Author Archives: abliq

The Drone: Full Moon in Sidereal Capricorn

15 Thursday Aug 2019

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“We navigate a passage through a jagged archipelago of partly submerged questions upon the raft of language.“ Kevin Brophy, “Shame-Job“, Meanjin, Winter, 2019.

“The power of incompetence may be one of the most inscrutable phenomena of the modern political age, but it certainly works.

Why else would a man like Boris Johnson feign it so carefully?” Annabel Crabb.

At first glance, the Drone seems to enjoy a privileged position: he is simply required to impregnate Women. They will take care of the rest, with the aid of the Hive. They will connect with other Women to form communities, within which they will raise the children, for whom Daddy will be a frightful imagination of Otherness. The Prodigal left; the Drone elects a life sentence. Diploid children are welcomed by the Sisterhood as relief for any of their three full-time jobs, food gathering, child raising and home maintenance, but haploids are a nuisance. Their demand of equality has always been a problem, but in recent times, when more and more haploids have been affecting to be diploid, that demand has become a real problem. Diploids are workers, not shirkers.

Drone Moon Punta Arenas Aug15

‘Meaning’ is all too often regarded as drawing a statistical line through difference. Actually, the term ‘meaning’ should be restricted to references to romance’s opportunity for a new basis for personality, a new mean of identity, a new origin, and a new incarnation of the Force. A Girl needs to learn what it means to have haploids and diploids in Her class, and how to deal with both. A Boy needs to learn to navigate in order to congregate, and must overcome the fear of losing his balance and turning himself inside out.

Drone Moon Punta Arenas Underworld Aug15

The Drone, or haploid Male, until stimulated by a sunset yearning which floods the west with Her oxytocin, dwells in the Underworld, asylum for the Hive’s superfluous ones, or so it feels when He is accustomed to sunset rising and other upside down signs of an opposite existence. Bathed in Her oxytocin, the Drone is frantic for a meaning–although on the wrong side of the history of that term–to the fusion of opposites at the Vertex whose power (in the Force) safeguards his redundancy. Of course, being haploid is a competitive thing. Once the Sun has gone to the Underworld She may be in the habit of craving humour rather than dependability, and a Drone’s repertoire is limited to one shot. Furthermore, the Force evolves. It really is the case that She seeks salvation of a different order as She gets older. What did you imagine those endless safaris into the Tropics were about?

Drone Moon Newman N Aug15

Washing out the Emu of a Warrior sky, the Drone finds himself this time within a degree of Deneb Algedi, who, like a goat’s mouth (seen in the northern sky) isn’t fussy about what congregation She gets into. And so the Vertex and its opposite evolve towards death without God or Heaven, and Nirvana, like oxytocin, has no real existence in the eternal release from the wheel of rebirth and suffering which is ordained by the Force. The Drone joins the congregation in the Tropics, where Eternity always becomes Permanence because Cynicism always becomes Idolatry. This is serious stuff, where adults beyond transport grids seek to exchange transferable tickets to unlimited travel.

Drone Moon Newman S Aug15

By what mechanism did the Drone find His way at the precise moment of His brightest shining to this place, which if it did not exist, would have to be invented, where the Zodiac, arcing directly overhead from due East to due West, and the Milky Way, arcing in a straight line from North-east to South-west, form a crossroad directly over an observer’s head. In little more than three minutes–how accurately the time of birth must be recorded on the Tropic of Capricorn around 18:00 Local Apparent Sidereal Time–the Anti-vertex has whipped from idolatry in the Tenth House through fantasy, delusion, convention, narcissism and finally cynicism high above in the House of the intellect. No wonder the Drone needs the heroism of His ultimate journeys constantly rehearsed. And no wonder it is! His deaths in the mansion of Deneb Algedi number in the millions and have required of His mystique absolutely everything.

Moons 2019-2028

Flight, heroic journey, mystery lover, significant other? Around and around we go, echoes of madness in the Bardo of a queen’s Spermatheca. The Zealot, you may notice, always narrows himself into the correct precedence, and bullies have always been the socialities most easily socialized: next year, mate, you can be the Drone’s survivor, as you always were.

Drone Moon Auckland Aug16

Capricorn

The Force is other than country. On my country, the phases of ancestry are synchronous with the six moments of the Milky Way, the values of the stars are devices of the poetry of landscape, and the cycle of Full Moons is a music of heroic impotence. The Force, meanwhile, is where my country loses its emptiness, where there is no when to be absent from, and where I am nothing but inscrutable purpose in an instant of virtual forgetting, like the flight of a Drone.

New Moon in Sidereal Cancer: Connection

01 Thursday Aug 2019

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Yes, the Stone Circle of Wurdi Youang may well mark the setting Sun from solstice to solstice, and I can sympathize with the satisfaction of the layers of the stones, but it seems a comfortable confirmation of what we already knew, that the Sun’s arc is shorter in winter than in summer, as though they were saying, people migrated out of the Tropics, problem solved. What problem?

The problem of the cardinal directions: I know where I am, right here, but how do I describe it? How do I relate it to you, my hunting team, when you can’t see me? In our almost instinctive knowledge that the Sun rises on our left and sets on our right, or vice versa, we short-circuit an astronomical heritage more ancient and fundamental than Wurdi Youang witnesses. To say, “the kangaroo is on your sunset side,” or “the crocodile is to my south,” we have to all know what the shadows mean, which way the stars are revolving, where the Sun rose, where noon is, in front or behind.

Relationships can be like this. If the Other knows exactly where they’re going, to the extent they know where you’re coming from, and you’re actually from a different hemisphere, just get out. Simple. If you have history and want to plough it into a brand new present, and they say, why? There you have the epitome of short-circuit. Your emptiness just got invaded by the Other’s presence, or rather their self-composed fullness. If reality is not there for you to invent, merely discover, you’re still in school, at least according to the teacher. Is it so stupid to only trust those who don’t know what they’re doing? Don’t answer that.

It is quite normal to trust the ones who know what they are doing, who are in a story with interconnected chapters, beginnings, middles and an end, way off in the distance. It is quite normal to find oneself integrated into a web of connections between things and events as they are in themselves, and to spend many years of childhood and adolescence discriminating among possible meanings to keep things real. It is quite normal to take unconscious advantage of those whose reality has fallen apart, rather than to confront the insecurity of the social construction of one’s things. It is quite normal to discover it is the self as creator who is responsible for unlovability, and to have recourse to psychological reassembly.

And although it may not be normal, who cannot forgive the one who learns how to protect the heart by making love permanent, by idolizing objects as expressions of perfect love, for denying the enduring hormonal reality of romance, rejecting in the very last chapter of one’s individualist narrative needy romance’s cauldron of transformation, life’s offer of transpiration to the skeletal things one must keep connected, the trees of one’s wood?

It is self-evident that the Earth is a thing which does not move, for example in a rotation on its axis, or at varying speeds around the Sun. One cannot see the Earth rolling towards the sunrise, but one can see the Sun as a thing rising above the flat Earth. Once in a generation perhaps, one human imagination has played with the idea of the Earth rolling and the Sun staying still. Try it. It is almost impossible. Leave everything you know out of the equation, the kettle, the toaster, the fridge, the smartphone, the TV, the radio, and imagine your world flying through space faster than anything you’ve ever seen, without a hair out of place. That one is a more recently recorded experience, early in the twentieth century, of the emptiness of things.

Imagine yourself without an imagination. Dream that you’ve never had a dream. Believe it or not, there really are men who have never imagined being a woman, and women who have never imagined being a man! Not to mention men and women, the very definition of Bogan, who have never imagined themselves to be men or women! So you see that this is how everything is connected, how Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere can be a lion, and in the Southern Hemisphere a water-carrier, not by the reversal of absurdly fixed seasons, but by not assuming anything, by playing with appearances, by imagining the impossible. A crab really might empathize with the kids playing in the wet sand above its castle: a King Crab, the Lion in Winter.

Yes, you who learnt yourself as real from your parents and teachers, and what fell into place with the television, the economy and social canon allowing only a few kosher [sic] alternatives, must heal. The fabric of reality is damaged because yours is wrong, in the sense that every object is wrong, until you create it yourself in relation, shorthand for, say, “Careful, a crocodile is in the westernmost waterhole!” Perhaps with Sun and Moon conjoined in Cancer, you will be in Tropical Aquarius, and perhaps you will be in Leo. All that parents and teachers are really saying is, this is where I am. That’s all I’m saying too, and all that I’m hearing, now that you’ve discovered you’re not normal, is where you are too.

Prodigal Moon in Sidereal Sagittarius

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

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“The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.” Jacques Monod.

“Having the freedom to believe but not to express is not freedom at all.” Gabrielle Moore.

A grandparent’s life is about transforming eternity into permanence: preparing for death must be an act of love.

”Clara didn’t belong to you.” “Your life didn’t belong to you.” Almodovar, Carne Trémula (Live Flesh) 1997.

“What happened to you?” Disappointment is readily couched in blame, but the failure of the prodigal to live up to expectations cannot cloak one’s projected dismissal of annihilation, particularly narcissism’s claim to survival in eternity, and the open-ended immensity of non-existence known as permanence which so overwhelms the sociopath. Let us remember Janus, facing past and future at the gateway of our absence.

Prodigal Moon Singapore S Jul17

“Let me tell you what happened: this layabout took off when the going got tough, and excluded us from the temple of his emotions; and now his Procrustean flesh wants to come home, because it seems the capacity of its independence cannot surpass his father’s blessing.”

Not that this Moon would rationally be reflecting you personally, but ask yourself, was your existence worth its effect on global-warming, for example? Was it sufficient to be stable in your ignorant, irresponsible, surprised consumption of the self-evidence of every platitude, every fashion statement, every improvement to humanity and the planet, which you were manipulated by status into following … or not?

More to the point, if you are prodigal, is it in your wastage of the natural resources you inherited, or of the opportunity to share them with the poor of the world you choose to make your equals by calling them disadvantaged? How can you choose climate-change minimization over poverty alleviation? Fear? Shame? Millions have died in youth who, with the endowment of electricity, security and education, might have contributed far more to the science of energy technology, climate management and human survival than you and your lucky fathers, mothers, sons and daughters have achieved.

Have you lost your inheritance, the reason for your pain and all its hope, and in your contrition are you just begging your father for more than a slave’s wage? Take it then, the fatted calf of a world of hatred, fear and anger it is unlawful to express! Like the older brother in the parable of Jesus, I question your fitness at the table, especially where global temperatures and the manhandling of your waste are traded. Your eternity is emotional prattle and your permanence is rational wank, not flipping but tripping.

Prodigal Moon Quito N Underworld Jul16

It is well-known that the Tropic of Capricorn passes through Longreach (and Gracemere, south of Rockhampton) in Queensland. Still quite commonly known is the fact that the inclination of the Equator to the Ecliptic is currently decreasing, and so the latitude of the Southern Solstice is moving northward. However, only our allegorical prodigal knows that in the year he was born, 1993, the Tropic of Capricorn passed over the Longreach hospital in which his long-suffering mother brought him into the world. A lifetime later, he is still pondering, as is his wont, if he was born before or after a Vertex Flip, if indeed there was one above his southerly ward, and why the stars wait for birth to exercise their influence. The miracle of gestation and the exhaustion of labour have never entered his equations of care. Thinking with the heart does not teach us to feel with the head.

Prodigal Moon Singapore S Underworld Jul17

What is the ‘Vertex Flip’? Twice a day it happens for every location in the tropics, where James Cook University has estimated more than half of the world’s population will live by mid-century. An uncomfortable moment from which the majority of humans have escaped into temperate latitudes, it transposes and mystifies the hemispheres of left and right, before and behind and up and down, whatever they might mean. Currently stationed in North Queensland, (among the electorates which decided Australia’s destiny at the recent election,) I must say how tumultuous seem the Constellations of Scorpius, Sagittarius and Capricornus at the Zenith, revolving implausibly into my South.

No wonder the comfortable geometries of astrology evolved by the heirs of Ptolemy flourish in temperate latitudes: what sense can they make of the lurch of the Vertex from Eleventh House (one before IC—bottom West) to Fourth (one after MC—top West), and of the Anti-Vertex from Third (one before MC—top East) to Tenth (one after IC—bottom East), when the Ecliptic, the Zenith, and East, West, North and South converge? The Third House is the House of Intellect and the Bardo of Paranoia, and the Ninth House is the House of Aspiration and the Bardo of Deprivation. The Fourth House is the House of Reputation and the Bardo of Relativity, and the Tenth House is the House of Realization and the Bardo of Boredom. The Vertex by definition is a western, social point, a source of personal meaning in the Other, and its opposite is an eastern intuition of social meaning in the Person. Put all these elements together, and the Vertex Flip encapsulates the transformation of eternity into permanence, cynicism into idolatry, and country into emptiness, cultural artefacts which, face to face, at once engender and transcend time, place and difference.

Prodigal Moon Quito N Jul16

“You are welcome to your inheritance, my sons, whether you’ve blown it already or not. I congratulate you both as flashes of brilliance in the bog of emotion. I am proud of you equally, but what either of you deserve was never in the equation. This I must tell your children as their grandfather: you have rights, evolved in the rationale of the ages in all cultures, and one of them, the right to country, is called Emptiness, not Permanence. Death is the empty gateway to that right, idolatry is an ignoble trap, and a right to serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline is an oxymoron. By the time they are grandparents, and your dreams and their memory have withered and died, they will know what it means to love one’s workers with their faults, if sometimes in Gemini a little harshly.”

Responsibility: New Moon in Sidereal Gemini

03 Wednesday Jul 2019

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“We are expected to grow up to be empathic, caring, respectful, or honest when these qualities are not demonstrated in how we are treated, nor are we given room to find from within who we are. It’s entirely unsurprising to me that most of us carry so much shame given how much and how often children are shamed by others.” Miki Kashtan.

”Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.” Richard Mitchell.

“Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre.” Montaigne, Essais, I.

You probably cannot understand what it means to receive inspiration from the Sun in Gemini unless you have crossed the Acheron into the Underworld, trudged through vanity and perfectionism, braved the ghosts of love haunting the Circlet of Pisces, evaded treachery in the badlands of Aries and the herd of brides offered on eBay by lowing Aldebaran, and waded past the ablutions of seductive Saiph, one glance towards whom could have you up before the Sexism and Racism Commissariat. It’s hell, Hell, and it’s somewhat of a comfort to forget you’re there, and why you’re there. Karma is a factitious disorder beyond belief: like Baron Munchausen you have pulled yourself from the mire of Tropical Astrology by your own hair. Welcome to social eternity, where community withdraws from the defeats of history, and celebrates the visible mercy of silence.

And welcome to good company. In living memory, and for any living person’s foreseeable future, Lethe season and June Solstice coincide, within a day or two, even if their precedence reversed in 1998. In the Southern Hemisphere the June Solstice is the Sun’s surrender, the New Sun, and so this first Moon tries to temper its relative brilliance with an appropriate show of delicacy, if not self-effacement. Prorsum et semper honeste, quoth the Southern Hemisphere to its Underworld, its Other.

Gemini New Breamlea Jul03

You will think I’m terrible, and I know that Western Civilization is underpinned by the perennial struggle for freedom, but I believe that the majority of those who sacrificed their lives for freedom didn’t have much of an idea what it was. I suggested as much to my Father after I’d read Bullock, and he as much as told me to shut my mouth lest I defile the memory of the fallen with a repeat of my suggestion that pre-war American, British and Australian boys, and indeed he, seem to have been raised with something similar to Hitler Youth values.

Gemini New Hanga Roa Jul02

Out of responsibility, freedom; out of freedom, forgetting; out of forgetting, responsibility. That is what baby-boomers learned by associating the meaning of their parents’ language and behaviour. Their grandchildren have also been born into a Great Forgetting, of the caring responsiveness we know as responsibility, to fly like a bird through the rights and obligations woven into the fledgling nest by a thousand socialist institutions.

Gemini New Bhakkar Jul03

Does God know in advance every wing beat of every bird? No ego, no matter how inflated, could rationally make such a claim. After all, every bird is itself responsible for the joy of its unique capacity, like dreaming humans, to swim through the air. We share the species-memory of birds, and no omniscience was ever created by human ego which could predict a dream, as no form of government was ever born of human competition which could create responsibility.

Gemini New Bhakkar Underworld Jul03

As society can survive civil war, so love can survive limerence, and humanity’s adaptation to climate change will continue, but freedom can only flourish in the renewal of community which clings to the forgotten woe of individuality like the Jordan to the baptized. Irresponsibility? Forget it, as the adult bird said to its fledgling: “You were hatched to fly, girl, so fly!” And what is that planet with her toes in the Lethe? The Sun does not go anywhere without her retinue, and that includes us, and all our divine beings.

Full Moon in Sidereal Scorpio #2 of 2019: The Zealot

17 Monday Jun 2019

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“Forget all these pious denunciations of populism from progressive politicians. When figures like Khan use such grotesquely exaggerated moral categories to denounce Trump, they are promoting extremism more effectively than anyone else.” Greg Sheridan.

“And if everyone is anti-racist and anti-sexist, you have to really be strongly anti-racist and anti-sexist to get more points.” Jonathan Haidt.

Zealot Moon Davos Underworld Jun17

For some strange reason, June is a time of dissatisfaction. Aligned according to preference as to whether it is poetry or pleasure that is not enough, everyone is declamatory. It is as though to the boor preening her preeminent progressivity the Moon could not make the timing of his fullness at the Galactic Centre more self-evident.

Zealot Moon Shiraz Underworld Jun17

Whereas for most of us the Constellations are a backdrop to lunar motion, the zealot has a tendency to take things literally, project his borrowed and reified concepts onto a cosmology to which he expects unquestioned adherence by anyone with half a brain, and in eliding perspective, miss altogether the relative meaning which that other peculiar human being, the natural scientist, has given to the celestial spectacle since the Stone Age, namely the lapse of time.

Zealot Moon Shiraz Jun17

The Gates of God and Man have absolutely nothing to do with the Signs or Seasons. They are the intersections of Ecliptic and Galactic Plane, and have occupied the Constellations of Sagittarius and Gemini since before their invention, some twelve thousand years ago, when axial precession was revealing its intention to turn the Seasons upside down. The Gate of God is called Woe, where the soul crosses the Acheron. It coincided with the Southern Summer Solstice in 1998. Jupiter at opposition, vacillating, obsesses with it every 83 years, last in 1960, next in 2043, although you could infer powerful dreaming from its retrograde hesitancy this year. Jupiter will cross on December 4. The Full Sun crosses at Southern Litha, in 2019 seven hours after Solstice on December 22.

Dasein 2019

The Gate of Man is called Forgetting, where the Ecliptic crosses the Lethe, which may or may not be the portal to reentry into the phenomenal world by the departed. It might simply be the spawning ground of socialist zealots. The New Sun crosses on June Solstice Day. As for Jupiter, the last time it was at opposition at the Gate of Man was December 1977, and the next will be December 2060. I am confident that by then, no Australian zealot will refuse to sing the words of this new and improved national anthem:

Australians all let us rejoice
For we are strong and free
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil
Our home is girt by sea
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare
In herstory’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia, yair
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia, yair!

Certainly, born in 1948, Abliq won’t, hypochondria notwithstanding. In the meantime, I hope you catch the close conjunction of Mars and Mercury in evening twilight tomorrow, and with clear skies on June 30, both the last appearance of the Morning Star and the evening twilight end of the 2017-19 Mars apparition: so endeth the Southern Year, and beginneth another, yair!

 

 

New Moon in (Sidereal) Taurus: Populism

03 Monday Jun 2019

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“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” Greta Thunberg.

If reality only exists in relation to unreality, who are we to question the unreal, we who are merely real?

“Both what I know about myself and what I do not know will therefore be my testimony to you, since what I know I have seen by your light, and what I do not know is from my own darknesses, not yet scattered by your noonday gaze…. So, though memory is in my memory when I remember remembering, both forgetting and remembering are in my memory when I remember forgetting—remembering that I forget, and forgetting what I once remembered.” St Augustine, Confessions, Book Ten.

Taurus New Sydney Chart Jun03

News of Abliq’s terminal illness has begun circulating on social media.

Taurus New Sydney Jun03

Was he ever real? And what of those he has remembered, and forgotten? Is there a populist who can stimulate their regurgitation from his unconscious, put them back together again, make them feel real enough to survive him?

Taurus New Sydney Underworld Jun03

Where is the Moon real? Not the lump of rock, whose physical presence three or four hundred thousand kilometres away in the sky and tidal effects on Earth are real enough, or as real as we are. No, not that moon, but the Moon, the creature of antiquity, the voice of the heart, of human emergence from universal mind. Where does it survive NASA’s landing, and socially engineered equality, and exclusive religiosity, and populist claims of humanity’s responsibility for climate change, and Abliq’s rudimentary algorithms of solar and lunar position? Where is it safe from judgement and perfection, exploitation and habitation, logic and priority, identity and death? In Country, in short, where the Underworld is tangible, and secret business resonates as powerfully today as it did 50,000 years ago; in consciousness of the unconscious, seventy years of dreams of a lifespan transforming 13.8 billion years into occupied space; a space always and forever occupied by Abliq’s absence as the Other.

Rogue Moon in Breamlea Scorpio

20 Monday May 2019

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Have you worked out what ‘Why?’ means? Pretty important question, perhaps the most important, especially for me and my friends and enemies, as Reason reaches the last moments of its bout with Instinct in old age. Are you getting anxious about how much time you’ve wasted, or don’t you have time? Of course you were meant to integrate the souls of your parents, but what if you couldn’t be bothered, or had other fish to fry? Are you just starting to get bored after forty years of having a good time? Was hedonism an abnegation of a calling or an excuse for not hearing one? Are you a better judge of what you deserve than anyone younger?

Astrology may have been just one of numerous historical tool sets for grappling with such questions, but its diagrams may reflect a crystalline template for the adaptation of life to that primordial question, ‘WTF’? Because, left to its own devices, this question, ‘Why?’, is devastating to the fabric of consciousness, and to society, even human survival, yet the rogue is characterised, perhaps defined, by the insistence on asking it. Why does the rogue emerge at this time of year? Elections? Ask him! What response can you get from a globular rock you might notice less than ten times a year?

Eddie Betts is an Australian Rules Football rogue who has a magical control of the ball which regularly produces impossible goals. When asked to teach the skill, he said something like, “Sorry mate, you can’t learn it: it’s got to be in you.” Is that the Vertex or the Anti-Vertex the Moon and Jupiter are aligned with in Tampa’s Underworld, West or East, as the Moon sets in Sydney this morning?

Rogue Tampa Underworld May19

Nobody seems to have any idea where they come from, these rogues, for want of a better term. Dilettantes, I have previously called them: clever types who are never able to dedicate themselves to a specialty, whose convictions intensify in inverse proportion to the dilution of their interdisciplinary insights in the apathetic ignorance of the Underworld which surrounds the dead and the unborn, and their metamorphosis in ‘Why?’.

Opportunism: New Moon in Sidereal Aries

05 Sunday May 2019

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“I don’t purport to speak for every single person, but ‘living non-binary’, for me, will always feel more authentic than ‘identifying as non-binary’.” Adolfo Aranjuez, “Quest and Queerness”, Meanjin Quarterly, Autumn 2019.

“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 8:7.17.

‘Civilization!’ was God’s inevitable reply to ‘Death!’. Abliq.

The first sign of the Northern Hemisphere Zodiac is like a tree in a wood you can only pick out from the air. It definitely has an identity, but what does that mean to the hiker who can only see the wood? The Northward Equinox, known to navigators as the First Point of Aries, is this year a shrinking 8.1° E along the Ecliptic from the westerly IAU boundary of Pisces, and today’s syzygy occurs 44.2° from the Equinox (roughly 44 days), and therefore 14.2° into the Northern Tropical Sign of Taurus, but obviously not the Bull we see, which was still visible last night on the western horizon an hour after sunset. So in the North you have a brace of fish smelling like a ram, followed by a restive ram chewing his cud. In the South, on the assumption Northern seasons can be simply turned upside-down, we have a haggling over the fish on the scales, followed by a ram trying to temper his assertiveness to mask a scorpion’s aggression.

Whether you use identity to attack or defend, or like Southern Hemisphere Astrology mystify it to undermine it at every turn, we must all deal with it, because no matter how desirable adaptability to change and equanimity in ambiguity may seem, definition and discrimination are here to stay. Most people couldn’t produce a line drawing to save themselves, but everybody can colour in. Walls, as for example in Zodiac divisions, are what humans are made of. Look at the great tide of humanity spilling over historical borders across the planet: what does it encounter, and what does it bring in the flood? Exclusion! Identity! Do the Southern Signs of an English night portend integration, in the way Northern Signs purported to in colonial times?

Every decision we make, every unconscious choice, every like on social media, is recorded in the folk story of our lives. Whether we like it or not, the author of that story is not us, and gravitating towards the most flattering opinion is not a journey. It’s just another wall, and every brick is delivered by a truck from Opportunism Quarry. (Yes, ‘quarry’ does mean prey.) Has your life been a journey, in some other sense? When did you begin it, may I ask, and what will you do when you reach your destination? Become a star, a string of code, a ‘desert’ island?

On the other hand, take as a given that something which has happened once is much more likely to happen again. Doesn’t this mean an eventual capitulation to plot, a reduction of creativity to fame for stuff done before by the forgotten, and a disincentive to push off from the oasis where all the acts eventually appear? Where are you going to find the impetus for a new chapter in your story about waiting here? How can life be a journey which doesn’t begin, a join-the-dots and colour-in boredom exercise bequeathed to us as four-year-olds?

Perhaps the destination is all there is, and every chapter we insert is an opportune postponement? Perhaps we are hurtling in the direction of Vega clutching a Book written backwards, and there is a nice, Home Counties explanation for the existence of a community of expatriate Chagossians in the south of England. A tree roots itself in the earth but grows out of the air, just like the Underworld. It ceases to defend itself with poison, thorn and madness when it discovers its nurture in the purpose of its material enemy to eat, sleep and be happy. Yes, the birds nesting in the tree and gobbling the nectar of its flowers are quite right to say, this is mine, as we are, warming our hands over the blaze of its timber. Meaning is opportune.

Opportunism is your colonial guarantee of being valued for what others can get out of you. Yes, ‘dependent arising‘ applies to identity, too, and to the human rights of the inhabitants sent packing when the British and American invasion of the Southern Hemisphere was cosily negotiated. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile” (Article 9), indeed. It also applies to any likelihood of a United Nations recognition of the rights to self-determination of the Papuan indigenous people of Irian Jaya, but the opportunism of goldminers and their lawyers, skilled in the rights enshrined in Indonesian law, is another story. You get that in the Southern Hemisphere when the Moon is eclipsed by the Sun in the Constellation Aries!

What is the truth? Walls or holes? Where does the future come from? Does its logic determine or emerge? Will minorities forever fight to reduce each other’s figure to ground, or will socialism succeed where it has hitherto failed, to stamp humanity with a common weal? Will believers with arms uplifted in benediction forever bare their pockets to petty theft? Where on Earth does terrorism fit in? In what inhabitation of meaningless identity is the slaughter of children opportune? In what abdication of meaning does reified identity cringe behind, ‘The Christians have it coming’? If you leave your Hell in a worse state than you found it in, you may find your virgins wearing a similar disguise to your god, and Heaven may prove to be your absence.

There was once a boy named Jack, who changed the course of human history by throwing some beans out of a window. In those days, everyone knew that Heaven was the real world, and every dream and every calling, like every tree and birdsong, was rooted up there somewhere, in the Creator’s inscrutable purpose. Jack chopped the beanstalk down before the gardener in his hobnail boots could discover Jack in his Underworld, where roots of Heaven can be climbed to a marriage of Gaia and Uranus. Death in Heaven is a fairytale, promulgated by the opportunistic pedlars of a social history of fallen Neanderthals.

Sensualist Moon in Sidereal Libra

19 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Moon Phases

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Aha! Do I spy another lost soul who has succumbed to that deadly sin, sloth? Head down, shoulders hunched. Your name, sir? As I might have guessed, you receive no mention on the preeminent databases of the successful. Shame on you, sir, that you have so mistaken the purpose of your existence as to have spent on yourself all those profits which rightfully belonged, with compound interest, to the glory of God’s creation. No doubt you have been dealt a cruel blow or two, sir. Haven’t we all? The importance of such setbacks is that they provide the opportunity for spiritual growth towards the redemption of original sin for this and future generations if we learn the right lessons. Have you sought professional help or considered further study? What invisible thing are you staring at, anyway?

I gaze at the birds outside my window and see an animal which evolved a house.

Yes, it is difficult to love another person, to share lives of empty oneness resonating pleasurably in miraculous presence each with the other like the ripples we launch on the billabong before they rebound chaotically at the limits of our consciousness, where we project shadows and light, depths and banks, reflection and blindness, expectation and recrimination, desire and satiety, and ideas of creatureliness, proper course, perfection and finitude. Indeed, that love is so rare for most people that they exclude it from their experience as impossibly ideal, even pathologize it, and instead luxuriate sentimentally in comparable experiences of solitude: sunsets, the entrancing behaviour of children, favourite pieces of music, and secret dreams of ghosts; knowing full well that each facsimile of loving physicality shares with the others a certain sensuality, an immersion of the self, as it craves the dissolution of its boundaries, in what we knew once as that ‘oceanic’ feeling, aware that joy is not imbibed like wine, but exuded by the glass.

Sensualist Moon Gisborne Apr19

None of this self-discovery business needs to be anxious, dear reader, even in the event that it is not merely incidental that we are at Easter once again and throngs of candles will soon be wending their way through the nightscapes of Christian cities. To take part in such a procession is not usually the privilege of the sensualist, but he is nevertheless bedazzled by the extraordinary synchronicity of the annual procession and midnight transits of the Easter Moon and the Southern Cross. Have candle holders never wondered about the night sky which grounded the followers of Jesus after their prophet’s martyrdom? What were they staring at, indeed, when tomorrow became today? The one thing you cannot hide from the senses is meaning! But hark, the sensualist is not gawping at the Moon, but in the opposite direction, and the Moon’s gaze is boring through the back of his head, or would be, if the Moon and sensualist were not one and the same. The sensualist’s art is the transparency of walls. Is the Full Moon in Libra or Virgo? Take your pick.

Sensualist Moon Gisborne Underworld Apr19

About 650 kms east-northeast of Tokelau and roughly halfway between Samoa and Kiribati in the South Pacific, the Moon is directly overhead. At the Moon’s distance, the Earth hides an arm’s length fingerwidth of the sky (2°), which does not even cover the Sun, because the Moon is square to the nodes, and 5° out of alignment. If that is not how you imagine it, the Moon’s diameter is half an arm’s length fingerwidth for an observer on Earth!

Sensualist Moon Kiribati Apr20

What the Kiwi sensualist is looking behind is a bit broader, about 90 arm’s length fingerwidths in fact. Like millions of ancestors before him, he is trying to see the underworld. Why? How will that ameliorate human suffering and maximize the value of our legacy? Those latter questions cannot even be comprehended by the sensualist, but the reason he is trying to see the underworld is because it is his. What he imagines he cannot see will vanish with his death as surely as will the visible artefact we imagine he can see. The relationships he cherishes with ancestors, antipodeans and archetypes of his own psyche will be no less tangible than his family, community and society when his Country vacates itself. Is the Spaniard’s underworld real because the Kiwi can see it, and the Spaniard real in the Kiwi’s underworld?

Is the unreality of these personages not a sign of mental illness?

Islamists may be slaughtering each other in Mali, Libya, Nigeria, Yemen, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia, or any other Muslim society struggling in these postcolonial times with the ideas of community, property and space; Britain, ‘America’ and Israel may have torn themselves apart in order to stitch their citizenry up again; the Belt and Road may continue to park excavators and graders all over former Soviet Socialist Republics: but in every one of those ‘countries’ with their legal definitions and contested boundaries the sensualists are creating Country with their senses, and long may the mutual creations of their transparencies continue.

Bodhisattvas who claim more presence than a fool are invited to help the tree-huggers.

The sensualist is a lover, not a fighter. He doesn’t change the world, he adapts, which he reckons is the same thing. He annoys the totalitarian left and right by defying perfection and evading definition. Reviled as Lumpenproletariat and Bogan, he is seen as having adapted identity quite out of business and himself out of the equation! Well, I regard him as a hero. Who else, thrown into the sewer we know as the Late Anthropocene, can so delightedly get down and crawl on the floor of a country pub with a stranger’s infant, narrowly escaping lynching as a pedophile; be so enthralled with social media on the crowded train which has just obliterated a motorist who ignored the warning bells; or be so happy going to bed because a covenant is at the top of the sky?

Sensualist Moon Alcadozo Underworld Apr19

I may allow myself anything I want in my imagination, for soon I too will die. Remember, no smiling until Sunday!