Does the incomprehensible time-frame in which the light of the most distant visible stars and galaxies has travelled to reach us–2.5 million years in the case of the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant naked-eye object–suggest to you a pitiful transience of self’s here-and-now or being’s eternal backdrop? It really is a fundamental question, and every culture I can think of has afforded both positions, but their coexistence has never been less harmonious.

”Know thyself,” and “Nothing to excess,” said the Greeks, and those maxims linger, but increasingly it seems, you have to imagine yourself in the Tardis to witness them. The presence of the Divine is beyond our sequestration of permanence in narcissism and comfort, and the Self as process abandons truth to the loudest voice, the highest-rating morning television, because the absolutely basic definition of being we cannot or will not share is our transience, our finitude, our emptiness.

We are on trains pulling away from the station in different directions. Has it ever been thus, that the good-looking African-Australian captivating the weirdly non-black girls outside the shopping mall with his studiously and rhythmically platitudinous ‘hoes’ and ‘bitches’ cannot gauge the contempt in the darkness beyond his spot engendered by the recognition of his bravadaccio as a dog’s barking in the wind? Am I the only witness to the wind of death stripping him of his narcissism as he speaks? Apparently those pretending his expletives are not cowardly are afraid of them.

You may have lost your way in the appearances of things, in the expensive, controlling and demeaning expertise of others, or in the unbearable loneliness of being unworthy, but cheer up, the path to the cliff is lined garishly with comforting signs of imminent healing, and this Moon is showing the way, to the Archangel Raphael, binder of demons, healer of blindness, Regulus the little king. No, a healer cannot heal you. Healing, throughout the ages, has been misconstrued as a transitive thing. The lion is not a king, but a trial of Hercules; a Little King is a basilisk. Healers are people who are themselves healing, from being born without white male privilege, from being born with it, or from being born at all. If Regulus is a healer, it may be the discovery of his anatomical position upside down he needs to heal.

It used to be said that life transforms the face you were born with into the face you deserve, but a third face is emerging under the scalpel and the syringe. Be careful what you wish for: “The wages of sin is death”, is morphing into the secular understanding that life transforms the wound you were born with into the subsidiary obsessions which merely transmute it, but a qualified mind-doctor can help you heal them. How does such ‘auditing’ deal with the wound you were born with? A healer is transforming compassion into narcissism, creative force into intellectual property, country into legacy, knowledge into fame, and accordingly life itself, the primary wound, knows only one cure.

In the immortal words of Kirsty MacColl, “Why can’t we just be happy, baby?” Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice, but we can’t blame the punk for the girls’ adulation, any more than we can blame light pollution on the wrong extinction coefficient, or extinguish persona in shadow. Has there ever been a culture that didn’t prize ignorance (closely related to humour as it is)? Men’s business is about obedience to the fieldmarshal, not debating his strategy; women’s business, acceptance, tolerance, forgiveness, is definitely not helping the choice of better leaders, and as an example for men is no better than a mirror to the shame of their pride. Perhaps the adulation of those girls is not much removed from pride in their shame. Oh well, they’ll move on one day, won’t they?

O Profit, what globalizations of healing are carried out in thy name! The river is sick; we must heal the rain. Busking leads will heal the queue excluded from the play. The audience willingly waits: they paid good money, printed by the Government, just in time. If as yet there is no app banishing the healer from next door to the underworld of opposite houses, nevertheless the meaning of your pain is all there above you, like ‘phases of the Moon’, and it’s not my fault you need everything spelled out: equality, diversity, identity, inclusion, footprint, in a smorgasbord of healing.

Bah! Humbug! The quintessential healer refuses to play victim to his wound. There will be no redemption for him! Transience is eternal, he mutters, rummaging heartbroken through priceless childhood photos of his children and their Fathers Day cards. The river is sick; he poisons himself with alcohol. The rivermouth is blocked; he swats mosquitoes in the hope it will be his flesh-eating ulcer that gets it dredged. He shares with asylum-seekers a debt to panels of experts. How many glass beads is his sovereignty worth to those who know better? Can its loss be healed by the human rights bestowed by foreign thieves on the victims of its theft?

Is a ‘Full Moon’ even possible any more?

I am not healing. What do I mean? I mean that the river which runs dry, the suburb which extinguishes its night sky, the refugees whose deprivation stands as pragmatic denial of any ideal, in opposite house or no, the acts in my past I would have to undo the fundamental naive judgements of my loved ones to deny, all of these dissolve in the texture of country, a wound and its wounding, a projection in three dimensions of my time in existence, an infinite emptiness not subject to appraisal by any pantheon of gods or panel of experts.

The Underworld of original sin has a surface where a healer’s tears repair the rain. Though it be covered by a skin of concrete outside a suburban shopping mall, it must be found this end of the rainbow.