Doubt is the necessary condition for meaning, and the necessary condition for doubt is time, and specifically time’s experienced intervals. What measures your mindfulness and interrogates your ego? Habits? Addiction? Divorce and remarriage rate? Child milestones? Reunions? New Year’s Eve? For some of us it is Full Moons, and Saturn Returns. The longer the interval, the more abrupt and bittersweet our apprehension of the brevity of the time we have. Were we right?
In a week from now, a Great Conjunction will divide our lives into twenty-year chunks. For a very long time, observers of the cosmos like Kepler have understood that successive conjunctions occur roughly 120 degrees apart, so that every third return occurs in the vicinity of its forerunner, but advancing through the Zodiac by 4-10 degrees every 60 years. The previous occurrence of this triad took place in sidereal Sagittarius in 1961. A Grand Return, a full circle, takes 1767-8 years, by my calculations. The last time it occurred in the vicinity of this one was in February 253 CE, and before that, ‘February’ 1455 BCE. How much time have we got?
I will leave it to the Sun and Moon to tell us how long it takes for a Great Conjunction in sidereal Capricorn to coincide with a New Moon. I am content to leave it in doubt. This Moon will be near First Quarter.
The last time the New Moon occurred on December 14-15 at the tail-end of the Scorpion was in 2001, and the next will be in 2031, when we may have another eleven years to look back on, and maybe not. At nightfall tonight Jupiter and Saturn are less than half an outstretched fingertip apart.
Salta Noon
I doubt if anybody here still holds to the view that seasons have a fixed starting date and duration. Perhaps there are Australians who regard scorching-hot weather before December 1 as an aberration, and purists who don their summer outfits at the Solstice. I know there are many who believe the Northern Hemisphere tropical signs apply down here with some sort of transcendental cosmological impact, and many of you up there incorporate Southern Signs into a meaningful polarity. Pity those migratory birds who arrive down here in a drought! But do notice how Ascendant and Descendant play out in the Antipodes.
Heyuan Underworld Solar Midnight
Along with the doubt which plagues us at this time of year that the brilliancy of our appropriate gifts will be under-appreciated, we have become accustomed to the devaluation of the Christian festival which draws nigh, just as the Christians devalued pagan antecedents. But as we prepare for the insufferable rectitude of pubescent nephews and nieces, can we admit the ambiguity and indefinability of the seasons?
After all, as our youngsters are fond of pointing out, it’s 2020, and it’s we who’ve changed the seasons, and perhaps invalidated all Tropical Signs, North and South. Have we really changed the seasons? Let’s have recourse to the timeless wisdom of indigenous peoples, or are they now wrong too?
There are no seasons on the Moon, only day and night, lasting 13 1/2 days each, which can be described as bloody hot and bloody cold. Perhaps the siderealists are right: Signs are no more than myth and appearance. If we abolish the seasons from the Moon’s view of us, what remains?
Moon view at 173 celsius below.
So back where we start from, we persevere in creating the antidote to doubt. What the Great Conjunction means depends on the Sign it occurs in, which I leave to the vested interests. All I know is how small it makes me. Country is time distilled. Will 2020, and the disadvantage its catastrophes have imposed at the margins, never end?
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1.
Dreams, like music, have a way of seeming personal.
It was late and time to turn the music off … turn, turn, turn … blowing through the jasmine in my mind … are you old enough? … handle me with care … I’ll clean it up myself I guess … and it ain’t me who’s gonna leave … there’s one way of gettin’ there, I’ve been usin’ the method for twenty-five years or more … so open up your beach umbrella while you’re watchin’ TV … desultorily clinging to words which had made the world around him, but merely punctuated the arpeggios of his soul … skipped the light and bangles … hey little sister who’s the only one … tastes just like cherry cola … how to open doors with just a smile … don’t want your kisses that’s for sure … and you wish the world was as tired as you … never lost a minute of sleepin’ worryin’ ’bout the way things might have been … I guess hell has finally frozen over … didn’t recognize the boy in the mirror … now he wants the music to stop, but when he takes the needle off the dream groove the music keeps going. He tries the volume and the off switch to no avail. The music cannot be stopped. He is aware that music has defined every step of his life’s journey, learned and made his own, but ever with a life of its own, a cosmos of his entrails.
The dream is still there when the astrologer awakes slumped in his wheelchair. The garden outside his window is in twilight. Any moment now the nurse will come to wheel him into the dining-room. He will eat, and then be hoisted into bed, sleep, and be hoisted out again and onto the toilet, then back into his wheelchair. His bodily processes, like the music, cannot be stopped. A lifetime of change seems petrified by the bodily processes which have governed it, and by the wheeling heavens which they have written in their dance book.
This Moon aligns with one of the vertical configurations of the Milky Way, or near enough, not the transcendent associated with the initiation of Indigenous men, but the other one.
Is anyone dreaming of music in the Rohingya camps tonight? Are Southern Hemisphere Signs protruding into anyone’s northern sky? Are the Rivers of Hades no more than a poetic device, and the Milky Way no more transcendent than a campfire?
Essential to this astrologer’s country is the awareness of cyclical change. Sometimes she is a man, and sometimes he is a woman. One of the more interesting implications of the meaning he has given to the intersections of the Zodiac with the Milky Way, in no small part inspired by the imputed association of one region of the Milky Way with ‘secret men’s business’, is that at the Southern Summer Solstice the female Sun is in masculine territory, and on this rare occasion the male Moon realizes itself in what the astrologer regards as feminine territory, ‘secret women’s business’. It must be conceded that the heroic male constantly facing the insurmountable obstacles to his immortality presented by the world, and the repression of female individuation which wipes her from history, are archaic cultural constructs nowhere near obliteration.
You should be familiar with the Emu, but you may not know how its appearance has moved throughout the millennia. It has been remarked that evidence of the orientation of Bora grounds to the position of the Emu is largely to be found in Northern N.S.W. and Queensland, a phenomenon which one day might enter the debate about continental vs. regional Indigenous culture. In the meantime, there seems to me a cogent explanation for the scarcity of such evidence south of the Murray, which has nothing to do with genocide or expropriation, and everything to do with locality.
About 12,000 years ago, around the time of final separation of Tasmanian inhabitants from the mainland resulting from rising sea levels, something just as weird began in the sky: creeping northward from Southern Tasmania, the orientations of the two vertical configurations of the Milky Way when the Galactic Poles cross the horizon converged due East and West. The Poles intersected with the horizon at the Meridian (addition of the absolute values of the declination of either Pole and local latitude equalled 90°, the angle between zenith and horizon). This weirdness got as high as Tallangatta around 4500 BCE then doubled back before it quite reached Echuca, passing south of Southern Tasmania again around 1800 BCE.
Down my way, at the Wurdi Youang stone circle, this occurred in approximately 5815 and 3190 BCE (as contemporaneously it did upside down in Copper Age Anatolia and Peloponnese Greece), according to Stellarium‘s algorithms, and during the intervening millennia the Emu was never precisely vertical. The NGP crossed the Meridian below the horizon and the SGP was circumpolar. It is possible that ‘near enough is good enough’ originated in Southern Australia (or Turkey, or Greece), but it is also just possible the Kulin nation occupied the locus for a sanctification of the Prime Vertical, the invention of the plumb bob or the transmogrification of masculinity.
It is also worthy of note, especially by those anthropologists and archaeologists who have not imagined the cultural impact of an evolving sky one lives under by night, that the vertical Emu has not always appeared as it does today head down in the southwest. Between 13000 and 3000 BCE it was entirely framed head up in the northeastern sky at Wurdi Youang, similarly moving down and back up between 12800 and 3200 BCE in Northern Victoria, and in Northern N.S.W. between 10800 and 5000 BCE.
That was the time to fetishize the dust lanes recognized as the Emu, and adapt geodesy and ceremony to the subsequent millennia, and so antiquity combined with latitude explains the orientation of countrywide Bora grounds all over the compass.
The fundamental revelation which underlies compassionate humanity is not woundedness but harmfulness. Yes, we suffer, and that means we sometimes cannot help the harm we do, but never have we alleviated suffering by being blameless. And have we alleviated suffering by institutionalising goodness? We like to think so, and weep in gratitude for the separation of conjoined twins, but we are also outraged by the sexual misdemeanours of priests.
The terrible truth is that we choose to harm, and because our freedom and responsibility are the conjoined twins of our selfhood, it eventually falls to us all to confront and own our harmfulness, and if we are not to lose our selfhood to self-hatred, see ourselves finally as victims of our own evil, we must find forgiveness. Loving myself and others as wounded victims is so, how can I put it, de-meaning? Woman, you chose to be this way. The only transformation of patriarchy that works comes from the forgiveness of the guilty, women who have taken a man, from his children, his mother, himself, to give their existence meaning, women who have accepted the inherited status of domesticated animals, and men who have conflagrated their heroism in love.
“Nobody owns my country but me,” our struggle seems to entitle us to say, and yet the past I and the ancestors have vacated stretches fence by fence across the horizon. The past of my neighbours is my country. Is it a paradox that we cannot forgive our enemies, when we are identical to them in our manias of self-justification? Have we lost with the Us and Them moieties of trade-unionism a mechanism for bringing the best out of each other? Pleistocene Australians invented the fire-stick, Holocene Europeans the fence. Is it a paradox that setting fire to the bush protects the fences, originally invented to minimize conflict over game? Do traditional owners really want the onerous task of collecting the rent to fund the administration of Blue Mud Bay fishing? Midnight permits? Boarding and sinking dinghies? Headlines? Civil war?
The human bones revealed by the shifting sand of deep time belong to a nonentity who was a hero or heroine like us, and so they are sacred, like every somebody who tries not to be nobody. The guilt-ridden invaders have been willing for ages to play a fugue with the Indigenous people their ancestral nonentities wronged, but the Indigenous prelude, from the time before European settlement, has not been scored for Western instruments. How far away are the stars now? Is it different for a man or a woman to stare into the abyss? Is the Wanderer more than a dead white man’s Fantasy in C Major? Is there now a Cassiopeia in Wurundjeri country? Yes, my anxiety is salved when the Moon crosses the Lethe, why would it not be? Am I not my Mother’s son? Was it not a Song of the Rainbow Serpent she sang which opened my heart to my welcome as an interloper at the campfire of strangers? Yes, “everybody owns my country” is what I’m trying to say.
Trujillo, Colombia
“I’m a time traveller.” “You’re a clock watcher.” “All my life I’ve been travelling at 7.9 km/sec.” “You’re hooked on melancholy”“Doubt everything, especially yourself.” “How could you believe being a failure was paying your dues?” “How could you think therapy could pay yours?” “Your anality is dying in its arse.” “Your top-down thinking is arse-up.” “I can’t keep a straight face listening to a dead man’s vain attempt to sacralize death.” “One more km/sec and I never had to hear you.” “Why did you need to tell me that? Stop attacking me.”
This all too human propensity for discrimination and judgment, unalloyed with a good dose of skepticism, consolidates normal black and white mental illness. Applied to the skin, it establishes the difference manifested by foreignness. Binary gender is a classic example: humans have confronted and adapted to devastating climate change countless times throughout the millennia, but when they were forced to leave, it was always into someone else’s country; the right to somebody else’s country doesn’t exist, but could that be rouge on the cheeks of Chopin’s corpse when Khatia Buniatishvili plays ‘his’ Piano Concerto No. 2?
Kyrie
The veteran in his wheelchair will not see the like of this again, and nobody younger will experience quite the awe of the Pleistocene, because dark skies are gone from Sunbury, where once the soul could study the lines of its eternal palm under the stars. Hoisted into bed, the astrologer lays his grateful head on plumped pillows, dissolves the fences of mind, floats down and beyond the fulcrum of duality, and sleeps.
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
– Albert Einstein.
What makes you tick? Not what motivates you, but how do you put yourself together? What is your organizing principle? Not why you get up when you’ve been knocked down, but how? What do you call to mind? What comes? Is it a lie to foster a self affecting a truth? Why is it that accepting the inevitable seems like a self-defeating mechanism? When an imperative pops into your mind, an innate or habitual mechanism, do you recognize and give expression to the body of your world, implement it as the construction of your will, or fight it as the enemy of your integrity?
If we could imagine for a moment language inflected not only with sexist and racist attitudes to power, but also with ingrained certainties of the physical world, including which side of the human body belongs to us and which to society, the sacredness or profanity of the instinct, and the nature of freedom as submission or rebellion, then to the extent we are comfortable and decipherable using our language, we might be confident of a universal order which makes us all brothers and sisters. We could understand the ego as the instrument of our own control over the irrational and infantile.
On the other hand, should the ego seem more like an enemy than a friend, should meditation waft us away into the universal mind, leaving us with the body only of our breath, we might attempt to dissolve our infantile defences against separation, disappointment and death in the acceptance of change, but succeed in arresting the change the universe orchestrates by flowing through our bodies.
And what if the body of the world, our habits, language and culture, seems to us in itself a threat to our identity, an oppression of our egoic insistence on mastering the socially constructed self to become in a state of fluidity whomever we choose intellectually to be? If ‘identity’ has ceased to mean what is identical, but “A person’s conception and expression of individuality or group affiliation, self-concept and self-representation”, where are those brothers and sisters now? Compassion and loving-kindness limited to the emptiness of a meditative trance? Equality, democracy and equanimity are subsumed by ungovernability when ‘identity’ is forced to mean ‘ipseity’ and the universal mind devolves into tribalism.
Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors began to make sense of the movement of the Moon. It became hardwired into our understanding of time. It made scientists of us. Actually, you could say that the Moon, by impressing on us the rhythms of the sky, was waiting for a first landing, and caused those enduring footprints itself. Perhaps the real cause was embedded not in American politics, or an intercontinental military-industrial complex, but the universe itself, the how, not the why.
At a certain distance from the Equator, currently 37°9’34” latitude north and south, decreasing at a rate of about half a kilometre a year, the points at which the Galactic Plane and the Ecliptic intersect are either due east or west at the precise moment the Milky Way intersects with the horizon north and south, arcing east or west. Does this mean anything? Do you doubt it? How can you betray your ancestors by doing so? In fact, it means to the body of the world that someone has noticed it, and nothing more. Climate change is a similar, not to say identical, phenomenon. That someone did not say that east and west and the planes of the solar system and the Milky Way exist only in the mind, that the azimuths of the Galactic Poles are a problem of elementary trigonometry, or that the language used to formulate astrometry needs to be decontaminated before its importance in human history can be debated, as though it were a matter of whose bodily processes in an interstellar spacecraft have precedence, officers or ratings, men or women, black, brown or white, means only that reality has made a new appearance, that someone noticed something happening, as though in the mirror, in his Underworld.
The Sun crosses the Galactic Plane slightly less than seven hours after Solstice this year. If you’re within cooee of the N.S.W. Central Coast on Solstice Day, a Saturday, why don’t you see what you’re made of? It’s a special moment, any time the Sun is due west, this one fitting for a special companion.
What do you find beneath your feet? Does Mother Earth recognize them? Do they mirror those of an observer of the Moon on the other side? Is fantasy or forgetting an element of how you deal with things, or both, and is (s)he the One? Remember, do not to leave your phone in the car.
One day, astrology may use what has been noticed to see something else. Then it will be understood, but first it must be seen. Its seeing is in turn the underlying understanding of doubt. Climate change may be the universe engineering the colonisation of other solar systems by whiteness. The wound may constitute the measure of breath, and the oppression of victims be the cinching of trousers around the neck of believers. Belief, when all said and done, is of the body, not the mind. And should you doubt December’s opportunity to doubt doubt, perhaps you have not known hope or grief. When you do, in your body, please know that I, your ancestors and the birds, along with a dog and cat or two, hope and grieve with you. We are the universe. But doubt, you can have that on your own, with the sky revolving north and south, unseen, for when doubt rounds on the Self, only Christmas can save us, hein? And the ancestors sing, Death, D-Death Death, where is thy sting?
”In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.” Tolstoy, War And Peace.
I take it as a given that most people in the West live on a flat Earth. With no value for the nuances of language and mathematics which have engineered their technology, or the cultural capital of their Christian history, they are unable to sustain the emergent reality they have inherited from the commitment of their ancestors, let alone build on it. They are objects, and their introspection is devoted to understanding and perfecting themselves, and others, as objects. The spiritual dimension of their lives is reduced to ideological conflict, because the spectacle of their finitude is not immediately present, but filtered and polluted. Their suffering is unique, renegade, and blind.
In the month of Sagittarius, for the Sun has only hours left in Scorpio, you have the time to indulge your imagination, behind your sunglasses on the beach, with the chatter and laughter of children confirming the safety of the shallows, and if you join with Sun and Moon in discarding the intellect, you may be able to imagine who you would be without human rights and victimhood, neighbours and argument, retirement security and parental influence, cultural cringe and the tall poppy syndrome, political correctness and cognitive dissonance, and any other idol which springs to mind before which you worship the self-enclosed and permanent utopia to which you pay your weekly subscription.
However, for the imagination to free us from a prison, it needs to do more than place us outside. It must create a context for the prison, and for this you might need an entirely new language. We might call this the language of extrospection, since it is the reverse of introspection. Instead of regarding the interior of an object as a subject, it enters the object’s exterior as its subject. Perhaps such a reverie might voice a song of change to dissolve the permanence of your victimhood. Is the situation you have been intent to define really intolerable? The lineaments of creation are hidden in thunderous surf, the sun-parched wilderness, its distant low hills, waterholes, trees and sky. Why are we seduced by healing from a celebration of the wound creation stamps us with? Because such consciousness might be the aura of death?
Extrospection is a peculiar type of consciousness. It is not a tool of social control with evolutionary benefit for group survival. It is not emergent in a cultural sense. It is akin to the intimate connection farmers have to the land, First Peoples have to country, poets have to language, and medical practitioners have to health, not disease. It is like introspection, in that it is a consciousness of consciousness, but the self which is conscious of itself in extrospection has no boundaries: what inspects itself is an artefact of the timeless process of creation, the universe created by your understanding, at once subject and object, eternal and finite. A meditation on change, it is the landscape of one’s absence, an unfolding of the immanent death of emptiness.
Imagine your life lived at the dawn of humanity, emerging from the refuge of the tropical forest, and increasingly confident of your group’s capacity to repel predators, but now sleeping all night in pitch blackness under a canopy of stars so vividly ablaze you could reach up and touch them. You know them. They are all dead spirits flooding up from the underworld to watch over you while you sleep. They are beautiful, but terrible too. They saturate your bodily awareness. You live in death.
If we are to find equanimity in the extremities of awareness, not merely escape them as utopians do, we must address the question the stifling trappings of the mediocre class mask. What is my country? How does what I’m conscious of respond to my consciousness of it? What, if anything, will survive of my consciousness in its death? Not in what memory will I be remembered, what mark on the world will I leave, questions of the living dead, but what mark, what miracle will I take, what bubble will reality burst?
The field of archaeoastronomy is not properly the province of top-down thinkers, and certainly not researchers who have not witnessed an heliacal rising or the stars of a very dark sky. Most research I’ve read focuses on the emergence of the understanding of eclipses, planetary movements, seasonal correlations and the utility of stars for navigation, and this might be expected from searchers working backwards for the roots of what we think we know. I believe research would better serve a quest for what we think we don’t know, such as the impact of the Milky Way on our distant ancestors, which indefinably we have inherited in our cultures in ways we no longer recognize.
Lethe visible on the right (latitudes greater than 30°, Sun -18°) is the Western Wall December-May in the North, and the Eastern Wall August-December in the South.
Right and left: what do they mean to you? Yes, besides left and right hemispheres of the brain and opposite sides of the body, lateralized information processing, and what several generations of scientists taught, that language was exclusive to the left, etc.. Where did some First Peoples of Australia get the notion that the cardinal direction of language was the West? Where did astrology pick up the idea that the West is social and the East is personal? Do metaphors of East and West have something to do with rising and setting, or with left and right, or both? Perhaps it’s not only astrology but evolution and emergence that a bit of confirmation bias gets into.
Acheron visible on the Left (latitudes greater than 30°, Sun -18°) is the Eastern Wall February-June in the North, and the Western Wall June-November in the South.
As our ancestors migrated northward out of the tropics of Africa, what impression do you imagine their ancestors created, and where in the mind, when every one of them lined up in the West, and at other times in the East? Was it left and right which made it meaningful? Or East and West? What can you imagine the First Peoples of South America, Southern Africa and Australia made of the migration of left to West as they faced natural law, the Sun? Why did they go south? What was different about them? Was it a story the galaxy was imprinting on their imagination in Crux or the Emu in a language as yet to perfect itself when that stellar region was high enough to see? Are they different, people who find West right and left? What do you imagine happens in migrants from North to South today? What would you do? Go back? Build a home facing south?
You see? The galaxy we evolved in wants to leave its mark, even as it is dying to the naked eye no doubt.
The vagabond is homeless, disconnected, a refugee from the world of the therapeutically discriminating intellect. Is he unpacking his “stuff”? Is he on the way to realizing that the enemy of a perfect world is the undeconstructed self? Shall we ask him? Are we bored enough by our pallid Nothingness to inhabit with our self-aggrandizing ‘compassion’ another’s tedious wound? Do we have the temerity to apply our triumphant empathy to the capacity to deal with the shame of eating garbage, being constantly afflicted with diarrhoea and having nowhere to do it but in our pants? Are we ready to deal with the stereotypes he has us cast in?
Now read on.
Does this look like a smiley face to you? You’re sadly deluded. The Moon is a piece of rock without legs, and its ‘head’ is all face. If that doesn’t give him away as a shady type, the one eye confirms he is ‘other’, not to be trusted, potentially evil. Of course, as compassionate people, we have long abandoned physiognomy, but our compassion is anchored to the otherness of the ‘other’. Compassion is part of our identity, and the identity of the ‘other’ is as fixed: indigenous people must remain in traditional culture, disinherited and victimized, and disabled people must remain the recipients of our largesse, defined by their disability. To expect otherwise is racist and elitist, disrespectful of their identity.
The Sign of the constellation Taurus in the southern hemisphere is Sagittarius, the sign of charisma and independence. Re-inhabit your subjectivity and respect the ‘other’ in theirs! Nobody’s identity is fixed, at birth or in an analytical, managerial mind. There is no form which is not empty. There is only time, and the dark art of becoming. And the timelessly true subject of the subject, love.
Part The Second
If you want to justify yourself–tidy yourself at the margins–spare me some change, says the vagabond, the loser, the weirdo. Pause for a dialogue in the daylight world of your power to imagine away my exile. But if you can brave it, meet me in the middle of the night, in the chaos of your fears, the world of my power to make you an infantile irrelevance.
Chapter 1. Saiph
Who is God?
SAMAR KHEL
HANGA ROA
These people on the streets and roads of Afghanistan know the folly of disrespecting a man who will kill you instantly with impunity. If one is uneducated in the nature of offence, as I am, and you too, then one is in mortal danger. One must shroud oneself, maintain an attitude of deference and submit to any indignity. Is it wise to leave questions about God to the Imam to decide? No, it is stupid to voice an opinion. And that is why I will be long gone from the shelter of this moai by dawn. The power of Polynesians is immense, and under the gaze of their ancestors existence itself is an impertinence. Saiph has the laughter which incites a man to be bigger than his grandfather. It is very, very dangerous.
Chapter 2. Butch
Who are you?
BAGNOLI
PUKAPUKA
Why do I sing “O Sole Mio” when all the beautiful people at this beach have their earplugs in? Because this is a dream, and singing a Neapolitan song gives me an aesthetic reason to be dressed in rags. My people forgive my problem with the bottle, and the years I wasted reading the history of the world, because I entertain the tourists. They tell me a woman’s beauty is not so much degraded by wolf-whistles in Italia these days. You can wear these revealing clothes. Is it true? A woman’s beauty in Pukapuka is the secret which keeps us alive. You will all leave and take your secrets with you, and here another cyclone will come.
Chapter 3. Avior
What is life?
SAN ANDRES
PHUKET
You boys are trouble, no? Hahaha! No, just having fun, I know. That’s all I’ve got, and I don’t know when I’ll have more, but you’re welcome! A cricket team, eh? We play baseball where I am from, but last year I was in India. There it is big, I know. Howzat! Hahaha! The world is just a big game of cricket, no? Tampering with the ball! Hahaha! Go over there to vomit, man! Hahaha!
Chapter 4. Regulus
What is death?
RECIFE
MELBOURNE
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” When will the Holocaust be forgotten? When will the Twin Towers be forgotten? For ever and ever. Now get out with me and witness the moment. I am pausing the meter, see?
That you will never see again. The star is the Archangel Raphael. I thought it was him when you started raving about death. Why do you want to talk about death? Is that my “stuff”? No. “I found more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, whose heart is a snare and whose hands are like prison chains.” That’s mine. “Eh quoi! n’est-ce donc que cela? La toile était levée et j’attendais encore.”
“Finally, I got home. It was tantamount to harassment.”
“Well, at least you got to see the Archangel Raphael”
“Not funny.”
“And you might refrain from turning our Christmas party into a conversation about death?”