eternity is transformed by material greed or secular cynicism into the archaeology of imperial trophies, and, by what Greta Thunberg called “fairytales of eternal economic growth”, into the replacement of religious obedience by scientific enthralment. Is that what happens? Can the Earth’s obliquity really single out the residents of Townsville for such an influence during their lunch break today? And can we really know the exact day the Sun’s declination equals the latitude of anywhere before the noon shadows of the locals announce it? [The sine of the Sun’s declination equals the sine of Earth’s obliquity multiplied by the sine of the Sun’s ecliptic longitude. The Vertex ‘flip’ occurs at the longitude after the Summer Solstice Point (either one) whose sine equals the sine of the latitude divided by the sine of the obliquity, and before that Solstice Point by the same degree. Since sine 0 = 0, those longitudes at the Equator are 0 and 180, the Equinox Points.]
And finally, is there a more logical basis for the application of Sun Signs to places without four seasons than which horizontal hemisphere the noon Sun is in, North or South? As the Sun retreats towards the Northern Hemisphere in our late Summer, we welcome back more of the Tropics to our shared perspective; or the more of us there are, the further away the Sun. [It takes two months for Australia to get all of its Tropics back from the Northern Hemisphere, but the South gains Singapore at noon on March 24, Monrovia on April 5, Bangkok on April 27, Mexico City on May 17, the Kaaba on May 28, Hong Kong on June 3, Havana on June 11 and ultimately Mazatlán on June 13.]
Whatever the flipping of this mysterious recently invented influence on the heart from sidereal Cancer in the House of Aspiration to sidereal Capricorn in the House of Reputation signifies, you can imagine it has a huge bearing on the price of fish, up and down Australia’s tropical east coast. Even with GPS, the unwary visitor who cannot smell the sea will begin westward when trying to find the fishing co-op! No aid will be forthcoming from the locals, either, who will be down on hands and knees with plumb-bobs and rulers, trying to calibrate the turbulent hormones which cascade during a four-hour period in Townsville at different times of day. Perhaps the visitor is of a mind not to ‘lose it’, but simply to go without fish today. Such a person might well be absent in their own country, and not lost at all. What kind of country might that be? Not a culture of power relations and commodities, oppression and exploitation, perhaps, but unfortunately a world of innerness without outward form or utility to anyone else.
Miraculous though its panorama certainly is, the tenancy of country with a small ‘c’ becomes null and void, any freehold extinguished, at death. Whatever ancestors or previous inhabitants might have put into place, for however long the grandfather clock might have ticked, or the eels teemed into the traps, country did not exist until its tenant came along and made it. Has the tenant lived an impoverished existence, up to their ears in debt, even enslaved, banished, children gone in war and marital strife and migration? Very likely! But you know how beautiful their country is? How awesome to be its only inheritance? You probably don’t because, embedded in history, social theory and economics, identity and law, or perhaps the search in therapy for love and validation in your existential victimhood and educated blame, it is too soon for you to stand here on the banks of the Lethe, dissolved in awe of karma created by hope, error, sorrow and submission, defeat, addiction, intoxication and joy, which for all eternity has been the haunt of our ghosts. When the time comes, welcome to cosmic individuality, the practice of awe, where even scientists and high priests acknowledge the relativity of their faith in platitudes about life’s journey.
Let’s whizz to the moment in time, several hours before Townsville noon, customarily identified by the Academy of Scientific Astrology and the Uniting Church of Oncology, Climatology, Astrometry and Extragalactic Dynamics as New Moon. So here we are, ready to argue about signs and influences, but suddenly aware that the only thing we know for certain is that we know nothing. It may or may not be the case that this is not a dream, that the underworld is the outside looking in, or that the many mansions of my Father’s house are the wards of a detention centre’s psychiatric hospital, the hours which mark the various ways the autonomous spirit of everything gasps for survival under the putrefaction of my corpse, or the seams of my resistance to the emptiness of consciousness, time and illness. The following relativities of geography, Milky Way mythology and rotational orientation may or may not be helpful in sustaining the dialogue you might have with the Moon this year. [They are all plotted using Stellarium 0.19.2 and paint.net 4.2.7.]
Every one of these snapshots could begin a dialogue between insiders and outsiders typified by a line in the sand separating absolutist and relativist: do not assert your truth over mine, because I am right and you are wrong. Presented together, they offer the elusive prospect of a system which ties them all together, which should remind us that our most conspicuous lack is not respect for difference, but a spirit of solidarity, an ethics of presence, a sharing of silence. In fact, it is relatively easy to discover systems on the outside, but it is not easy to share from the inside one’s creation, of love and obedience, integrity and awe. The oaths sworn by the gods in honour of the goddess Styx, the elm tree at the entrance to the ancient underworld to which false dreams cling under every leaf, the varieties of madness in the no-man’s-land of the bardo, and the experience of life in death I call ‘country’, are concepts borrowed from other times and cultures, and elements like the oils on a canvas, with no intrinsic meaning or independent agency, of an astrology of empty identity, time and place.
‘”…Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
“…The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless…”‘ Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose, Picador, 1984.
The veteran finds he can remember the name of everyone in his high school class, but cannot remember taking his blood-pressure pill today. As he reads the news of the world going to hell in a handbasket, who is manipulating whose doubt in democracy’s inclusivity, and who is crowdfunding what ego trip, he admires the new methods of driving forward what feels like it must be done, but he cannot remember much about what that was in his own youth. He imagines a reunion of his high school class dividing into contact groups asked to explore one question, ‘What happened?’ How did you lose all your money? How did you rise to those dizzy heights over there? How did you raise five children and foster nine more, alone? How did you interpret the platitudes of the sixties and seventies to make yourself that best self you committed yourself to find after school? In straggling formation like cockatoos, squawking eternity across the timeless vault, they would possibly share an inexpressible need to absent themselves from their children’s resentment, but would be unable to articulate what in the moment they would need to adapt … in these terms, my darling grandchildren, you achieved greatness merely by getting here!
Upon what glistening trackside web in the light of dawn shall time, the flight of its captives, zigs or zags, be transfixed? The zigs and zags of the veteran similarly flutter no more. He remembers the past as the foundation of its future, but karma in each instant depends on karma in the next. The future is indeterminate; the present is a polynomial guess, whether the climate emergency means you, or you mean it. The distinction may already be between a zig and a zag.
As humanity begins to fall apart, the Veteran Moon wonders at the meaning of his velocity, his phases, his background and his gravity. Humans have created history, society, science and religion out of cultures of meaning, which is a great achievement on the face of it, since the meaning of all phenomena, the Moon and your heart, for example, only phenomenologically exist. Rights and duties, and genders, for that matter, circle each other like pugilists, as the planets circle the Earth, and the Sun.
Perhaps you don’t believe in Gaia, but what of the sea and the sky? You may not believe in God, but what of awe, and your vocation and your muse? How do you define your family? How do they define you? Meaning is the situation you create for yourself, your country, in that existential terrain which sustains your interest. Poof! One day it will be gone. How can it have been so important? How will the next generation of veterans define an ingenue? Does your judgment of your elders mean anything? What does it mean to be on the verge of extinction?
Religions abound which offer authoritative measures of the meaning of life, and have ever done so. And as surely, the doctors of the spirit have never shirked from the issues of suffering, fear and despair. Salvation is at hand, cry the wellness spruikers of today, on a million social websites, in the form of answers to questions like, ‘who am I?’ and ‘what shall be my legacy?’, or ‘how may I cling eternally to something which will survive me?’ On the other hand if, unlike Southern Hemisphere Astrology, you believe the rock of permanence is best left unturned for the red-back spider it will disclose, there’s a tour for that, and it heads out well after dawn.
As for the Full Moon near the ‘June Solstice’, the Elder or Veteran in Gemini, it resonates with the overarching values of human community, forgiveness and compassion, because on the other side of the world from the Sun’s woe, it’s the Moon’s job to say, “Keep going, it’s all downhill from there.” Trouble is, 866 crossings of the Lethe to the Sun’s 70 doesn’t make the Moon an authority, it just makes him mathematically correct, one who has done it all, including compassion, without remembering how.
What is the nature of the reality in which an Earthling’s local perspective can find meaning in geometrical intersections of galactic and orbital planes which are no more visible than the Stone Age in an urban streetscape, or a name for someone’s awe? What cannot be disproven by algorithms such as I use, whose formulae are based on polynomial expressions of previous observations, is the good fortune of Earthlings in 1998 CE that the Sun’s crossing of the Lethe did not exactly coincide with the June Solstice (difference 6 minutes), the New Moon (difference 3 days) or the North Node (difference 2 constellations), because the coincidence of all four would have wiped out all memory, tipped the magnetic poles and caused 10m tides, catastrophic floods and bushfires, and hundreds of thousands of fatalities in collisions of aircraft with each other and with migrating birds.
For me, there can be no more satisfactory explanation of contemporary utopian, even soteriological, notions of secular safety, mental and physical health, and identity and personal improvement, than that Earthlings are learning less and less about more and more, and more and more about less and less, resulting in widespread distribution of ingenues who know nothing about everything and veterans who know everything about nothing.
“Dear Lord, may this stone, a symbol of my efforts on the pilgrimage that I lay at the feet of the cross of the Savior, weigh the balance in favor of my good deeds that day, when the deeds of all my life are judged. Let it be so. Amen.” Emilio Estevez, The Way, Elixir Films, 2010.
