“Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage…”, Samuel Johnson, l. 308, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, derived from Juvenal, Satire X.
Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. Deuteronomy 32:7, King James Bible.
It’s no use. The Veteran cannot hide from the truth. It’s not just that his triumph in Northern skies comes in the middle of a Coronavirus-infested winter, as humanity struggles to celebrate the turning of the year with breaking heart, or that in Southern skies his diminutive opposition to a searing Sun needs the compensation of the un-moonlit symmetry of the Eurocentric mythical Twins to impress, but having crossed the Lethe immediately before syzygy, he realizes in his curtain call only the magnitude of the reintegration which lies ahead for the audience (who are yet oblivious to the Acheron River which daytime has just crossed), and the possibility that he no longer has the will to help. Oh God, not more feelings!
On the other hand, the Veteran has died and been reborn so many times that the Bardo provides his second name: “The Hell You Say!” The Tenth Bardo House of Boredom is one he particularly enjoys, where the cleansing of the Lethe affords him the luxury of staring out of the window of the Northern Tropical Indolence bus on his way to Total Withdrawal, paying no attention to dark continents rolling him around their clocks. His fellow-passengers cannot wait to get off: being bored is akin to being boring; the emissions from the bus out-thrust its propulsion; grasping is mindfully consuming acceptance; and forests of wild viruses are being cleared for the graduation of sated ignorance. “We must alight at centre-stage,” they cry. Not the Veteran. He is indifferent to the footlights, and to his demotion from a starring role for the next twenty-four times he appears on this stage: you will not see a Full Moon in Gemini (the Constellation) until January 2023.
What tortuous labyrinths of despair might just squeeze a sleeper up to the surface? What convulsions of suppressed hatred, what intestinal convolutions of corruption and deliberate pain? What catacombs of memory, what collapsed and utterly expunged escape routes out of anxiety? What tectonic shifts of catatonic stress? And reversing direction, the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Australian Central Ranges is no country for old fish.
It is time and memory which stamp Veteran country, a duration of exile from the permanent present. Aligned with the course of the Moon’s progress across the faintly visible constellations between Sagittarius and Gemini, Woe and Forgetting, and irrevocably past Regulus and Spica and Antares to the Acheron again, an artesian underworld meanders beneath a landscape dotted with caves, one of which is yours, another mine.
“Take me for a walk in your country, so I can understand why you call me that name, Peasant.”
Community is a complex concept—which concept isn’t?—but if it exists as a thing, and not just as a term used for political or economic advantage, it must have boundaries: it is both inclusive and exclusive. That the world is complete is a common way of looking at things.
Out here, and in here, I use the term ‘country’, borrowed, without permission but with profound respect, from its usage by the warriors and wanderers (as I perceive them) of Australian Indigenous culture, to signify a reality without boundaries, impervious to political and economic definition.
Peasants are they who belong to a community by virtue of their acquiescence in a political and economic system, but who, by the nature of their work, their intimate knowledge of the seasons of hot and cold, the transient and anonymous life-cycles of their animals, and the motions of the sky, stand at the boundary of community, where ‘who are all in this together?’ is as idle and meaningless a question as ‘who owns this country?’ So a peasant does not ask questions.
Country is no more nor less than territory’s transcendence of its map. Who among us lives harmoniously without maps? We are all peasants, and particularly when we celebrate the dead at Halloween, when Spring is bursting into Summer, and we should be celebrating Beltane, garlanded with flowers. Does the Queensland election portend Summer or Winter? Trick or treat, indeed!
“So I am possibly at a time of enlightenment?”
Maybe. Unless our heads are in the sand, or we are called, or it rains. Or a stranger comes.
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?
“In exhibiting the horrors awaiting all human beauty, already lurking below the surface of corporeal charms, these preachers of contempt for the world express, indeed, a very materialistic sentiment, namely, that all beauty and all happiness are worthless because they are bound to end soon. Renunciation founded on disgust does not spring from Christian wisdom.” Huizinga, J.. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and The Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (p. 126). Normanby Press. Kindle Edition.
“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.” From “Tenderness“, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.Naomi Shihab Nye.
Imprisoned in time by a pandemic, we are all old now, reprising bad decisions and bad relationships, the only ones we will now own. As the Other withdraws over the event-horizon it seems that we only exist as Other. The Moon is meaningless: it has its own sky. And yet it is still there in ours, like the immediacy of memory, or the sharing of infant seriousness. Has an entire system of meaning traumatically collapsed? Perhaps, but the fundamental system remains: sensuality. Even after death, sensuality remains. Corpses stink. And our death meditation remains what it is, the sensuality of timeless country. Where is the mouth to the cave of sensuality? Kindness! Country is kindness. It owes its existence to me as I owe my existence to it. We share something of infinite tenderness: sensuality. Sensuality is kindness, two-of-a-kindness.
I have been sharing all my life, in much the same way that my youngest darling grandson is currently learning how to speak, by learning cues by trial and error, and saying the first thing that comes into his head, usually with transformative consequence. His adult erudition is inevitable, because none of his loved ones will ever allow its infancy in insignificance or irrelevance to be forbidden. And because of that, his speech will be shaped by kindness, and I hope one day he will open the box of my notebooks, and share his tears. (The catastrophic slithering of a memory of mammoths plucked from the ice of the primordial Yarra at a lichen-encrusted Abbotsford bench; the magic of architecture which unfolds of its own accord: the desirability of innocence.)
There is nothing the old, like the Moon, can teach the young; the young have assumed an inheritance from still extant benefactors hanging on their capacity to embody the joy they give the old; the old and the young are quarantined from each other. The Moon is outdoors; country no longer has an outdoors. The Moon is not to know this of course—how could it know anything of Earthly affairs it supposedly influences? It can barely distinguish continents—but a rumour has gone viral that country may never have existed. For the time being, the young are sacrificing everything they value to preserve the old, as though given enough time, values will become their own monuments to something other than the waning of youth, the health of the pharmaceutical industry, the power of the Hippocratic Oath, and the harvest of seed.
But how long will this last? So many signs holding the life of a human together depend on constant reinforcement of the roles humans learn to play by forgetting woe. Too many humans have lost their roles and traumatically thereby their experience. Too many roles were incompletely learned before they were expunged. Can they be assumed again? Is there a template? Many generations of humanity have died without hearing an orchestral recital, let alone the performance of works their enjoyment might have confirmed as immortal, such as Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, or Wagner’s Liebestod. In too many spirits they were never composed. The cave leading to the eternal underworld may be ringed by your parents’ assays of serious music: Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Fauré, Elgar, etc., or perhaps the Reader’s Digest collection of operettas, but my grandfather could never plier, and I doubt your grandmother could ever whistle, let alone queue a playlist.
The openness of a vowel is non-gustatory; the emptiness of a bowel is non-binary; the orbit of a satellite is non-accusative. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust. Let no one deride the rites of death. Let all be present in its cavernous jaws. Grasp an opportunity! The ocean is full of tears: taste yours! Make something of this crisis! Relate to country! Imagine it wearing your clothes, the slippers your kids will give you for Mother’s Day! Weigh your emptiness! Be kind to the Moon! Share your isolation! We’re all in this together!
Sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Horace, Odes I xi.
[Be prudent. Let the wine flow. And since time is short, leave off far-reaching hopes. Even as we speak envious time has escaped us. Reap what the day offers and put as little trust as possible in the future. Trans. B. Muir]
For there are pleasures which they must have, and are afraid of losing; and therefore they abstain from one class of pleasures because they are overcome by another: and whereas intemperance is defined as “being under the dominion of pleasure,” they overcome only because they are overcome by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that they are temperate through intemperance. Plato, Phaedo. Trans. B. Jowett.
Goodbye Michelle it’s hard to die When all the birds are singing in the sky Now that the spring is in the air With the flowers everywhere I wish that we could both be there. Brel/McKuen.
In the Southern Hemisphere there is a trail leading from the high country, which lies in the direction of Sagittarius A, down across the ridges of Pisces into the meadows of the Ram and the Bull which line the River Lethe. All of the planets are strung out along this trail in this time of calamity, all of them obeying a primeval rule: mind the path! For the trail is precipitous, and fall is fatal. It only seems like yesterday the Full Moon was diplomatically avoiding the subject of castration with the old drifter on the ridge, Uranus, and here we are for the third and last time for 30-odd years in Aries at Ramadan, the two of us quarantined together, fasting in the jaws of apocalyptic pestilence, with the invisible stench of our homeless Father Sky a few days further down the track tainting the decomposing autumn sunshine.
You are welcome to dismiss this metaphor as a guide on your journey, for who would deny the narrative you are at pains to construct for your life? Alas, you may need a Covid-19 test if you deconstruct narrative as relative but cling to your own. Who on Earth began a ‘journey’ at your birth but your ancestors, jostling for reincarnation? And if we go back far enough, 4 billion years, yours are mine, so don’t take it personally when I scorn your journey! And does your journey have a social and linguistic background which makes your claim to ‘go your own way’ a little quaint? Don’t the seasons and the Covid-19 shutdown define it? Remember the Ramadan weather twenty years ago! And that the faithful are heading for the Lethe while Ramadan is working its way back to the Acheron!
If you think that opportunism is the cynical advantage of prevailing anxieties the unprincipled take to enrich themselves, then you are far from sharing the preoccupation with death that tempts the celebrants of enrichment into the giddy abyss of eternal forgetting. What is that smell? The stale toejam of the tragic bride, Andromeda, the bowels of her water-boarded mother, the crotch of homelessness and the hormones of a rutting ram! A lot of bull, perhaps? Is the pursuit of knowledge and truth the foundation of civilisation or the talisman it vouchsafes its loved ones as it lowers their impoverished corpses into the Underworld, or floats them away on the Lethe?
I’ll grant you that when you came into this world what you didn’t know was very important. But as you leave this world it no longer seems important at all, does it? Even though an entire culture be evolving in the pursuit of the knowledge certain others seem to have gained by ignoring yours. There is a germ at the heart of every organism as resilient and adaptive as any virus: you are taught to know it as love. But its formula can be rephrased in terms of what love has taught you to fear, love as a disease overcoming its absence, the disease of limerence. Life has taught you not to fear, not to look down below the ridge. But limerence retreats to medical definitions, and thus do ‘we who are about to die’ fear dying of a virulent coronavirus. The opposite of love was never fear. Only intemperate individuals could cling to such an idea, as dark energy to matter seems to cling, because the opposite of love is its narcissistic dark temperance, silence.
To revisit the concept of ‘country’ as death meditation: if it is true that what you know, including what you instinctively or unconsciously know, is a collaboration between the world as it has formed you according to its needs, and you as you have formed the world according to your needs, then it is true to say that what you know is a constituent of what you don’t know, or that your essence is somewhere between the two, like the history of Australia before 1788, as the essence of a tree is in the quantum uncertainty of the sunlight of its chloroplasts, or as country grows the timber of its nearby star. I strenuously suggest you grab whatever low-hanging branch you can, because to be made of stars is to burn out like them. Better to warm like wood in the hearth of your desire, than to illuminate emptiness a million years after your death.
And should I seem terse, or scarcely adequate to the leadership you desire, just continue in the direction you are heading, as you must, in fair weather and foul, under deluge and darkness, one foot in front of the other, on your journey, if the evasion of dizziness can be called a journey. Who did you think you were, once the plug was out of the bath, if not a variation on a universal theme? Strive, one foot in front of the other! Plant your foot carefully in the print of the horde! Live as though you hope for mercy! Carry a rooster in your bag! Saint Peter’s love has not been tested for limerence! Hello? You’re breaking up! God is saying goodbye! Carpe diem!
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Random House, 1980, p. 218.
Sagan highlighted our connection to the cosmos, but so what? All of us must make that apple pie for ourselves, or it is merely words to say that we are star-stuff. The name of our construction is like the name of God, beyond words, but I create mine myself as a panorama of language and emotion and finitude on the three-dimensional backdrop my senses give me, begging for more at the depth of a finger, and I call it Country. I create mine with every effort to resist the centrifugal force of forgetting and boredom, but it is not that resistance I will mourn as I die—how undignified a deathbed recantation of nihilism!—but the mountains, deserts and streams of my youth, the ache of love, the subject and source of beauty and humour and honour, the music of Dostoyevsky, Hardy and Faulkner, of Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler which my youthful heart immortalised as Humanity, and my own most familiar beauty which immortalized them. No, if there is nobody to hear it, there is no sound. And so, children of your own time, place your hands under my thigh when your time comes, and swear to leave your country, not somebody else’s, not your teacher’s say, or your doctor’s; and by that effort you will perpetuate mine.
What is your country, Migrant? Are you bringing it with you, or leaving it behind? Your resilience is not in question, but your instinct is. North and South are not hard to find, if you don’t confuse East and West with left and right. Just ignore your shadow if East must be where it was, left or right. It may be in front of you, screaming noon, but nobody need know you’re lost in their instinct. We all know the resentment of being peripheral, and relevant only to alien perspective, and that is not cause for anger. It remains that who you are is up to you to desire. Go ahead, create a new centre at the periphery. Whose? Those whose self-centredness stayed behind, or those whose reflections of you are your haunting, your country. The task is in front of you. Without stealing my country, without appropriating any earthly culture, with no reference to climate change or corona viruses or global panic and economic recession, I challenge you to reject me from your instinct: no seasons; no hours; no houses.
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.” from “Defeat“, by Kahlil Gibran.
One of the first conventions we learn as infants is that the difference between zero and one is the same as the difference between nine and ten. Who knows how many tens of millennia we took to dismantle the convention that the difference between zero and one is infinite? What is ‘country’, as I use the term, if not an attempt to restore the sacred awe implicit in that ancient convention? Of course, conventions have ever been challenged by the truth. If, after half a millenium, our horoscopes are still governed by Northern Hemisphere seasons, and we still have trouble recognizing the Zodiac because its Constellations are upside down, don’t blame me.
However, it is not truth, but convention, not righteousness, but compassion, which hold communities together, especially when they originate from all over the world. A lot of healing is in progress: it has been a summer out of hell across Australia, grief never far beneath the surface. Community resilience is not in question, or the courage and kindness of good neighbours from all over the country and the world, but in the debate worldwide about how to prevent a repeat, it is difficult not to hear the same divided bickering that characterizes our efforts to deal with the racist, sexist and colonialist conventions we were all made of.
Has not the extant population of Earth, like a forest held together by subterranean fungus, arrived at an optimism, a raison d’être, a motivation for getting out of bed, deriving from a sense of powerlessness normally associated with depression, which is invisible, and ultimately unbelievable? Are we not, like a wind turbine in a coal-driven economy, or an ego in a yoga routine, going through the motions? Does not the survival of humanity beyond the next generation lurk in the legacies of the beneficiaries of our last wills and testaments, framed and interpreted by nobody who ever understood or respected the pain we old ones put the world through?
Pessimism looks like another secret to keep from our grandkids. How much easier that would be if they just had partners who preferred refined white bread because they ate it as children, revered secrets because their mothers were narcissists, and also cannot wait to get the kids out of the house for the sake of some me-time. Pessimism looks like a race to see who grows up first, the coffin we need to lose a huge amount of weight to fit into, in the grey area between one and zero. Hey kids, the song of the magpie out there means another perfect day! Off you go now.
One day, we might agree that hope and heartache both start with the same letter as hallelujah and hell, but apparently not yet. In the meantime, it’s in country I need to recover some equanimity, lest I go conventionally mad somewhere between nine and ten.
Country is the body of my idea, the underworld of my zenith. Country is the bush, the planet, the sound of one hand clapping, the whirr of insects, the roar of surf and wind, bird calls, traffic, someone singing, silence, the underworld sky. It has been mortally wounded, not only by drought and fire, and fear of climate change, but by an enormous sadness which seems to weigh on everyone, no longer possible to ignore, making even hope heavy. But healing is in the nature of things. You could say that adaptation and evolution are healing processes. The present is the past healing, you could say, the idea of time’s body, perhaps. However, never complete or permanent, healing is definitely not the same as salvation. Is that what makes it so sad? Doctors, of flesh and spirit, heal their compassion by trying to alleviate human suffering, knowing that neither suffering nor compassion can ever be cured. And if anyone is to blame, everyone is to blame. Does the sad doctrine of original sin mean other than everyone is wronged and everyone is wrong?
Australia needs a doctor! We grieve the deaths of millions of animals who trusted the bush. We grieve the passing of a world in which the conflagration of bush-change was as inconceivable as the inundation of sea-change. Actually, there is a profusion of shingles advertising pyres for deniers of climate change, but proselytizers always abound in the projection of shame. The Healer makes no claim to timeless wisdom, but engages in what must change: understanding, tradition, discrimination, self.
Scene: The Healer’s waiting-room. Whimpers and groans issue from an assortment of shapes around the room, and all that is visible of most lowered faces is distorting disgust and anger, while they rehearse their soliloquies.
“Human languages have evolved away from their original capacity to communicate with inanimate objects, and have limited things within a vocabulary of peculiarity, e.g. sick man, old man, dead man, holy man, which negates their subjectivity, and masks who else it is doing the dependent co-arising. Making universal gods of the vital elements of human experience, the inner voices of paleolithic biochemistry, should have led to something other than abstraction, objectification, copyright and forgetfulness. It should be the birthright of every human child to grow up in a world of interwoven spatial and temporal languages: mathematical, chemical, linguistic, gravitational, ecological.”
“What would happen to terrestrial tides and nights if there were no Moon? What would existence be like if there were no Earth? What might the gods be discussing with you if you weren’t demanding they inhabit the detritus of your attention-span? What community might we belong in if we could overcome our recently acquired faith in an immortal society?”
“What being actually feels like is uphill and downhill, like a subway elevator on our way to and from work in periods of growth, learning and self-actualization, utility, creativity and self-assertion, or harmony, withdrawal and reconstitution. For reasons best explained by storytellers, elevators get no mention in the sequence of these periods which may form a lifetime, a year, a day or an hour, but suffice to say, nobody likes to think of themselves as going around in circles, regardless of how many others are employed by our need to do so: ‘Shut up, or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor!'”
“Linear narrative has come to bestow on its proponents many seductive advantages, such as property and common law, historical grievance and the justification of war and terrorist reprisal, but above all, narrative has sacralized the hippocampus as the altar of knowledge and expertise. Narrative is primarily responsible for the curse of our age, identity, and our horror of the mental illness we define as dementia, its collapse.”
“Time tries to heal too. The moment is oppressed by memory. The future cannot come into being until versions of the past are forgotten. Snippets of music from the past, golden oldies, are private property anchoring their celebrant in the past, to the extent of encouraging regret for the passing of the moment. Ultimately, not only must private property be abolished, but also the wellsprings of avarice and envy, the human spirit. Any amount of educational experiment is welcome in place of the abolition of flesh and blood. Since rationality is the invasion of the moment by the past, children must be taught to cease any effort to understand.”
“Think about this, think about that. What belief are you pushing, Healer? What is wrong with you anyway? It’s your job to fix things, but you never! Your altruism consists of dog whistling the fools who think people like you are somebody. Actually, your compassion is pitiless. Hello? Wake up to yourself! There’s no time left for you to understand the darkness in which we feel less alone, to let the stars in, and acknowledge the Moon as the poor healer who killed himself in your waiting room!”
She has licence for hyperbole, dear soul, after what she’s been through. And the Moon does seem to be seeking a different way to heal. The heat has quite gone out of his competition with the Sun. Indeed, the deities of each are withered on dead placentas, their genders archived where salvation doesn’t shine. Humanity is its own body within a body now. Long live the Earth in the Zodiac of Moon Country! We don’t know enough of our planet’s companionship! Earth’s terrors are reduced at Moon distance to a human fingerwidth at arm’s length, and the disjunct of Sign and Constellation is healed in the absence of seasons. The geographical location of the overhead Moon is the centre of the planet’s disc at lunar zenith, during lunar daylight and terrestrial night between First and Third Quarters, lunar night and terrestrial daylight between Third and First, and equal in geographical latitude and sidereal time to the Moon’s declination and right ascension. Precise calculation of Earth’s position is one of the most difficult problems facing lunar mathematicians, but ‘among those stars right above us’ will do for now, until a fully-fledged astrology evolves.
“Let me in,” cries a voice in the stone-age bicameral mind, in the Pacific Ocean 460 kilometres off Colima in Mexico. Didn’t a mysterious stranger get hauled out of this sea once? In fact, there is nobody in the Healer’s consulting room but someone closer to the head of the queue, an old man aimlessly brushing sand from the hieroglyphs he occasionally unearths under the plaque of his wandering. With bewildered effort he can remain vertical, this encrusted column sinking into the sea in line with the others where once there may have been a causeway.
“I’m looking at the river, but I’m thinking of the sea.” Randy Newman, “In Germany Before The War”, Little Criminals, 1977.
Today is an important day in Townsville, Australia. Locations south of Toolakea witness their noonday shadows to their south for the first time since the Sun’s declination moved south of Townsville’s latitude on 19 November. In astrological terms, the noon Vertex moves from the 9th House to the 4th, or in simple geometrical terms, the overhead intersection of the Ecliptic with the Prime Vertical crosses from the east to the west, transformed from anti-Vertex to Vertex. Another way to relate to this phenomenon is to imagine the complete reorientation of your sense of direction when the Sun goes from rising on your left to rising on your right, how mindful of your shadow you would need to be in terrain with no landmarks, and how familiar with landmarks you would need to be in the tropics. You would expect our ancestors in the tropics to travel a lot at night and know the stars like the back of their hands, wouldn’t you?
The longing for the divine partner underfoot in eternity is transformed by material greed or secular cynicism into the archaeology of imperial trophies, and, by what Greta Thunberg called “fairytales of eternal economic growth”, into the replacement of religious obedience by scientific enthralment. Is that what happens? Can the Earth’s obliquity really single out the residents of Townsville for such an influence during their lunch break today? And can we really know the exact day the Sun’s declination equals the latitude of anywhere before the noon shadows of the locals announce it? [The sine of the Sun’s declination equals the sine of Earth’s obliquity multiplied by the sine of the Sun’s ecliptic longitude. The Vertex ‘flip’ occurs at the longitude after the Summer Solstice Point (either one) whose sine equals the sine of the latitude divided by the sine of the obliquity, and before that Solstice Point by the same degree. Since sine 0 = 0, those longitudes at the Equator are 0 and 180, the Equinox Points.]
And finally, is there a more logical basis for the application of Sun Signs to places without four seasons than which horizontal hemisphere the noon Sun is in, North or South? As the Sun retreats towards the Northern Hemisphere in our late Summer, we welcome back more of the Tropics to our shared perspective; or the more of us there are, the further away the Sun. [It takes two months for Australia to get all of its Tropics back from the Northern Hemisphere, but the South gains Singapore at noon on March 24, Monrovia on April 5, Bangkok on April 27, Mexico City on May 17, the Kaaba on May 28, Hong Kong on June 3, Havana on June 11 and ultimately Mazatlán on June 13.]
Whatever the flipping of this mysterious recently invented influence on the heart from sidereal Cancer in the House of Aspiration to sidereal Capricorn in the House of Reputation signifies, you can imagine it has a huge bearing on the price of fish, up and down Australia’s tropical east coast. Even with GPS, the unwary visitor who cannot smell the sea will begin westward when trying to find the fishing co-op! No aid will be forthcoming from the locals, either, who will be down on hands and knees with plumb-bobs and rulers, trying to calibrate the turbulent hormones which cascade during a four-hour period in Townsville at different times of day. Perhaps the visitor is of a mind not to ‘lose it’, but simply to go without fish today. Such a person might well be absent in their own country, and not lost at all. What kind of country might that be? Not a culture of power relations and commodities, oppression and exploitation, perhaps, but unfortunately a world of innerness without outward form or utility to anyone else.
Miraculous though its panorama certainly is, the tenancy of country with a small ‘c’ becomes null and void, any freehold extinguished, at death. Whatever ancestors or previous inhabitants might have put into place, for however long the grandfather clock might have ticked, or the eels teemed into the traps, country did not exist until its tenant came along and made it. Has the tenant lived an impoverished existence, up to their ears in debt, even enslaved, banished, children gone in war and marital strife and migration? Very likely! But you know how beautiful their country is? How awesome to be its only inheritance? You probably don’t because, embedded in history, social theory and economics, identity and law, or perhaps the search in therapy for love and validation in your existential victimhood and educated blame, it is too soon for you to stand here on the banks of the Lethe, dissolved in awe of karma created by hope, error, sorrow and submission, defeat, addiction, intoxication and joy, which for all eternity has been the haunt of our ghosts. When the time comes, welcome to cosmic individuality, the practice of awe, where even scientists and high priests acknowledge the relativity of their faith in platitudes about life’s journey.
Let’s whizz to the moment in time, several hours before Townsville noon, customarily identified by the Academy of Scientific Astrology and the Uniting Church of Oncology, Climatology, Astrometry and Extragalactic Dynamics as New Moon. So here we are, ready to argue about signs and influences, but suddenly aware that the only thing we know for certain is that we know nothing. It may or may not be the case that this is not a dream, that the underworld is the outside looking in, or that the many mansions of my Father’s house are the wards of a detention centre’s psychiatric hospital, the hours which mark the various ways the autonomous spirit of everything gasps for survival under the putrefaction of my corpse, or the seams of my resistance to the emptiness of consciousness, time and illness. The following relativities of geography, Milky Way mythology and rotational orientation may or may not be helpful in sustaining the dialogue you might have with the Moon this year. [They are all plotted using Stellarium 0.19.2 and paint.net 4.2.7.]
Every one of these snapshots could begin a dialogue between insiders and outsiders typified by a line in the sand separating absolutist and relativist: do not assert your truth over mine, because I am right and you are wrong. Presented together, they offer the elusive prospect of a system which ties them all together, which should remind us that our most conspicuous lack is not respect for difference, but a spirit of solidarity, an ethics of presence, a sharing of silence. In fact, it is relatively easy to discover systems on the outside, but it is not easy to share from the inside one’s creation, of love and obedience, integrity and awe. The oaths sworn by the gods in honour of the goddess Styx, the elm tree at the entrance to the ancient underworld to which false dreams cling under every leaf, the varieties of madness in the no-man’s-land of the bardo, and the experience of life in death I call ‘country’, are concepts borrowed from other times and cultures, and elements like the oils on a canvas, with no intrinsic meaning or independent agency, of an astrology of empty identity, time and place.
“The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.” Umberto Eco.
“The bull of the herd had stepped into the white foaming brook, and went forward slowly, now striving against, now giving way to his tempestuous course; thus, no doubt, he took his sort of fierce pleasure. Two dark brown beings, of Bergamasque origin, tended the herd, the girl dressed almost like a boy.” Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, Second Sequel, The Wanderer And His Shadow, Aphorism §295, ed. Darryl Marks, trans. H. Zimmern, P. Cohn, Everlasting Flames, 2010.
The naming of Moons of course connects them to what we’re doing down here. Inverting European and North American names or leaving names behind completely in the Northern Hemisphere might do for some, and continuing such traditions as Yule and Easter in their opposite seasons doesn’t seem to have disturbed capitalism or hurt anybody, but the entertaining possibility exists that seasons and customs merely refine what we’re doing and feeling, and we’re actually all doing more or less the same thing. It might at least be said that we are all subject to universal influences on our mental health, which fall into cyclical patterns we all engage with in similar ways, if at different times. Two distinctive things we all have in common with the Vagabond are the balancing of the desire to forget and the inability to remember, and the experience of being utterly alone.
The best moments of your life are the hardest to remember, because your language did not impose you on them, but rather from the bottom up, your spirit was dissolving into a belonging in something beyond, something almost magical, a connectedness which drew its miraculous energy from you, which could only last an instant and might never emerge again from the objective definition of your existence, but which in a flash of awareness revealed the reality of being alive instead of dead. Ceremony is of course your best method of putting your memory back in that transcendent self you own abstractly as yours. But what of the wooden hands of the cellist, the traffic vibrations and the halitosis of the singer behind you, and your own, for that matter? Is solitary meditation the only way to engage in a ceremony of connection? Must we wash our hands of others lest we forget who we are? Would such uncleanliness truly be the opposite of authenticity? Is there an important lesson in equanimity to be gained from the Vagabond’s stoical existence?
The danger we sense is real: the most vividly lived moments of our past are most challenging to relive, because they include the best, which we can seldom recall in all their complexity, and the worst, which can traumatically reconstruct themselves viscerally in the most unwelcome way. We even judge the good in the context of the meaning of the bad, and we think to free our good selves from shame by working on our shadow, but the judgment our insight passes on the self-as-other is so vivid in its remorseless negativity that compulsively as we might train ourselves to disbelieve, we are built to forget, and it is easier to disbelieve what is forgotten. The shadow of the Vagabond in sidereal Taurus falls across the June Solstice and the river of Hades he approaches in the Bardo, the River of Forgetting.
If you have the good fortune to withdraw from the everyday, just for one night at the right time of the year, and in your nearest dark sky, you can realize the connection of above and below, as it was known by the prehistoric people who lived under the Milky Way, as it was once known under rural skies by the swagman, and as it has now been forgotten in urban lanes by everyone: when the Milky Way arcs overhead from horizon to horizon in either of the two configurations which are so formed, its bearings link all Warriors or Wanderers camped on their river, Acheron or Lethe. My Acheron crosses Eastern Australia to Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast, but my Lethe arcs over Central Australia to the Kimberley and beyond through Timor Leste and Western China to Siberian Omsk. I am proud when I am on the Lethe to project over the horizon the kin of my spiritual sisters of Wurdi Youang. Detroit’s Lethe arcs over the Caribbean to Brazil, and a shout-out wells up in my heart to all countrywomen, and tonight, fellow Vagabonds!
Not everyone is summoned by a divine voice to sacrifice his son, as was the Patriarch of all of the religions of The Book, and of socialism and humanism, in all their woeful, forgetting folly. If the nearest you can now approach to such grief, mysterious atavistic Vagabond of our cosmic loneliness, as you stare over the Atacama Desert, is not quite being able to erase the memory of rejection, the clinical name healers give the extinction of a divine voice and the reduction to dust of every monolithic monument to human immortality since the dawn of civilization, you are as blessed as you seem to believe yourself, blessed to have heard the voice, blessed to have been spared its demand. Charismatic though our inner voices may be, the gods are bent on the narcissistic autonomy they enjoy in our submission to their resentful, perfectionist control.
The Vagabond is the avatar of all who throughout history and before it have gratefully accepted country as more real than landscape and real estate: the ancestral, the migratory, the rejected, the enslaved, the dispossessed of everything but kinship and the meaning of ceremony and song. He and they enact the memory we share eternally of what remains of creation to be forgotten. What more could there ever possibly be, than broken, throbbing hearts crying, “Please don’t climb my rock,” and protected by them in a world of liars, charlatans, scammers, hostage-takers, people-smugglers, bullies, creeps and bogeymen, the laughter and tears of children?
