“We are expected to grow up to be empathic, caring, respectful, or honest when these qualities are not demonstrated in how we are treated, nor are we given room to find from within who we are. It’s entirely unsurprising to me that most of us carry so much shame given how much and how often children are shamed by others.” Miki Kashtan.
”Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.” Richard Mitchell.
“Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre.” Montaigne, Essais, I.
You probably cannot understand what it means to receive inspiration from the Sun in Gemini unless you have crossed the Acheron into the Underworld, trudged through vanity and perfectionism, braved the ghosts of love haunting the Circlet of Pisces, evaded treachery in the badlands of Aries and the herd of brides offered on eBay by lowing Aldebaran, and waded past the ablutions of seductive Saiph, one glance towards whom could have you up before the Sexism and Racism Commissariat. It’s hell, Hell, and it’s somewhat of a comfort to forget you’re there, and why you’re there. Karma is a factitious disorder beyond belief: like Baron Munchausen you have pulled yourself from the mire of Tropical Astrology by your own hair. Welcome to social eternity, where community withdraws from the defeats of history, and celebrates the visible mercy of silence.
And welcome to good company. In living memory, and for any living person’s foreseeable future, Lethe season and June Solstice coincide, within a day or two, even if their precedence reversed in 1998. In the Southern Hemisphere the June Solstice is the Sun’s surrender, the New Sun, and so this first Moon tries to temper its relative brilliance with an appropriate show of delicacy, if not self-effacement. Prorsum et semper honeste, quoth the Southern Hemisphere to its Underworld, its Other.
You will think I’m terrible, and I know that Western Civilization is underpinned by the perennial struggle for freedom, but I believe that the majority of those who sacrificed their lives for freedom didn’t have much of an idea what it was. I suggested as much to my Father after I’d read Bullock, and he as much as told me to shut my mouth lest I defile the memory of the fallen with a repeat of my suggestion that pre-war American, British and Australian boys, and indeed he, seem to have been raised with something similar to Hitler Youth values.
Out of responsibility, freedom; out of freedom, forgetting; out of forgetting, responsibility. That is what baby-boomers learned by associating the meaning of their parents’ language and behaviour. Their grandchildren have also been born into a Great Forgetting, of the caring responsiveness we know as responsibility, to fly like a bird through the rights and obligations woven into the fledgling nest by a thousand socialist institutions.
Does God know in advance every wing beat of every bird? No ego, no matter how inflated, could rationally make such a claim. After all, every bird is itself responsible for the joy of its unique capacity, like dreaming humans, to swim through the air. We share the species-memory of birds, and no omniscience was ever created by human ego which could predict a dream, as no form of government was ever born of human competition which could create responsibility.
As society can survive civil war, so love can survive limerence, and humanity’s adaptation to climate change will continue, but freedom can only flourish in the renewal of community which clings to the forgotten woe of individuality like the Jordan to the baptized. Irresponsibility? Forget it, as the adult bird said to its fledgling: “You were hatched to fly, girl, so fly!” And what is that planet with her toes in the Lethe? The Sun does not go anywhere without her retinue, and that includes us, and all our divine beings.
“Forget all these pious denunciations of populism from progressive politicians. When figures like Khan use such grotesquely exaggerated moral categories to denounce Trump, they are promoting extremism more effectively than anyone else.” Greg Sheridan.
“And if everyone is anti-racist and anti-sexist, you have to really be strongly anti-racist and anti-sexist to get more points.” Jonathan Haidt.
For some strange reason, June is a time of dissatisfaction. Aligned according to preference as to whether it is poetry or pleasure that is not enough, everyone is declamatory. It is as though to the boor preening her preeminent progressivity the Moon could not make the timing of his fullness at the Galactic Centre more self-evident.
Whereas for most of us the Constellations are a backdrop to lunar motion, the zealot has a tendency to take things literally, project his borrowed and reified concepts onto a cosmology to which he expects unquestioned adherence by anyone with half a brain, and in eliding perspective, miss altogether the relative meaning which that other peculiar human being, the natural scientist, has given to the celestial spectacle since the Stone Age, namely the lapse of time.
The Gates of God and Man have absolutely nothing to do with the Signs or Seasons. They are the intersections of Ecliptic and Galactic Plane, and have occupied the Constellations of Sagittarius and Gemini since before their invention, some twelve thousand years ago, when axial precession was revealing its intention to turn the Seasons upside down. The Gate of God is called Woe, where the soul crosses the Acheron. It coincided with the Southern Summer Solstice in 1998. Jupiter at opposition, vacillating, obsesses with it every 83 years, last in 1960, next in 2043, although you could infer powerful dreaming from its retrograde hesitancy this year. Jupiter will cross on December 4. The Full Sun crosses at Southern Litha, in 2019 seven hours after Solstice on December 22.
The Gate of Man is called Forgetting, where the Ecliptic crosses the Lethe, which may or may not be the portal to reentry into the phenomenal world by the departed. It might simply be the spawning ground of socialist zealots. The New Sun crosses on June Solstice Day. As for Jupiter, the last time it was at opposition at the Gate of Man was December 1977, and the next will be December 2060. I am confident that by then, no Australian zealot will refuse to sing the words of this new and improved national anthem:
Australians all let us rejoice
For we are strong and free
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil
Our home is girt by sea
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare
In herstory’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia, yair
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia, yair!
Certainly, born in 1948, Abliq won’t, hypochondria notwithstanding. In the meantime, I hope you catch the close conjunction of Mars and Mercury in evening twilight tomorrow, and with clear skies on June 30, both the last appearance of the Morning Star and the evening twilight end of the 2017-19 Mars apparition: so endeth the Southern Year, and beginneth another, yair!
Planets vanish in the gaps between constellations; stars drift screaming into the void; the Milky Way runs in glittering rivulets down across the sky’s glassy dome, coming to rest, defeated, against the hard bed of the horizon. There’s no mistaking it. You are going to die. Sam Kriss.
What could be more antithetical to Buddhist emptiness than the infantile notion that spirit or consciousness survives death? I have no idea where the idea came from that dead loved ones become stars in the sky. Perhaps it’s an anthropological fiction which confirms the a priori cultural delusion of permanence. Yes, we are constructs of energy forms forged in the stars, but so what? Mind is an emergent reality of carbon, but so what? We could argue until the cows come home about mind’s purpose, the fulcrum of its personal meaning or the laws of its libraries of evolutionary independence. But imagine the moment of death without any mumbo-jumbo: awesome, yes, but the nothingness you’re sliding into is neither eternal nor permanent. You’re becoming nothing.
We’re beyond history here: our personality and its ramifications are no more significant than a hole in the ground. Our body can no longer answer the question, who am I? Of course we will be remembered, but the minds which will do so are as dust. Galaxies, gods and goddesses, lovers, friends, enemies, children and grandchildren, all dust, as though they never were. The living will do with this as they must: always, they seek. Indeed, in Hell, here on Earth, there are many grey areas: embers of a material world in conflagration, country, the imagination, the unconscious. Perhaps a good death might be no more than the evaporation of the mirage which, shimmering on someone else’s country, we named our pain.
Who are we, the never-were, the forgotten? We are all immigrants into country our ancestors never knew. We live in an alien age, not of sticking it out, making do, with a promise of nirvana or heaven in an afterlife, but of hopelessness, betrayal and envy. Only the mentally ill have faith in an afterlife, or the truth of their ancestors. The rest of us are queuing to get what more fortunate people already have. We are doomed where we are, and life is too short for struggle against the odds. Equanimity is not something you can bequeath your kids. Our ancestors forgot the past, but the future is where we live, and it is a paltry thing to forget in death.
They came to the old man and harangued him to find the spirit of the boy’s sickness and make peace. The old man knew how to dream bad spirits back to the Underworld. He dreamed his Wife, long passed, as the Morning Star, and steered Her to join the Guardian and draw Him back under the canopy [Ophiuchus] to which He was appearing to desert the boy, the strongest hope for their prosperity. On the day he brought Her to join forces with Him, he was reassured that the boy would be saved, even though he was deeply unsettled by the omen of the canoe from the Underworld which his dreams told him was the vehicle of invasion.
Shortly before noon, the boy died, and while the women shrieked and screamed, the old man went back into his dream, and sent his Wife into the Underworld for vengeance.
She is well aware that She is from somewhere else and has a Mission, but She finds Herself overwhelmed by a feeling of being at home with the fishermen who have pulled Her from the sea and clothed Her, mumbling incomprehensible words to each other and to the darkened Moon.
There is so much kindness in this superstitious and pessimistic world, beneath the butchery and inside the walls. Her feelings seem almost alien, like the disappointment which haunts tourism. That’s the thing about dreams, certainly the lingering aura of this waking one we try to share, that their reality eludes words. She is remembering.
Remembering a caravan of migrants escaping poverty, discrimination and violence which includes her without question, though she says not a word; remembering an eclipse of the Moon which is everywhen; remembering an awareness of being a man in a woman’s body, issuing deep laughter in response to the antics of strange people in the colours of the rainbow at the back of a bus. Given a knife by a lovely woman in a man’s body, she remembers how to kill, though the man in uniform is strangely unable to provoke a memory of anger or hostility.
Kumar (not his real name) finishes the last take, and director Lenny (not his real name) says he is in love with it. Kumar “has mastered the physical and mental techniques for a convincing portrayal of death”. For the thirty seconds the camera was exploring his primeval face, time after time until after 9pm, he was banishing nagging thoughts, that the remembered had forgotten him, that he might only exist in unremembered form, and that warriors are doomed to love being forgotten.
Nonetheless, all went well, and it is time to go home and be remembered. Tomorrow is the day of the preliminary hearing of the charge against him of sexual assault of a minor on the set of his first movie fifteen years ago, one year to the day after his arrival. His devout Hinduism and the presumption of innocence notwithstanding, he would be the first to admit there are many things he would like to forget, when his time comes.
The Shadow is most often projected into delusion: such is migration. “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (Sartre, Huis Clos.) The movie in production has the working title, Death of a Border Guard, and the production house, wreathandstyle.org, in anticipation of no being universally construed as yes, has opened a Facebook page for us to post suggestions of what the old woman might be saying. It remains blank. It might not be the first time a Hollywood movie has starred an extra who walked in off the street, but the bloody #MeToo t-shirt was a first, and when did you ever hear of an extra melting back into obscurity without collecting her pay? #WhoIsShe is trending.
And me, I’m just a simple guy out of the audience listening to the voice of an hypnotist who has me staring at the sky. What will I forget? More than I’ve remembered, that’s for sure. Just like you, I have migrated into a village unable to raise a child. I’m sorry, did I remember you properly?
“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.
This is a transcript of the Country Talk program originally broadcast at 8 pm on Saturday 31 March 2018, presented by Joe Blow.
[Joe Blow:] Aboriginal evangelist Roundaway Camooweal has died in hospital overnight from head injuries sustained while attempting to intercede in a violent confrontation outside Trades Hall between members of the Bricklayers and Tilers Union and the Robotics Assembly and Maintenance Guild.
Mourners gathered outside Northcote Town Hall this evening thronging across High St with placards proclaiming “Emptiness Is Saved” and “Country Is Sovereign”, while inside, the Country Artisanry Awards presentation goes ahead as scheduled, following a Welcome to Country delivered by Witchetty Grub people from the Wurundjeri Land Council. In the absence of the patron of the awards, Aboriginal Petrichor Cokehurt, Professor of Comparative Astrology at Quinoa Curtain University, will conduct proceedings.
[Prof. Cokehurt:] It is gratifying to see so many people here in the aftermath of the horrific confrontation at Trades Hall yesterday, and I hope that this event may be repeated for so long as we hold Roundaway’s memory in our hearts. Tomorrow is Easter, I wish it were more widely known just how complicated that word is, but let us not conflate our tragic loss with archaic symbolism. Shall we simply look forward to the joy of watching little ones hunt for Easter eggs, keeping our thoughts about the true meaning of death and salvation to ourselves, as we have learned to internalise the seasonal contradictions Down Under of our imported ritual of springtime renewal?
Our patron initiated this celebration of artisanry which most emphatically reveals itself as a tradition voicing its own resurrection. The background of his project is not hard to grasp, although in this age of environmental alertness it can be hard to imagine the un-attuned culture our patron grew up in, saturated with personalities so separate from nature that death presented an annihilation disturbing enough to necessitate the advent of a messiah.
Roundaway was raised under the authoritarian guidance of magi who supervised the amputation of his intuition: forced to wear dresses to school, to learn to write with his left hand, and to speak in a language which few at school could understand and was too archaic to express any of the elements of his experience, he was routinely sequestered among elders who were mentally ill. While the girls in the street were able to communicate in a fashion by kicking balls around, the boys faced a constant struggle with indecipherable antagonism. The intimate caress of a magus was almost a relief.
Defined by the magi as a Capricorn, he suppressed his Sagittarian imagination as a tendency towards depression and a hindrance to ambition. He was initiated into what the magi called his true nature by some very gloomy people. He learned to mask himself as a philosopher and poet, even as he worked long hours as a delivery boy. Eventually his inner life was possessed by a priapic god, and the dysfunction of his early adulthood encompassed a search for meaning in the disposition of the body, an attempt to integrate Arthur Lingam and Martha Yoni.
And then he received his vision. Simply walking down a city street one day, still more or less a delivery boy, but now a clerk of courts in a suit, he was suddenly aware not only of images and objects as empty processes, but of the essential nature of images and objects as ingredients in empty relationships. God had taken off his dress, the illusion of form had taken shape, and passers-by were all walking backwards in time, upside down.
He stopped going to magus meetings, and his life fell apart, time and again. Other people couldn’t hold it together for long, try as they might to save their image of his Capricornia. One day he left his dilapidated land rover to wander in the bush and fell into a cave, from which he was rescued a month later, skin and bone and raving about self as the emptiness of country, and three principles: sovereignty as perpetual struggle with language; cruelty and suffering as the faces of boredom; and the sky as real from bottom up.
Many here tonight have heard his description of that experience, how the mouth of the cave yawned below him like the maw of a monstrous future, a fateful harvest of consequence coming at him like a freight train, and how wandering in the bowels of the earth led him to discover that people are all artisans, their identities created by the utility of what they fashion in obedience to the imperative of their craft, just like the processes of geology.
And so to our winners, the inhabitants of this sublime synchronicity, and with them the builders, architects, engineers and surveyors who helped put it in exactly the right place. Very nearly a perfect creation, but not quite. Should the residents care to observe the precisely full Moon due north in their location, they will be mesmerized by the arc of the Milky Way stretching miraculously from east to west, and let no astronomer or surveyor awake in the vicinity quibble about precision. Indeed, not only is no creation perfect, but no one creator is ever responsible. Add those who made it exactly the right time and place: the Moon, the Earth, its tilt, oceans and shores, the Sun and all the other stars. They all belong to our guild.
The runner-up is the precise moment of the transit of the galactic poles. The Moon and due north are too close to call: who knows where north is in the dark?
And at Uluru, who knows the precise moment of full Moon? It looks full all night, and there’s no doubt that the Moon is transiting in the same instant as the Galactic Poles! And what more fitting place for the Moon to highlight the Covenant of Crux at Easter to the awesome strains of the Kyrie! In a sense, Uluru fashioned itself through geological processes for this very event.
The girls in the packing room don’t miss much! Their award goes to a very distinguished entry indeed. Its depiction of the Moon’s conjunction with Porrima balances the confluences of the Zodiac and the Rivers of Hades on Christianity’s horizon at the stroke of its Easter Moon, thoroughly deserving the packing room accolade. Woe can be an occasion of defeat, but it can also ground us, in faith, in compassion. Forgetting can salve suffering, but moving on can condemn us to shame. Angles can anchor the projection of a map, but only as sovereign in a particular place at a particular time. It is not possible to formulate the combined experience of people on opposite sides of the Earth, walking with their feet pointing at each other, minds full of signs sticking out like pins into the cosmos.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘good’. Any parent who has sought an impression of their child’s day at school has grappled with the contentious primeval meaning of that first word. Whether you believe that Jesus was the son of God or not, civilisation is a creation of gods, as surely as a work of art is its own creation, and neither one is an end product of a cumulative evolution of rules. Corruption is the fruit on the tree of law. Only creation, the inhabitation of human hearts by the meaning of the word, has saved us until now. Both the victim and the possibility of routine evil which victimises exist in the realm abandoned by gods as surely as the coward punch that killed the patron was inhabited by the god of silence and perimeters, a totem of nihilism.
Here is the last work we want to show you, from the patron’s bottom drawer. A sign is coming on Tuesday, an alignment of bodies, matrices and angles which signifies a living breathing inhabitation of country by a dead man. What does it mean that the conjunction of Mars and Saturn occurs every two years? Clockwise in the South through the constellations, signs and houses? I don’t know. Do you? A punctuation mark in separated, meaningless lives, or something else?
I do know that Roundaway hoped to live until the triple conjunction with Mercury in the Constellation of Pisces in 2026. Will that event be authored by his desire? What does it mean that today’s ten-year-olds will see it when they’re eighteen?
[Joe Blow:] So there you have it: sovereignty or narcissism, polarities or contradictions, emptiness or meaninglessness, conscience or chaos? Thank you for listening. This is Joe Blow, signing off from Northcote Town Hall. Now it’s time for us all to don Easter Bunny costumes. But remember, it’s Autumn: no smiling until tomorrow.
"Know thyself.""The unexamined life is not worth living."'Neti Neti'."Smile and the world smiles with you; cry and you cry alone."
When the pilot light of your gas hot water blows out, it’s just a matter of relighting it and you’ll get hot water again. Its essence is its machinery. Animate things like us are not like that. There was a magnificent gum tree beside my access track whose roots were killed by the rising saltwater-table last year when conservationists across the river decided the mouth should stay blocked by the sand-bar a big storm had dumped. The local magpies still roost there, but it’s only the form of a tree: when hydraulics ceased, respiration and photosynthesis ceased permanently, and the essence of the tree vanished. The Moon exists in relation like a tree. When the time comes for a human being to pay it no mind, it still governs the tides. It’s a moot point whether it’s animate or a piece of machinery.
Your elders are still recovering from the rigours of your family reunion, still wondering exactly what role you expect them to play in your life. This Moon is in the lowest constellation of the Zodiac, in keeping with your elders’ wisest strategy. They’re getting on, aren’t they, these dotards you like to think of as at least having the potential, whatever the grievous harm they once had the power to inflict on you or your parents, to depart with dignity and grace, leaving the machinery running.
Indeed, when the Sun is in Sagittarius, and we are counting our blessings as we embrace a new year, the Moon is foreshadowing his goodbye. You will not peel your eyes to identify its background stars, I fear, but Gemini really is an evocative constellation. Upside down, the weirdly symmetrical twins could be conjoined in their coffin, immortalized in Forgetfulness. A veteran is complete unto himself. His symbol is the Twins. He is affirmed by his absent Other, like a hot water system bears witness to its extinguished pilot light. We are all veterans when we seek validation in social media from others who express our views, when we live variations on a theme. We speak in quotes to immortalize the mechanisms of repetition. You can find our reason on page 55 of a self-help book, word for word.
The inner light as boredom and idolatry; eternity, validation, pain and evanescence: musings of an old man. The impression the veteran nodding off makes on young people is of remembering. Isn’t life a journey consisting of things you do? No, the old man is in the trance which has nourished his whole existence, withdrawing from his formation in relation, yes, but now it’s come to everyday experiences like the generic chatter of great-grandchildren, the pattern of the carpet, the sensation of new-mown hay on the summer wind, the discomfiture of limbs. The dotard sings a flooded country. Each rendition has seemed like an utterly different song, but it is the same he has always remixed. His country exists in song, in any improvisation, so long as his feelings quiver like the machinery of a beyond.
Everyday reality is not serene enclosure like old age, but a kind of perpetual mental illness papered over by tolerance. To one who has been there, done that, it seems as an undeclared war between kindness and anger over who owns the bombed-out remnants of a post-Manichean essentialist world of a Good assembled out of contested rights.
Are there still Magi somewhere who can see in the transit of the Gemini Moon over Natal (sic) a promise of the return of a female Christ? This configuration of the Milky Way is the converse of the sky which heralds Australian initiation among its First Peoples. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. I have created two hemispheres.
What really happened to the Magi? They were veterans of a war between Good and Evil, and whatever the sign was they followed it was as the twittering of birds to most contemporaries. Historical change transpired in its own way, long after their deaths, but what of freedom versus predestination? How goes the war between grace and anger? Did Jesus help? Is his song still heard? Where to find the guiding star? Is Jesus more than an empty desk in one of the skyscrapers that paint the night sky grey?
The young ex-Muslim atheist still asks all the wrong questions, the vestiges of his upbringing by Allah: Why are we here? How can it be that we are so perfect? What is death? Why? The secular humanist also asks these questions, but history cannot validate what it has forgotten. What is the Eastern Wall? What are its mathematics?
For two weeks, wading across the Styx, then through the attenuated constellations of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces and Aries, the Veteran tried to answer such questions on the side of language, society and organised religion. Rioting broke out in Melbourne and society enslaved by freedom harboured a quasi-religious sociopath who drove through scores of citizens crossing the street. For the next two weeks, the Veteran will cross the Anima, and once again the River of Woe, searching in vain within for answers like kindness, submission, lust and love, healing and yoga.
The Lunar Mansions are the same, but the occupants now covet their personalities, like their friendships and their youth, behind curtains of beads in the hallway. The streets are the same, but the short-cuts, always a left then a right, have been barricaded by bollards, negotiable only by pedestrians and cyclists, chattering like cockatoos in a foreign language.
Only here, staring at the carpet of what remains of his country, glistening with oblivion, are the Veteran’s answers to be found, unravelled and not in the slightest mystifying. Veterans don’t live in the past, they did. And so Christmas will end with a most emphatic epiphany below a wall.
The Full Moon over Australia is in the Ninth House. In the daily cycle of the madness of materialistic existence, that puts it in the Bardo of deprivation. East Asia ‘sees’ it in relationship, India aggression, the Middle East self-improvement, Europe and Africa fear, Western Africa and the Atlantic relativity, Eastern South America paranoia, Western South America and Eastern USA discrimination, Western USA perfection, and the Pacific East to West seriousness, ignorance and boredom. If that means nothing else, it indicates that at least the Earth is still alive.
Scavengers are very smart birds, the vagabond says to himself, noticing an anomalous crow on the beach. A different kind of smart from migratory birds. He remembers a science bulletin years ago which described how some scavenger species was herding migrating birds to their death among North American skyscrapers. How would you know that, he muses, remembering the spectacle of seagulls in the updraft of the incandescent spire of the Melbourne Arts Centre wheeling in turn to swoop on insects with the studied delight of dancers. Nobody else had believed that. And the London crow, or raven or whatever, which dropped nuts onto a pedestrian crossing for the traffic to crush, and then hopped out to retrieve them when the light turned red. And the Perth restaurant which put its sumptuous garbage bins in a peculiar place only he knew, from tracking compactor trucks.
Just one thing, he rehearses, sloshing in a sudden flat phosphorescent sigh. It may be my only opportunity to say, that ‘being there’ means only to be attentive; ‘being there for someone’ does not mean to feel compassion, or help someone to deal with their problems, but to attend to someone, to enjoy someone. That alone is ‘presence’ and ‘loving-kindness’. I know I should keep my trap shut, he mutters, but it feels like something which has never been said, the ancestor of common-sense, the moist soil of a Garden of Eden … and another thing …
We’re all vagabonds, in our pursuit of a journey of indeterminate duration and destination. This is especially so for those knights errant who pursue love, or good, or truth. The destination is never reached. Evasion of someone else’s idea of these gives us direction, but brings us no closer to ours. And what happens when there is nobody left to evade? One by one our accusers face the gallows.
What is a vagabond doing on Eighty Mile Beach near midnight? Easy to imagine how he got there: dysfunction, rejection, confusion, rectitude, dissociation, addiction. But where on Earth is he heading? Towards Broome it appears, where–unless I’m mistaken–he started school in 1954. But he’s gazing lugubriously at the Moon, which is headed over the Indian Ocean, the other way. Familiar with the night sky from decades of sleeping out and a thousand municipal libraries, he may be walking towards a particular star, which might explain his continual veering towards the ocean, or is he drunk? We’ll never know; neither will the crow.
Perhaps he is headed beyond Broome, to the person gazing at the Moon in his direction right now, thinking of him. Thinking what, I wonder, and is she the person he thinks she is? Dulcinea or Aldonza? An acquaintance’s deserted wife, a schooldays friend, distant family? Haughty teenager promised to the elder he met in gaol who died there of an overdose on her Facebook? His own clever daughter perhaps, willing his connection to mean something? How does he want to be remembered? she might wonder, and well might she, with the most inane question in all of Errantry!
He battled with the Dumbledors, the Hummerhorns, and Honeybees, and won the Golden Honeycomb, and running home on sunny seas, in ship of leaves and gossamer, with blossom for a canopy, he sat and sang, and furbished up, and burnished up his panoply. (Tolkien)
I am haunted by a story written by my father about the Eighty Mile Beach, or rather a man stranded in its sandhills in the pitch dark. My memory has attributed to it the most evocative description I have ever read of the three- or four-dimensional experience of the galaxy in a dark sky, where you can see the vast distances of the solar system with the naked eye, and looking up feels like falling. This was my projection, dispelled by recent rereading: Dad’s character couldn’t see even his body, so lay down and slept until light, as though the stars weren’t there. But my Dad loved the Kimberleys, worked there during my early schooling–a daguerreotype experience of post-colonialism before its infiltration by the concept of ‘self as other’–and as he was dying completed the self-publication of a novel about “black and white love in the Kimberleys”, The Binding Chain. I am still wandering on his beach.
And so is the vagabond I guess, while his eponymous namesake heads out to sea, but I seem to have lost him, and can only see where moonlight slicks upon the heavy fluttering of a large black bird on a mound a long way up the beach.
The Moon, together with the voices of our ancestors in the self we call the world, is doubtless the harbinger of the god who dies and is reborn. Certainly the Vagabond will return tomorrow night and, possibly beyond the lifespan of humanity, repeat the sequence every year: recite a pagan god’s name backwards, S-E-R-A-T-N-A, outsmart seven sisters, quit the manger-cave of the Bull and Aldebaran (the archangel Michael), bathe in the sacred hormones of Saiph, cross the Lethe, sashay in a tutu onto a midsummer night’s dream, wake up in the mind, invent an astrology. It does seem strange that some people can’t love him until they turn him into a woman, but there you are.
Grandchildren, if you come to vacation at the Eighty Mile Beach Luxury Eco Resort, taking advantage of the pre-Christmas off-season rates, make the most of the floodlit sky of the social beach-volleyball, for you’ll soon be migrated to an eighty-storey condominium in Hobart. Broome and Halls Creek will be ghost-towns, and the saga of Eighty Mile Beach will be the improbable tale of a couple of old men, of a woman in the Moon never there, and a soliloquy interrupted, always wrong, long-elided.
Funny how the Full Moon transits in the middle of the night, huh? Funny that the middle of the night is rarely midnight. Funny how the Bull looks like a real bull, and Michael his eye. Funny that Papa talked about such things as though he had actually seen them. Funny about the Seven Sisters and how they had to be tricked into sharing …
There is no doubt in my mind that one of the great contributions to philosophy in the twentieth century was I and Thou, by Martin Buber. There is no ‘I’ existing in and by itself, Buber says, only an ‘I’ which stands in relation in either of two pairings: I-Thou and I-It (or I-He/She). The Vertex reminds me that my love-image, my attachment style and the success of my intimate relationships all hinge on my capacity to experience my self in relation, to recognize what I am projecting, and also to enjoy myself as a beloved.
Some totalitarian tweeted the other day his faith that same-sex marriage would be embraced by Australian society, and this would be a repudiation of the ‘concept of the other’. One of us is out of step, and it could be me. This is an ‘I-It’ attitude. Australia has embraced same-sex marriage, and this might be interpreted as the consolidation of an Australian identity, a swelling of the ranks of a majority who see eye-to-eye. It might also be interpreted as a recognition and celebration of difference, that we love, and share our ‘country’, our personal space, with the Other, as the ‘I’ in ‘I-Thou’. I for one realize that inclusion does not confer identity when it is an act of love, and exclusion and inequality do not imply enmity and ought not be used as weapons by totalitarians to inflame it.
Astrology does not have clean hands when it comes to the totalitarian claims of identity politics. Object-permanence may be an essential intuition in early childhood development and an important element in a sense of self, but experience should lead us to the understanding that only the past and other objects can carry our desire for fixed meanings. No person or thing can properly be understood as enduring in time or occupying unambiguous space. I cannot hate you for not understanding me, or sharing my culture and its beliefs. How could I, when I am not the same person two days in a row?
I have not worked on the Vertex to enshrine it in the pantheon of formative influences, but to connect my hormones to my concepts, to empty both of fixed definition, and to broaden the internal debate about what personality entails by enhancing my focus on what I and the Other may be projecting. I must admit, I am drawn to the ambiguity of its offence, and its compartmental categories of latitude are irresistibly mischievous.
The Anti-Vertex is the elephant in the room.
The Ecliptic is fixed on the equatorial grid, which makes it easy to predict and time its movement. The tropical location generating the chart above sees the Zodiac passing directly overhead and high and low in both hemispheres, and I am definitely envious of the spectacle. However, it is totally unempirical speculation on my part to relate the symbols of our deepest affections to the altitude of the Ecliptic. The worship, not to say the fetishization, of eternity and permanence could not be imagined as a localized phenomenon, could it? Would not such a suggestion be an invitation to outmoded concepts like the ‘noble savage’ and ‘the Other’?
This little corner of the USA could not possibly offer emotional or daemonic experience unavailable in the rest of the country! I am really more interested in the movement of that red line than in real estate values, but what if resistance to culturalist pieties found itself drawn to enclaves further and further from the pernicious influence of a Vertex of conformity, even as the pietist preachers of victimhood were succumbing to the transference of exotic love-objects from sub-tropical climes?
How would you react if around 2020 you started to become aware of strange new yearnings unsatisfied by good old-fashioned marriage, self-improvement and illicit sex? Instead of idealizing youth, you began to hanker after a winged angel on your marble sarcophagus? Or instead of people being turned away by your cynical intellectualized dismissal of spiritual life, they began in droves to revere you as a messenger from another dimension, taking holy orders and even their own lives to be with you in eternity?
Computing the exact latitude of date of the Vertex in the realm of Eternity demands seven decimal places, or 11 millimetres at the red line, to minimize its duration to less than 2 seconds, so if you’re right on it, stay put. Its rate of migration is 16,000 millimetres p.a. and its disconcerting wingbeats will pass over and be gone in 4 hours. Besides, the maximum sub-conscious reach of the Vertex for antipodean day-dreamers is the Gemini Winter Solstice (tropical Cancer), where it coincides with our Lethe Crossing and ‘Forgetting’ is the universe’s middle name. In the North, Eternity coincides with the Sagittarius (Capricorn) Solstice at the woeful heart of our galaxy, and you must continue to drown deprivation as is your winter wont.
The chart above locates the Vertex above Marcoola Beach, but in the very same moment (03:35 Eastern European Time) it is in the Fourth House above the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III in Luxor, which is still forgetting at the Lethe an entry to the underworld 3,172 years later.
He was assassinated by a wife.
Roughly 4 hours later over Marcoola–woeful Luxor Eternity was roughly 8 hours ago: Eternity comes first–Permanence is a little more worrisome than Eternity, because of its tantalizing visibility, that is, it lurks in the House of Reputation, where consciousness is ever doing mortal combat with wokeness, and the next-door House of Attachment sublimates fear. Can you believe that enlightenment has been struggling with inherent properties for thousands of years, yet books purporting to contain the Word of God still top the bestseller list? Be mindful of the possibility that while you were deconstructing everything, your children were finding parasitism in the entrails of relativity and deprivation a most undesirable lifestyle. And note that in the Southern Hemisphere it is Cassiopeia, not Crux, in the First House. Don’t be surprised if your children convert to Islam because you’re just not permanent enough.
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