Tag Archives: Civility

Civility: New Moon in Sidereal Pisces

24 Tuesday Mar 2020

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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.

Civility: New Moon in Sidereal Pisces

05 Friday Apr 2019

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Straightway Rumor flies through Libya’s great cities, Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world. She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride, slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds. She is the last, they say, our Mother Earth produced.  Virgil, The Aeneid IV 219 ff., Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin Publishing Group 2010, Kindle Edition.

Over the mountain, watching the watcher,
Breaking the darkness, waking the grapevine.
One inch of love is one inch of shadow.
Love is the shadow that ripens the vine.
Set the controls for the heart of the Sun. Pink Floyd.

If you deduct from time all those unkind acts you still hurt from, and all the hurt you’ve perpetrated without meaning to, what you’re left with is civility, because nothing is more pressing a concern than how to live together, and nothing is further from our grasp than coexistence in freedom. Homer called the Sun, tireless. What is ‘inextinguishable’ is not only the Sun, but the refusal to be responsible for ignorance and pain, set in stone as the rights of the individual. Ownership of subjectivity is as predictable as the Sun.

Thinking keeps thought alive and in check, as dancing keeps music alive and in measure. What keeps culture alive is its frontier, where it takes its validation at crossroads of negotiation and relationship, at its borders with misunderstanding. Australia, seen by many as having a poor culture, has decided to address its brand problem, or the Government has, in the pointed absence of an ‘Australia’ to recognize its dysfunction, let alone address it. We don’t have borders—not in the sense of crossings where something of ourselves must be left behind—but we do have standards we are relieved and enlivened to come home to, don’t we?

Operating in a global market increasingly corrupted by fatuous Guanxi assertions of unassured trust, Australians—who are they?—need to focus on their shadow—read, ’face’—and perhaps the best we might come up with is, “Love is the shadow that ripens the whine” (sic.), or “Cosmology is the glue of twilight”, or what about, “Australia, the song which helps you remember to breathe”, or “Getting up too early for breakfast is a bitch”? Perhaps, after all, Australia is too safety-conscious to show a face, the ‘Inextinguishable’ merely a monkey on every back, jabbering the half-truths and rumours we hear in the grunts and growls of their preverbal network.

It is probably not a coincidence that while this brand crisis was brewing, masculinity across the world was also being forced to have a good hard look at itself, especially in a country whose Prime Minister could accord higher status to the national cricket captain, and pastoral care could be found guilty as charged. This website began as a questioning not only of the applicability of Northern Hemisphere Signs to Southern Hemisphere seasons, but also of the traditional Eurocentric gendering of Sun and Moon. It seemed to me worthy of consideration that the life-force of the Solar System is female, and that the peripheral body in orbit around her reflecting her light is male. Unless emasculation is a thing, like sex-objects and racial stereotypes, it cannot be blamed on a diminishment of interest in self-aggrandisement, seriously, but is altruism a thing, and how will your descendants value the imperfect world you have passed down?

Dasein 2019

What have you got when the passage of a year is measured in phases of the Sun, waxing from Winter Solstice? When Moon has will and Sun feelings? When brief human lives are enfolded by the spirit of ancient trees? When parent and child can agree to disagree, understanding that their shadows are forever lengthening and deepening? When every hatred dissolves in the time it takes to digest it, and every son of a bitch is a mother’s son? When the highest aspiration of hunter (and murderer) is to poke their head into the shimmering mirage of creation and stay there? When culture is what you pass on of the mind you have changed? What have you got if not civility?

In my time of dying, let bickering about gender and other dualities cease. What does it matter if the seasons are divisions of a year or multiples of the month? It is incontrovertible that before the sky and the sea came Mother Earth, but Gaia has been supplanted by Country, which has no limit above or below, merely an horizon shared by the Underworld, at which Coxeter and Escher located our binary motifs, and Country comingles them as above, so below, within and without, infinitely reduced.

Pisces New Salto Apr05

A little bird told me that the physical and the spiritual are not parts of a whole, and nor are the female and the male: neither has any existence without the other, not even for Mitochondrial Eve. So it is with the roles of reason and instinct in the achievement of self-restraint; so it is with the invisible passage of the Sun through the Zodiac measured at night by the Moon and stars; so it is with the seasons of the hemispheres.

Pisces New Shanghai Apr05

Are you a tree growing miraculously out of solid rock, or an embodiment of respiration and photosynthesis flirting with the idea of permanence? Is the stable value system your gossip is preserving progressive or conservative? Can Post-Colonialism open its borders for the arrival of something other than wholesale exploitation, corruption and theft? Is this not a question to Heaven answered by the crumbling pillars of our invasive heritage? What cultural garb does Rumor reveal beneath the clouds? Will you dissolve your personal space into the infinitesimal otherness of your Self, the emptiness of the identity your culture or religion affixes, if there is real danger of enslavement to the Other in believing in their tacit assurance, or even in Rumor keeping a civil tongue in her head when discussion turns to walls? Is the fatty deposit she sits on a handful?

Civility: New Moon in Pisces

16 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in Milky Way, Moon Phases

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It’s as though an evil spirit has got into us all. At the very least, the gods, goddesses, totems and saints seem to have vacated us, and nobody could blame them for not wanting to come back. Hatred and its deluded excuse, resentment, paranoia, ridicule, not to mention chemical warfare and the faithlessly spirited prosecution of sacrilege, are not in their line of work. Our symbol of oneness has become 1. I am right, I am healing, I am equal, I am together, I choose my identity and my gender. The world is full of objects, of which I am one. My love is a delusion and I’m reassembling it. My role is an oppression and so is my image. I face them. I turn my back on them. I am the iris of a proud cat’s eye.

Many years ago, one of my precocious granddaughters in her ‘What’s that?’ phase was pointing indiscriminately all over the garden, asking, “What’s that?” I could see Nominalism 101 in full swing, and perversely tried to turn the tide. A broken stem was a hole. An upturned empty pot was a hole. The end of the hose was a hole. Together we discovered that the world is full of holes, not just things.

Pisces New Birdsville Apr16

My custom is to present an image of the sky over a place where Sun and/or Moon are at the meridian, in an ongoing attempt to broaden a sense of global country, its connectedness and its objective emptiness. That place at noon in the moment of conjunction is Penrith, Australia, with the Moon in the third house. Once I would have explored the horizontal non-alignment of the two bodies to confirm my use of the equatorial system, but I noticed that the galactic plane was close to one of its distinctive configurations, and mathematical investigation led me to the sky above Birdsville, in Western Queensland. The conjunction of Sun and Moon is an invisible cat’s eye, the symbol 1. The alignment of horizon and galactic plane is an invisible ring, the symbol O. It is a hole.

Do you think we might reexamine circles in this light? Could we go back to the beginning, the ‘What’s that’ stage, and recognize the circle, our group, our culture, our religion, not as a zone of exclusion or as the boundary of its solid contents, but as a concept of emptiness? The horizon is a perfect example. What is it really? Perhaps it is so obstructed by the physical features that crowd your environment that you have never even seen its circularity. Are you aware that it changes with every step you take? Are you aware that you share elements within it with people beyond it?

The Milky Way is another perfect example. We are accustomed to seeing it, perhaps on rare occasions when we vacate the circle of our city, as an arc. From representations of our galaxy as a thing, we ‘know’ it as a spiral we observe from near its rotational plane. However, just like the horizon, it reveals itself as a circle as we turn around. When its poles cross the meridian, South Pole in the South, North Pole in the North, it becomes a closed circle near the horizon and disappears. What is within it? Are we?

Curiously, the horizontal galactic circle reveals a potentially therapeutic symmetry between the astrologies of North and South. Perfect alignment, at the present time, occurs at latitudes 27° North and South. Here it is at Laredo in North America.

NGP Transit Laredo USA

The empty night sky is observed in this configuration from mid-January until the end of May. The Moon and planets are not shown. Note the ruling Sign of the Constellation Virgo. And here is the same galactic configuration at Oodnadatta in Central Australia, observable from mid-July until the end of November. Note the ruling Sign of the Constellation Pisces. What’s in a Sign, eh?

SGP Transit Oodnadatta

The Laredo alignment was moving south at the latitude of Stonehenge in 2700 BCE. Imagine what figurative representations of the sky might have occurred to people who lived under the Milky Way on the Salisbury Plain, as science emerged from Neolithic concepts of the cardinal directions. Imagine the concept of good, honourable government which might have stood in the circle of extinguished ancestors!

By 880 BCE, the Galactic Poles were at the latitudes of Southern Tasmania and the Great Lakes of Adena culture. What is within the circle of disappeared ancestors? Grave mounds. Legend. Story. Nobody knows for sure what the sky-stories of these people were, but over China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece, zodiacs had formed. The concept of the empty circle was being supplanted by linear histories in cultures with boundaries. By the year dot, the North Galactic Pole transited over Athens, where Western science was born within the circle of Hell, and the South Pole over South-Eastern Australia, where my conception of the southward evolution of Indigenous cosmology culminates.

My astrology is rooted in the circle: the cyclical madness of postmodern hormones, the presence of the bardo, and the emptiness of country. Remember Justfriendistan? A “territory only to be rivaled in inhospitality by the Western Sahara, the Atacama Desert, and Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.” (Ali Binazir.) Is the Styx of hatred destined to flow across our circle between Acheron and Lethe? Is it the Zodiac? What is this impassioned battle between suppressed women and shame-faced perpetrators of all sorts of atrocities? Do people really want to spend the rest of their lives at war, or in one or two friendships hermetically sealed from the other sex? Must a male Moon be like a boy returning to his mother’s arms from ridicule for being a Mummy’s boy, an errant inner god submitting to the contempt of a generation?

And what do we want to leave our great-grandchildren, fast internet speeds and cheap power, or safe streets? Civility turns theories of power on their heads. Power is not disseminated from authority figures or a resilience concentrated towards the centre of social structures. That is force, not power. Country cannot be invaded and taken from you by any force, even if its hills and waterholes can and its stories be made about somewhere else. Why not? Because country is empty. It’s just you standing in your absence.

Look at your circle, and see its emptiness. It contains only one thing I can see: a hole of civility.

Diplomacy: New Moon in Pisces

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

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Psalm 74:20—“Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”

“Where were you when I called? Why didn’t you answer? I needed you! I was absolutely terrified! Listen. I was in a dream, walking to the bus after my lecture, head full of images of Islamic architecture, when the attack happened and all hell broke loose. I heard the takbir, then gunshots, then I walked into a screaming horror. Sirens coming, people running in all directions, others lying injured or dead all over the path. At the very instant I realized what had happened, staring down at an old man on his knees and covered in the blood squirting from the woman he was tending, a woman on the other side looked into my eyes with an expression on her face I didn’t register at first. I stared at her, and then suddenly I got it. I was to blame. My first reaction was outrage, but then I became aware that everyone was looking at me with the same expression, not contempt or fear, but recognition. That’s when I nearly fainted in shock: no, it wasn’t that I was wearing the uniform, but that it was I, naked and without qualities, who wore that mediaeval uniform, or any uniform, and that I felt guilty, recognized! There was nowhere to go! Nowhere to be!”

Sidereal time begins again in Pisces, and here we are again, face-to-face with our most serious, fundamental and seemingly insoluble problem. Rome is burning, like a bushfire which began as a controlled burn but escaped with a wind-change. We are caught in a feedback loop: we want our elected representatives to do something, to stand for something, and make decisions on the basis of what they know, majority decisions, even if we disagree; on the other hand, to get anything done, our representatives, monitoring the public mood, safeguard their status by telling us as little as possible, and what truth they tell is what they believe is a palatable truth in terms of who-knows-who’s interpretation of what we want to believe; and the result is that all we know is spin, and we, the minorities of one, inadvertently, are spinning the spin which disempowers our representatives. The age of Pisces might even suggest itself as the age of leadership in criminal submission.

Pisces New Moon Lower Transit Cabo Frio Mar27

Any fool these days knows that truth is relative. And yet, allergic to fundamentalism, to the wisdom of the Bible and the Qur’an, so many are faithful adherents to other fundamentalist notions such as universal human rights and our culpability in, and the moral imperative to reverse, climate change. Pisces, the symbol of Christ, nowadays eschews absolutist claims, but in its incarnation in the South it still attests to humanity’s resilience. In the face of the second law of thermodynamics and the inevitability of irrelevance and death, it delivers the semi-permanence of tradition and culture. By some miracle we are hanging together–remembering that the next Full Moon is the Easter Moon (no pun intended)–but doubt is no longer a benign influence, as happens when you’re being told a pack of lies: you’re supposed to doubt the strictures of your ego, not the very existence of truth itself.

Poeppel Corner is an imaginary place, situated in theory on the boundaries of the Northern Territory and Queensland with South Australia. Attesting to its imaginary nature and the obstacles faced by any agreement on anything, its marker post, accessible along the QAA Line and the K1 Line four-wheel-drive tracks 174km west of Birdsville, and beyond the GPS receptivity of your smartphone, is not where it was intended to be by the surveyors who, with 19th century technology, unimaginable adversity and incredible bravery, intended to mark the gazetted border at the intersection of latitude 26 South and 138 East. Did you know that Australia has moved about 1.6m northeast since 1994? Do you realize that your property has no fixed position? And finally, nobody knows what time it is where three time-zones, and more when daylight saving changes (on April Fools’ Day), intersect! Why don’t you go there, and decide for yourself?

The entirely speculative names I have given to the Milky Way ‘rivers of the Underworld‘ may offend you. Is it really true that people of the South born in January and February carry an innate regret for the suffering of centuries, and those born in the second half of the year are doomed to struggle with ignorance, or do I just like the sound of my own voice? Whatever the demographics of the matter, if you are familiar with the night sky of October, the Sun is in the middle of nowhere. She needs her son to validate her, to stand up and make a contribution to the society she has brought him to, and she needs him to make it in a way which substantiates her claim to ethnic and religious continuity. She needs him to build something of local value within his tradition.

Artisan Under the Bridge East Brunswick

The miracle of tradition is the personality that goes into its reinvention. But it is also the resilience of the underlying layers of its palimpsest. May I make one thing absolutely clear? You do not separate yourself from ‘Das Man‘ by having a story, or in narrative terms a journey. In fact, the self has no story and no journey. It stares its transparency to itself in the face, without props, because it is not an object. Far from it! Its subjectivity reveals every object as a subject, and the process of reality as civility among subjects, with an emptiness of plot. Who knows what the next encounter will demand, each from the other?

Rajab

The authentic self is not interstitial. Society is not its god. What godly power can compare to the reverence of the self for the finitude of the world it has created and expires with every breath? What sense of belonging to a master plan can outweigh the sense of being unique? What calling has a voice to diminish our gratitude for just being here, when we who are about to die commune with the beauty of what we will depart? But on the other hand, if we want to be recognized, we have to make ourselves recognizable. Truth lies (sic) in all sides of an argument, but the argument has to be heard. Judgment rules over silence; diplomacy rules over noise, and mindfully, change.