You cried, and I did not know how to comfort you, with your young body dressed in shortie pyjamas pressed to mine. You sobbed, I am not a virgin. At last, dear kind friend, I know, because I am not a virgin either, no matter how hard I try.
Every night when the Sun goes down I follow it, in search of my innocence. The stars outside are unconscious beacons of my experience, and they carry vestigial names from other times or intuitions in my own past. But the night sky is a cloak of experience thrown over something more intangible, a kernel perhaps of me as I am in my intention, not as I am in my responsibility.
Who is more ridiculous, the one who labours all the critical day longing for night, or the one who tosses and turns in his bed longing for the morning to straighten his load?
It is time I took my leave. Prolonged isolation has taken its toll on my hippocampus. Memory has become a stranger to any task put before it. I have no idea of the way forward, since it leads from wherever ‘here’ may be. You don’t need me to see straight; only you can transform nowhere.
There is a sign coming, which may yet unite us, offer a focus for our combined wayfaring instincts and a harmonious engagement of innocence and experience, intention and judgment. Jupiter is closing the gap on Saturn, and will overtake it in Capricorn at the end of the year in a single flare of light. The Sun in Sagittarius will be rounding on both, and so the conjunction will be visible low in the West, just where you would expect to witness the smothering of inconsequentiality. Will you look?
At last, what difference does it make if Sun and Moon swap signs? If the Constellations of the ancient Zodiac retrieve their mythical identities from the precession of the seasons which we have destroyed anyway? If grief or anger will hold sway tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? If it’s all confirmation bias and could not possibly be influenced by solar system orientation to the stars when that’s all relative, and every celestial body’s view of every other’s background is strikingly different? If the only thing you can say for certain is that you’re opposite on the Zodiac to whomever you’re looking at, and they signify nothing?
Is there a place to be other than at the centre of attention? Or, rephrased, why should you be the only one who doesn’t exist?
I could never resist one last question. Cheers, Zealot, nice to catch up, even if it does seem only once in a blue moon. You probably get this all the time?
The cusp of Leo: connection and disclosure, relativity and faith, altruism and irony. Regulus Gate: the heart of the lion and the anus of the possum, gratuitous, almost alien, postmark of a trivialized celebration of separate togetherness. Or perhaps it presents a simple gesture of togetherness comprising a ceremonious underworld revelation to sarcasm that its defences are less than fun? It is certainly pure coincidence, isn’t it, like all the star names and attributes I have invented, and for that matter, the entire corpus of astrology, though it prefer the term synchronicity?
I am reminded of an event in the life of a friend of mine, an ageing and obscure writer who somehow managed to be invited to address a seminar on something or other in a faraway place. To cut a long story short, he got hopelessly and helplessly lost: people kept telling him to turn around and go back the other way, pointing to roads and railway stations he either couldn’t find, or always took him the wrong way.
He became separated from his luggage, which not only contained the text of his talk, but the names and phone numbers of the connections he desperately needed to contact with an explanation of his non-appearance. While he was confronting the senile reality of his circumstances he came to find himself adjacent to a woman on the phone on the same railway platform.
He overheard her conversation about a writer who inexplicably had failed to appear at a seminar, and realised that this was his chance. Then he heard her describing the weird eyes, not exactly dead, but decayed in the most disturbing way, of a man sitting not far away from her.
The rest is history, but my friend never found his luggage and never made it to the seminar. With the help of many people, he eventually made it home, but he was plagued, and still is, by the impossibility of describing to any of the purposeful bystanders who guided him, or to anyone since, the awesome impact of the coincidence which improbably answered his need on that railway platform in the middle of nowhere.
We all know the powerful influence of a dream we never succeed in interpreting or communicating, but what does that tell us of the waking dreams and troubled realities of refugees, the homeless, the intellectually disabled, the gender-dysphoric, the mentally ill and the demented … not to mention those trying to make coherent their end-of-life reminiscences?
Heroism in the face of catastrophe is our ideal, the ultimate ethical expression of community, but a response to the call of the other, the inner voice of the Water-Carrier, seems to necessitate the vacating of selfhood that does not derive from the outside, from a faith in belonging on the outside, with no other way of being real than connection with others. But what happens when the interest of the community is believed to be served by doing nothing except distancing from others, and staying home?
We get lonely, and automatically the therapeutic industry offers social solutions like video chats, but once upon a time the theological industry would have recommended prayer. The social construction of reality is an accepted fact, but this latest coronavirus is reminding us what it is to be isolated and attempting vigour at the same time. We are rediscovering our secrets: yes, the guilty and shameful ones, but also the fundamental one, our power to be. The welfare of others may be our guiding light in our decisions, but there is a dimension to life in which ethics takes second place to ontology: decisions, on the face of it responses to horizontal stimuli, arise from the underworld.
Each one of us is absolutely other, and though the country in which we find ourselves as such, by its responsiveness to our dreadful finitude, does present as physical and historical shareability and enjoin us to participate in the communal and the ethical, our presentiment of its vanishing upon our death removes it beyond what we can share into the realm of otherness, mystery and secrecy, and our presence along with it.
Did those of our ancestors who escaped the religious and political upheaval of 19th Century Europe to subjugate the indigenous peoples of the South go out or come in? Were they present in an alien landscape the more they inhabited their loss, or absent from the tremendous world of the natives the more they anxiously impressed themselves upon it? Did they resile from every furbishment of comforts they were banished from, or simply resort to drink or meditation to ‘get out of it’? How did they stay apart?
Facts and figures lead us away from the underworld, promising an eternity of sorts, and evidence of self-mastery. They remind us that we are very small in the scheme of things. But it’s the little things that keep us together, inside and out, such as not being able to interpret one’s own or another’s dream, coincidentally perhaps at Regulus Gate, though chosen to try.
What do you suppose the chances are that today is the nineteenth anniversary of my friend’s encounter on that railway platform?
Some time between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, while the peoples of the Mediterranean were cobbling together myth and asterism and time as eventual attributes of a religion of connection, the tradition grew that a small triangle of rather dim stars a little more than a handspan east of the Milky Way resembled a goat, and as Capricorn (Goat Horn), it was the right place for the Sea-Goat to inhabit, eternally watching over the children destiny doomed him to lose.
By now, the Moon is aware of being meat in the sandwich of science and superstition, and by increasingly presenting his own perspective, is attempting progressively to emancipate himself from the prejudices and preoccupations of earthly folk-history. Nevertheless, he cannot evade the path to meaning indicated for him by the witches’ hats of the Sun-goddess, despite the senseless complexity of their pattern—she is primarily responsible for magnifying the Sea-Goat’s loss by uncoupling his constellation from the seasons, and reducing him to undeserving obscurity. It is beyond belief that the Moon might ever evolve back into a rock, so how does the Drone know when to fly, and in what direction? He follows human practice, of course, and devotes himself to his Thou!
No wonder the Drone is so seldom successful in finding a subject for his devotion!
But wait! Driven by loss, the Drone will inevitably find the Vertex in the Eighth House, even should the wind-blown recipient of his devotion there have no hope of perpetuating her hive. Here it is, in the middle of the ocean, and neither seasons nor Milky Way could guide him, only the mythical cry of the Sea-Goat.
Are-you-there-for-me? It is an interesting question—at a very busy intersection of hotly contested terms which endanger the life of anyone crossing against the lights—which is answered in the affirmative, not without trepidation, and in a voice barely audible and without echo, by the Drone.
“Hence, the world-machine will have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, so to speak; for God, who is everywhere and nowhere, is its circumference and center.” Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, II, 12, Trans. J. Hopkins.
“For the geometer all movement is relative: which signifies only, in our view, that none of our mathematical symbols can express the fact that it is the moving body which is in motion rather than the axes or the points to which it is referred.” Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004, p.255.
“Our self-consciousness does not take place in a merely closed-up, windowless self. It consists in the fact that the self, by transcending itself, faces and expresses the world. When we are self-conscious, we are already self-transcending.” Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, trans. David A. Dilworth, University of Hawaii Press, 1993 edition, p52-53.
With the Sun now beyond the Lethe behind him, and the Acheron curling like smoke above the Earth’s shoulder, the Moon begins another lap in Cancer, which nobody—neither the Divine Geometer of the Northern Temperate seasons nor the IAU geometers of contorting 19th Century Constellation boundaries—will deny, for they’re a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us!
‘Everything is connected to everything else’ is a truism ubiquitous at every level in our highly specialized and compartmentalized, not to say fractured, societies, and might well be an unconscious saboteur of its nemesis, social distancing. How is it influencing many to modify their behaviour for the sake of others, and seducing some to refuse to do so? It is clear that some people forget themselves, and others forget everyone else.
The post-COVID duration may overcome cynicism towards the life-expectancy of the aged, and panic concerning the career prospects of the young, settling into a new normal, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that a new normality will resemble the world I was born into, saturated by post-war earnestness, and a dreadful commitment to the finite and personal, so indifferently wounded by the historical, by ideologies and moralities which had so recently thrown their young and innocent recklessly and traumatically at each other.
It may be that Gaia has been groping for this coronavirus for a long time, as long as upheaval has been sucking tectonic plates together. Perhaps we have now had our turn and been outplayed. It may be that the rule changes which kept legends playing into old age stupefied the crowds into disaffection, and somebody playing Apocalypse did something accidentally on purpose. Perhaps the therapy-mongers who made fallow the fields of narcissism were right: we should have worked through skin hunger long ago.
Something must be remembered into being for the first time, intuiting the imperatives which the world awaits from us, who are its creation, not inferring them into the Jacobin templates of demolished order. The roads everyone must use never mend.
“After all, what is identity but the slow, lifelong accretion of gazes: us looking at ourselves being looked at by others? What we see is, largely, what they see, or what we think they see. And when they turn away, when we become unseen, in a way we cease to be.” Elitsa Dermendzhiyska.
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.” Hamlet, III, i.
“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.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, IV, §146, trans. Helen Zimmern.
That the Sun is in the Constellation Gemini, the Northern Sign Cancer and the Southern Sign Capricorn is of interest, but not arrestingly so. Nor is it of vital concern whether the primal force of earthly existence is female or male—we choose whichever we like—although it has amused us to plot the rhythm of the Moon’s phases as locked in a striving to escape a primordial envy of female power. It is the dynamism of Opposition which now resonates with the strongest signal, not only because the Signs and genders of Sun and Moon are interchangeable at Opposition, but because of the influence we have imputed to the Milky Way and the crossing of its rivers of the Underworld.
From the Lethe we dry off our responsibility; from responsibility we clothe care; care gives rise to anxiety; from anxiety comes being-toward-death in the effort to maintain buoyancy, the meaning of who we might be, as we flail across the Acheron to do quixotic battle with the denial of authenticity. And this drama is projected into the heavens above and below. Yes, we are made of water; yes, we go to water. The Full Moon of Sagittarius is hidden in the sack of the Sun and Earth in Gemini as a sublimated knot of anger and hurt, a recurrent nightmare, a hard-wired secret, an unexpiated unkindness, a solvent of lust and revenge: the germinating seed of an Elm rattling to be festooned with False Dreams at the gates of Utopia.
Do you identify with Gemini for some reason? Have you ever been recognized as a ‘Gemini’? Do you in fact resemble it? Or have you never seen it? It is visible in the night sky between its heliacal rising in September and setting in May, at the nightfall meridian in March. And it really does look like a pair of twins, or two buddies of either gender or both, or two sides of the same coin, Sun and Moon, North and South, like being a self, and knowing the law, daring and caution, day and night, anima and animus.
Validation, the ghost which haunts the faces of yesterday’s somebodies, reverberates like the reflected reflection of the existential enquiry, ‘What happened?’ You may well have accustomed yourself to the belief that you surpassed your parents, but you know that the back of your head indicates that you need a haircut, and has not surpassed the emperor’s or the prophet’s. Is it possible that lighting merely shaded your followers, your students, even your children? And does the improbably grotesque approbation of the satyr, somewhere between the comic and the tragic, emulate Gemini’s humanity, or merely notch the animal shaft it saves for perfection?
I have dreamed thee too long, Never seen thee or touched thee. But known thee with all of my heart. Half a prayer, half a song, Thou hast always been with me, Though we have been always apart.
From “Dulcinea”, Man Of La Mancha, Wasserman, Leigh & Darion.
If there is one injunction we don’t need in the maw of pestilence, it is, ‘Get serious’, for the meaning of life is no longer a buffoon’s number but a lack, a very disconcerting lack, lingering amongst the precious things we always took for granted and may never have again, like a tender embrace, an infant’s confided insight, the soaring spirit of an orchestra, and a blush on the cheeks of numbness.
Yes, every nineteen years of our lifetime, 1925, 1944, 1963, 1982, 2001, and right now, the New Moon has joined with the Sun at June Solstice to cross the Lethe, where exhausted extremism loses itself and we can rebuild country—the village that un-cancels, rescues and raises the child—as sanctuary, in Schiller’s immortal words from the Ode To Joy:
“Freude, schöner Götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!”
The attributes of the stars, the configurations of your unconscious inheritance, the paleolithic sky, and the evolution of the idea of ‘space’ beyond representations of zodiac and underworld, are the sidings and stations your journey has passed through in your dreams, in the middle of the night, where sanctuary is eternally denied the enclosed heart:
“Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt, To be a friend’s friend, Whoever has won a lovely woman, Add his to the jubilation! Yes, and also whoever has just one soul To call his own in this world! And he who never managed it should slink Weeping from this union!” Schiller.
When you notice from your window the rows of plantings which radiate in all directions in perfectly straight lines, I know you don’t know how it was done, but do you wonder if there is a station around here you might get a ticket back to one day? So many stations on the Mindfulness Line! Perhaps it is senseless to conjecture attributes for the stars. Perhaps journeys are hallucinations, or absent-mindedly drumming fingers on a pin-striped knee, resonating on a commute like the reverse motion of a picket fence.
Onward, across the Lethe! You may not see eye to eye with Heidegger, but I think we can all agree that responsibility is a pretty basic step forward to remembering oneself. As they say, there’s no time like the present. Is there, Aldonza?
Yes, something has happened: the universe has said something we have all heard, and I’m as much in the dark as the dictators and populists who claim the authority from somewhere to be its exclusive interpreter.
Like you, I don’t want to discuss what I don’t understand. Like you, I just want to let it all out, the grief, the anxiety, the fear, the aggression, the fury.
And I tell you, I’m tired of your bickering perspectives. If your emotions are so important, so am I. Anyway, your emotions seem to be honing themselves into the excuse I need to disconnect.
Supporters of sidereal and tropical astrology can riot in the streets, and loot and burn their own neighbourhoods, but what I’m looking at directly above me is a straightforward conjunction of Sun and Earth in the Constellation Taurus. What’s the difference if the Bull’s Sign is Gemini or Sagittarius, the Scorpion’s Sagittarius or Gemini? You are the meat in the same sandwich!
Your grievances have brought upon you a perfect storm of populists from left and right bent on destroying everything. All that still survives in the centre is a thin blue and khaki faultline.
It all looks like Bull to me—a bull in a china-shop, perhaps—but from out here you at least all look equal. Adapt to that, you emancipated covidiots!
“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!
