December Moon in Taurus: the Vagabond

12 Thursday Dec 2019

Tags

Acheron, Ceremony, Country, Forgetting, Justfriendistan, Lethe, Memory, Miserere, Rejection, Taurus, Vagabond, Wanderer, Warrior

“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?

New Moon in Scorpius: Doubt!

26 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Breamlea Zodiac, Cardinal Directions, Climate Change, Country, Forgetting, Gate of God, Gate of Man, Scorpius New Moon, Vagabond Moon, Woe

Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
„Ich schlief, ich schlief—,
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—
Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
Tief ist ihr Weh—,
Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit
will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!“

O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
“I was asleep—
From a deep dream I woke and swear:—
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity.” Zarathustra’s Roundelay, Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra.

This, believe it or not, is no laughing matter. Homo sapiens sapiens has assumed responsibility for the weather. It had to happen. At least 50 kya they anticipated night sky configurations of the Milky Way Galaxy conducive to initiatory ceremonies—or did they?—and buried their dead in the Underworld. At least 5 kya their familiarity with the seasons was able to relate Sun position, seasons and phases of the Moon. At least 500 ya they were able to time their affairs independently of the weather or Sun and Moon position; in fact Sun and Moon were forced to obey their mathematical formulae. Now anyone who doubts the power of Homo sapiens sapiens to bend inevitable change to static comfort parameters is called ‘denialist’ and ostracized. Is it any wonder that the birds on the wire cock one eye at Homo sapiens sapiens as it hurtles past on its ‘freeways’ towards its occupation of creating eternal life for its celebrated traders of inequality and elite rapists of country and planet?

However, doubt is not on the calendar because of climate change and the questionable benefits of capitalism and its derivative, consumerism. No, doubt enters the equation at this time of the Homo sapiens sapiens year because the Sun has already entered the great River of Woe, the Acheron, and nobody, least of all the celebrants of whichever solstice it might be, or the children who must learn real gratitude for whatever disappointment a guy in a red suit and false beard leaves them before he disappears into whatever parents do during the day, has ever been confident, notwithstanding the living testament of 2,500 generations of ancestral stars, that beyond its other bank is not death, species death, heat death, or a merely temporary annuity paid by the actuaries of finitude. The opposite of woe is not happiness, but forgetting, because woe is not unhappiness, but the rational apprehension of finitude in eternity, or in time itself and nothingness, which come and go in quantum micro- and macro-transparencies, the experience of which is the very definition of country, and for that matter, Homo sapiens sapiens itself.

Sidereal zodiacs are personal things. Various of those divided into twelve equal parts place their boundaries where they coincided with the seasons at some time in the past, or originating at Spica, or at intervals placing important stars in the middle of their Constellations. My zodiac, the so-called Breamlea Zodiac, conforms to three basic rules: boundaries wherever possible must accord with observation; boundaries must to all intents and purposes be defined in a static frame of reference; and boundaries must follow lines of Right Ascension, so that alignments of constellations and stars beyond the zodiac fan out from the Celestial Equator anchored by observation’s left and right, square to the meridian. Accordingly, Iota 1 Scorpii is the hinge of my zodiac—it moves 0.00026° south along its hour circle every 100 years, in galactic coordinates about 13 arcseconds in longitude and 7 arcseconds in latitude in 2000 years—at 0° Sgr, and “Yabby” is the easternmost bright star of one of the sky’s most dramatic and familiar asterisms.

Everything in the sky moves, hourly, daily and yearly, Sun and planets, stars and galaxies. Unlike equinoxes, solstices and ayanamsas, and the inclination of Earth’s Equator to the plane of the Milky Way, the intersections of Ecliptic and Galactic Equator have barely moved in the celestial background of the Zodiac throughout recorded time, so the Milky Way naturally presents another static frame of reference. Woe, the Gate of God, and Forgetting, the Gate of Man, are powerful pivots of sidereal astrology, where Moon and planets cross the great river of stars which still, in dark skies, wheels overhead as awesomely as it has done for as long as there have been eyes to see it, and independently of comparatively rapid seasonal and climatic change. Seasons and their Signs move across the heavens; constellations and other asterisms mill around in situ.

I live just down the road from Wurdi Youang. I discovered country 5000 years ago, when the angle between galactic poles and me was 90°, and I marvelled at the ‘me’ my ancestors were showing me as they assembled in a straight line over my head, inviting me to stretch one arm to one end and the the other to the opposite end, and not only was the Emu standing in my skin and language speaking where it always has on my west side, but straight in front of me where I clapped was the noon hour, the law, everything, including me, as it just is and always was across the laval plain east of the Anakies and south of The Divide, and I knew that directly behind me was a circlet of thousands of years of clockwise-cycling song and dance and ceremony, casting upon the law a shadow of eternal joy.

Something about you tells me we knew each other! You don’t remember either? Well, isn’t that just the way it goes? Perhaps we were lovers, and walked together, or shared a fire, a creation story or a common ancestor. Perhaps, on different sides of a world, we caused the same calamity, or escaped it. Regardless, I believe I admired you, and I bear you and your ignorance of my grave no ill will, as I have no intention to tend yours. Is that true, or is it just another leaf of the Elm I have forgotten?

Demented Moon in Sidereal Aries

12 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Ancestry, Aries Moon, BPD, Climate Change, Covenant, Dementia, False Dreams, Forgetting, Iconoclasm, Initiation, Kyrie, Lethe, Matriarchy, Milky Way, Miserere, Peasant, Sharing, Vagabond

I would like to say I remember every face which has ever presented itself to me, but I can’t. I very much fear that there is no longer a man in the Moon, and sometimes I wonder if there ever was. I know that I am, and where I am—I know your retina like the back of my hand—but I no longer seem to remember when I was here last or what I was feeling. I am in less of a rush to watch Lethe’s ablutions, and less susceptible to Aldebaran’s eye, as though I have forever already passed through the Gate of Man, or the waters of Lethe permanently cling to me now, in a Labyrinth of Forgetting haunted by the Minotaur of who I once was.

I know I once flaunted myself over the trenches of Flanders, and confusing what is deep in the heart with what is in the sky is as old as time, but whereas I have hosted human technology and confidence you could achieve anything, more than half the world has lost faith in everything, including that, and the rest are sampling a delectation of priceless baubles, even while they decry the manufacture of their satisfaction beyond the event horizon of the seventies, when developed countries allayed their panic about pollution by creating mountains of waste someone else could get filthy and sick transforming. ‘Progress’ had a different meaning in those days. Now it means a race by the poor for world domination, or giving up the technology of climate creation and planetary mining to lie down in a submissive but guilt-relieved ditch of abnegation.

How long ago was it that your ancestors could hold you accountable by disappearing over the horizon and leaving you to your ’emotional intelligence’, your faithless disobedience? In the oldest continuous culture on Earth, among Australia’s first immigrants, it looked like this.

But in the politics of resistance to patriarchal aggression the ancestors always reappeared in the East to applaud the resilience of women, and dare I say, non-binary men? Women who rise from their beds early in the Spring and retire late in Summer are confirmed in worshipping nothing but their own sensibility: it is all going to be just fine.

In the Northern Hemisphere it has always been a different story, and what other explanation do you need for the despoliation of the planet and the exploitation by miners and slavers of Southern Hemisphere equanimity? When they align themselves across the eastern sky, arcing like ancient wisdom between the cardinal directions of South and North, it is as gods within that the ancestors first return in Northern skies. It is at the Gate of God, when the nebulosity at the centre of the galaxy in the southwest leaves its spoor directly overhead, that boys cross into manhood in the hungry dawns of Spring and the proud evenings of Summer’s disappearance. The matriarchy of Southern latitudes is a mythical lost paradise. Seventeen hours or eight months later, the ancestors retire under the blankets above post-industrial Western welfare-states, where the masculinity-challenged may dream of healing, presence, collective rights and a day of reckoning.

Yes, the burqa and niqab are written in the stars, but now that nobody who looks can see, I am lost. I cannot read your heart any more. Your thought seems more like borderline personality disorder than soul, and that begins to seem as though we are no longer looking at each other with the same capacity to share that a bird on a wire has regarding the cars on the freeway, if only the drivers would stop, and let the children get out, to walk under the wire.

Is it time to be a Peasant or a Vagabond? Aggressive or insecure? Independent or withdrawn? I don’t know, and it is rather urgent we put our heads together, because next May, the Northern Ascending Node (Southern Descending Node) precesses to the Lethe. If I don’t find myself, neither will you, but unlike yours, my forgetting might be eternal. “What am I here[-]after?” we may well ask. The answer is just around the corner I turned yesterday, as you would realize, not having turned it.

Community: New Moon in Sidereal Virgo

28 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Climate Change, Community, Deep Time, Forgetting, Iconoclast, Idolater, New Moon, Progress, Salvation, Underworld, Virgo, Woe

“I saw a hole in the Man, deep like a hunger he will never fill. It is what makes him sad and what makes him want. He will go on taking and taking, until one day the World will say, ‘I am no more and I have nothing left to give.'” Apocalypto, Mel Gibson, 2006.

“We will never forgive you!” Greta Thunberg.

We believe in progress, don’t we? How quaint. Of course, it is the human spirit, universal mind, which progresses, not capitalism, materialism or technology. The ‘world’ may be going to climatic hell in a handbasket unless it becomes a ‘community’ sustaining our habitats rather than exploiting them. But how inclusive is the ‘we’ listening to Greta? If ‘we’ belong to ‘the broader community’, it is either with a subconscious, bodily sense of belonging to a universal family with a common ancestor who had neither eyes nor sex, or by virtue of a religious belief in salvation, an egoistic faith that we will leave the world, no less, a better place when we go, by engaging in a lifelong addiction to the mental illness of self-improvement. What it is that mental illness saves us from lurks in the underworld and is unspecified. Death? Climate change? Ridicule? Ostracism? Other people? Until push comes to shove, we all agree that the reason we are here is to participate in human flourishing, and we do so participate, and yet our judgment that our neighbour’s progress is not fast or far enough casts doubt on the whole project, whether we crossed the Atlantic under sail or by Concorde. After all, ‘Flourishing’ is every weed’s middle name, is it not?

«If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there, is there any sound?»

«My dear fellow, you don’t need to tell me. It is obvious from your agonized cycles of inspiration and disillusionment that you see your mission as bringing the world together. You may well be able to represent unperceived existence or the sound of one hand clapping, but a less flattering mirror might reflect just another snake-oil salesman peddling to binary extremists the myth of community.»

«How you enjoy being unkind when you enter the Southern Hemisphere! I don’t blame you for the seasons, so don’t blame me for antipathy and self-doubt. You have seen as well as I the erosion and disappearance on Earth of tradition, the replacement of integrity by diversity and the surrender of autonomy and sovereignty to specialists and experts. Alas, gone are the days when I could fill a lover’s heart. Romantic love has become an elitist joke, and emotional intelligence has demoted affinity to habit.»

«Yes, I have seen. Very few people are aware of you these days, and the reverence I once enjoyed has also disappeared. But as an ebb scrambling in stones is woven by the ocean, human knowledge holds but a candle to me, and the immensity of the darkness of our four-billion year invisibility is framed by eyes which have forgotten the miracle of light. Not a day goes past without a media reference to community as a thing, however community is no more than a momentary ebb of galactic time you land in as a child and believe to be whole and timeless until you experience and understand its delusions, conflicts and grievances as your life’s work.»

«We’re all in this together. This Spring month is the hardest one, when emotions emerging from hibernation are dragged screaming behind overriding evolutionary imperatives. The spectre of a life less ordinary stirs in our hormones in Spring. Winter’s day of reckoning has arrived. Perhaps climate change is only one face of the programmable futility of loving and being loved. Was this era ordained in the evolution of the eye? You never know, the headlines might one day read, “President of Earth Distracted During Her Election Campaign Interview by the Miracle of Being Alive.”»

«We are indeed in this together. I am already halfway through my life: nothing stays the same forever. Howsoever the community wills itself to be enslaved, by Instagram influencers, law courts and other despots, parliaments, corporations, mainstream media or gurus, it doesn’t matter in the end. Earth seems to be divided between those who think life is too tough, and those who think they are just tough enough. For those with eyes to see, twas ever thus: see the other first in order to grab a meal, or become someone else’s. I wonder in which sector of the Milky Way “Soul”, humanity’s death star (there’s no ‘u’ in ‘Sol’), will settle, and who or what will ever see it, and where. Are your ancestors concentrated in one or the other, Woe or Forgetting? Does your family have a plot? Is there a high premium? Or do you look up, and out, and beyond, and just trust? Or not look?»

Responsibility: New Moon in Sidereal Gemini

03 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Eclipse, Forgetting, Freedom, Gemini New Moon, June Solstice, Responsibility

“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.

Full Moon in Sidereal Scorpio #2 of 2019: The Zealot

17 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Advance Australia Fair, Dasein, Forgetting, Gate of God, Gate of Man, Jupiter at Opposition, Lethe, Milky Way, Underworld, Woe, Zealot Moon

“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!

The Migrant: Full Moon in Sidereal Cancer

21 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Cancer Moon, Death, Forgetting, Frivolity, January Eclipse, Lilith, Migration, Morning Star, Super BLood Wolf Moon, Underworld, Wanderer, Warrior, Woe

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?

Doubt: New Moon in Scorpius

07 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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December New Moon, Doubt, Ego, Forgetting, Galactic Plane, Identity, Scorpius New Moon, Woe

“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.

Astrologer Moon Anti-Vertex Forgetting Budgewoi Point Underworld Dec22

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.

Artisan Moon in Virgo

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Artisan Moon, Artisanry 2018 Awards, Country, Covenant, Easter Moon, Forgetting, Kyrie, Mars Conjunct Saturn, New Zealand Night Sky, Uluru, Woe

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?

Mars-Saturn Maffra Apr03

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.

Veteran Moon in Gemini

02 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Bardo, Country, Dasein 2018, Epiphany, Essence, Forgetting, Gemini Moon, Magi, Natal, Veteran

"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.

Dasein 2018 [Download]

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.

Veteran Moon Natal Jan01

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?

Veteran Moon Iconoclast Breamlea Jan02

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.

Veteran Twelfth Night Iconoclasm Bethlehem Jan06

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.

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

~ Turning astrology the right way up…

Tag Archives: Forgetting

December Moon in Taurus: the Vagabond

New Moon in Scorpius: Doubt!

Community: New Moon in Sidereal Virgo

Responsibility: New Moon in Sidereal Gemini

Full Moon in Sidereal Scorpio #2 of 2019: The Zealot

The Migrant: Full Moon in Sidereal Cancer

Doubt: New Moon in Scorpius

Artisan Moon in Virgo

Veteran Moon in Gemini