The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Shakespeare, Fidele’s Dirge.
The Autumn horoscopes of Virgo personalities devoured by Southern Hemisphere commuters born in Spring are beyond rational understanding, but there is no stronger influence on human behaviour than confirmation bias, and I am not butting my head against it. So let it stand for the moment that this year the first Moon of Northern Hemisphere Spring, pivotal in the lives of Christian believers, is born in the Sign of Pisces and culminates immediately before Easter in the Sign of Libra. It has remained a convention among European invaders of the South for 500 years. The fact remains that the astrological romance of each Moon’s journey from inspiration to realization is complicated by the journey of the Sun: the first realization of the Full Moon as it dramatises its Opposition is that the Sun has moved on, and navigation is ambiguous in the shoals of memory, as any expatriate visiting ‘home’ will attest. Convention is not mere habit, but the fabrication of a new chapter in the same story, a contest of intuition and language, memory and awareness, success and defeat. One person’s affluence is another’s deprivation. One person’s ritual self-discovery is another’s defilement. Convention is a truce.
But can the truce hold? When the Moon elected to worship the Sun Goddess as a man, he neglected the resilience of convention, and must now admit some culpability for a worldwide resentment among women towards his mansplaining. He meant to portray himself as subordinate to the coordinating power of female creativity, but deep in the brainstem from whence he drew his interpretations of gender there did lurk an urge to power. The ambiguity of his reflected outshining was tainted by denial that he was underplaying a primeval contest, and that he might represent just another patriarch with 27 concubines. Was there not a caricature of triumph in the metaphor of dragging Goddesses by the hair out of their Underworld hill caves to worship his worship? Even if all experience is the crocodile speaking, relationship is a more serious issue than this.
One person’s instinct is another’s reason. As previously explored, the alignment of the ancestors in a straight line passing directly overhead has two configurations: one associated by indigenous custom with the mystery of male initiation, and the other labelled idiosyncratically as the Wanderer, a possible celebration of gender difference locked into the progressive possibilities of iconoclasm emerging from the Underworld River of Lethe. Perhaps this moment, visible in complete darkness in the first quarter of the year, might be the birth of a New Moon with a difference, deriving his trajectory not from Goddess worship, but from self-worship among the ambiguous roots of identity in the somatic soup of retrospection.
Thus might the Moon be relegated to the ranks of those who dangerously deal their own cards, resentment and victimization be revealed as premeditated, and interpretation of selfhood dare to contradict convention. Meanwhile, he seems in the South to have fallen right way up out of the frying-pan of Pisces into the fire of Virgo.
What it all boils down to is, in attempting to give personality to the Moon, I have landed him with the same problem we persons all have to deal with: how to get inside another’s mind, indeed how to get inside our own without an objective system of meanings such as astrology which infers that another can get in there.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan’s prescient lines, you were kidding me, you weren’t really from the farm, and I told you later as you tore out my eyes, that I never really meant to do you any harm. Perhaps we must leave it at that. Own your conventions and their ancestral languages, and let no Goddess need recourse to claims of being framed, or farmed. And yes, rejoice in any unconventional primal resurgence of the cardinal directions, especially their upsidedown-ness, and let us hope that our subscription to their metacortical experience does not inadvertently expire.
“After all, what is identity but the slow, lifelong accretion of gazes: us looking at ourselves being looked at by others? What we see is, largely, what they see, or what we think they see. And when they turn away, when we become unseen, in a way we cease to be.” Elitsa Dermendzhiyska.
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.” Hamlet, III, i.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, IV, §146, trans. Helen Zimmern.
That the Sun is in the Constellation Gemini, the Northern Sign Cancer and the Southern Sign Capricorn is of interest, but not arrestingly so. Nor is it of vital concern whether the primal force of earthly existence is female or male—we choose whichever we like—although it has amused us to plot the rhythm of the Moon’s phases as locked in a striving to escape a primordial envy of female power. It is the dynamism of Opposition which now resonates with the strongest signal, not only because the Signs and genders of Sun and Moon are interchangeable at Opposition, but because of the influence we have imputed to the Milky Way and the crossing of its rivers of the Underworld.
From the Lethe we dry off our responsibility; from responsibility we clothe care; care gives rise to anxiety; from anxiety comes being-toward-death in the effort to maintain buoyancy, the meaning of who we might be, as we flail across the Acheron to do quixotic battle with the denial of authenticity. And this drama is projected into the heavens above and below. Yes, we are made of water; yes, we go to water. The Full Moon of Sagittarius is hidden in the sack of the Sun and Earth in Gemini as a sublimated knot of anger and hurt, a recurrent nightmare, a hard-wired secret, an unexpiated unkindness, a solvent of lust and revenge: the germinating seed of an Elm rattling to be festooned with False Dreams at the gates of Utopia.
Do you identify with Gemini for some reason? Have you ever been recognized as a ‘Gemini’? Do you in fact resemble it? Or have you never seen it? It is visible in the night sky between its heliacal rising in September and setting in May, at the nightfall meridian in March. And it really does look like a pair of twins, or two buddies of either gender or both, or two sides of the same coin, Sun and Moon, North and South, like being a self, and knowing the law, daring and caution, day and night, anima and animus.
Validation, the ghost which haunts the faces of yesterday’s somebodies, reverberates like the reflected reflection of the existential enquiry, ‘What happened?’ You may well have accustomed yourself to the belief that you surpassed your parents, but you know that the back of your head indicates that you need a haircut, and has not surpassed the emperor’s or the prophet’s. Is it possible that lighting merely shaded your followers, your students, even your children? And does the improbably grotesque approbation of the satyr, somewhere between the comic and the tragic, emulate Gemini’s humanity, or merely notch the animal shaft it saves for perfection?
“I don’t purport to speak for every single person, but ‘living non-binary’, for me, will always feel more authentic than ‘identifying as non-binary’.” Adolfo Aranjuez, “Quest and Queerness”, Meanjin Quarterly, Autumn 2019.
“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 8:7.17.
‘Civilization!’ was God’s inevitable reply to ‘Death!’. Abliq.
The first sign of the Northern Hemisphere Zodiac is like a tree in a wood you can only pick out from the air. It definitely has an identity, but what does that mean to the hiker who can only see the wood? The Northward Equinox, known to navigators as the First Point of Aries, is this year a shrinking 8.1° E along the Ecliptic from the westerly IAU boundary of Pisces, and today’s syzygy occurs 44.2° from the Equinox (roughly 44 days), and therefore 14.2° into the Northern Tropical Sign of Taurus, but obviously not the Bull we see, which was still visible last night on the western horizon an hour after sunset. So in the North you have a brace of fish smelling like a ram, followed by a restive ram chewing his cud. In the South, on the assumption Northern seasons can be simply turned upside-down, we have a haggling over the fish on the scales, followed by a ram trying to temper his assertiveness to mask a scorpion’s aggression.
Whether you use identity to attack or defend, or like Southern Hemisphere Astrology mystify it to undermine it at every turn, we must all deal with it, because no matter how desirable adaptability to change and equanimity in ambiguity may seem, definition and discrimination are here to stay. Most people couldn’t produce a line drawing to save themselves, but everybody can colour in. Walls, as for example in Zodiac divisions, are what humans are made of. Look at the great tide of humanity spilling over historical borders across the planet: what does it encounter, and what does it bring in the flood? Exclusion! Identity! Do the Southern Signs of an English night portend integration, in the way Northern Signs purported to in colonial times?
Every decision we make, every unconscious choice, every like on social media, is recorded in the folk story of our lives. Whether we like it or not, the author of that story is not us, and gravitating towards the most flattering opinion is not a journey. It’s just another wall, and every brick is delivered by a truck from Opportunism Quarry. (Yes, ‘quarry’ does mean prey.) Has your life been a journey, in some other sense? When did you begin it, may I ask, and what will you do when you reach your destination? Become a star, a string of code, a ‘desert’ island?
On the other hand, take as a given that something which has happened once is much more likely to happen again. Doesn’t this mean an eventual capitulation to plot, a reduction of creativity to fame for stuff done before by the forgotten, and a disincentive to push off from the oasis where all the acts eventually appear? Where are you going to find the impetus for a new chapter in your story about waiting here? How can life be a journey which doesn’t begin, a join-the-dots and colour-in boredom exercise bequeathed to us as four-year-olds?
Perhaps the destination is all there is, and every chapter we insert is an opportune postponement? Perhaps we are hurtling in the direction of Vega clutching a Book written backwards, and there is a nice, Home Counties explanation for the existence of a community of expatriate Chagossians in the south of England. A tree roots itself in the earth but grows out of the air, just like the Underworld. It ceases to defend itself with poison, thorn and madness when it discovers its nurture in the purpose of its material enemy to eat, sleep and be happy. Yes, the birds nesting in the tree and gobbling the nectar of its flowers are quite right to say, this is mine, as we are, warming our hands over the blaze of its timber. Meaning is opportune.
Opportunism is your colonial guarantee of being valued for what others can get out of you. Yes, ‘dependent arising‘ applies to identity, too, and to the human rights of the inhabitants sent packing when the British and American invasion of the Southern Hemisphere was cosily negotiated. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile” (Article 9), indeed. It also applies to any likelihood of a United Nations recognition of the rights to self-determination of the Papuan indigenous people of Irian Jaya, but the opportunism of goldminers and their lawyers, skilled in the rights enshrined in Indonesian law, is another story. You get that in the Southern Hemisphere when the Moon is eclipsed by the Sun in the Constellation Aries!
What is the truth? Walls or holes? Where does the future come from? Does its logic determine or emerge? Will minorities forever fight to reduce each other’s figure to ground, or will socialism succeed where it has hitherto failed, to stamp humanity with a common weal? Will believers with arms uplifted in benediction forever bare their pockets to petty theft? Where on Earth does terrorism fit in? In what inhabitation of meaningless identity is the slaughter of children opportune? In what abdication of meaning does reified identity cringe behind, ‘The Christians have it coming’? If you leave your Hell in a worse state than you found it in, you may find your virgins wearing a similar disguise to your god, and Heaven may prove to be your absence.
There was once a boy named Jack, who changed the course of human history by throwing some beans out of a window. In those days, everyone knew that Heaven was the real world, and every dream and every calling, like every tree and birdsong, was rooted up there somewhere, in the Creator’s inscrutable purpose. Jack chopped the beanstalk down before the gardener in his hobnail boots could discover Jack in his Underworld, where roots of Heaven can be climbed to a marriage of Gaia and Uranus. Death in Heaven is a fairytale, promulgated by the opportunistic pedlars of a social history of fallen Neanderthals.
“My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless;
‘Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.” Rumi.
”When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.” Leonard Cohen.
“Behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life.” Pope Francis.
“…He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.'” Robert Frost, from “Mending Wall“.
”The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” Bill Shorten.
“Justfriendistan. A territory only to be rivaled in inhospitability by the western Sahara, the Atacama desert, and Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.” Dr Ali Binazir.
”…There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours….” Kemal Atatürk.
This Moon has so rudely transformed my culture, so brazenly redefined its traditional meanings, that I am cowed beneath it like one deafened by laughter. One minute I was like a drunken bee, swinging from stalk to stalk in an Elysian Field, each stalk topped by a lovely flower, of art, philosophy or music; the next I am clinging for dear life above a tsunami of sewage. Eek! Has one of the gods broken a vow sworn by the primaeval waters of Styx? Has Styx said #MeToo?
It used to be said that the opposite of love was fear. Ah, the seventies, those good old days, joined in oblivion by the shamelessness of white privilege. The opposite of love is not fear; it is identity. At first glance, the tsunami seems to be a heaving mass of guilty miscreants borne aloft on a sea of placards demanding justice and the unmasking of corruption, but fearless inspection reveals the putrid turmoil stripping every stalk of its flower to be a contagion of anger and hatred. It derives its irresistible force not from a balance of reason and instinct, or even a unity of purpose, but from a unanimity of righteousness.
You see, like you, I always knew what was going on behind the facade. Incest, bestiality, pederasty, Zionism, Islamism and White Supremacism: we had lots of names for the unmentionable. But we were groomed to forgive and forget, in the name (as it were) of love. Good outweighed evil. Identity meant we were all the same, imperfect, imprisoned in our curtailed salvation, assailed only sometimes by envy, resentment and paranoia. How could the theist, socialist and humanist covenants be denied, let alone withdrawn? Well, we have decided that not only is it our right to be unique, but it is our right to be perfect, a pre-existent state of being we might regain if and when the evil of the perpetrators of our imperfection has been identified and punished. The process of healing is interminable, since every wound, and every evolving definition of perfection, is different.
What is the craft of any artisan? Perfection! An emergent autonomy nurtured by the great oath of the gods that healing may be enjoyed, craftspersonship is the very apotheosis of enjoyable healing, the Covenant of the Styx itself. When the Southern Cross is at its highest in the South, for those blessed by atmospheres in which the splendid design of Crux’s background in the Milky Way is revealed, arcing from due east to due west, the keystone of perfection locks into place. (I feel such compassion for the perfectionists north of the tropics who are denied this denouement! How do you manage?)
No, this Moon is not perfect. Supermoon, you call it, but its Perigee was yesterday; it is indeed on the cusp of the September Equinox, but the New Tropical Year is four hours old; and, most careless oversight, it is nearly two days from its Northern Lunistice. If it were a chair, the buyer would need to re-glue some dowels. But the buyer might be a bit of an artisan themselves, recognizing that nothing is perfect enough, not in the human realm, anyway. The Southern Cross now, as a symbol of Country, covenant between finitude and emptiness, Crown of the Emu no less, coincidence-that-never-dies, that’s an altogether different matter.
“But there is no way we will overcome the neurosis of victimization if, by transforming the past into our subjective present, we root our identities in injury alone. For the past to become a principle of action in the present, we have to manage to admit the reality of loss and stop living in the past instead of integrating it in to the present as that which must sustain human dialogue. In any case, the complete restitution of the past is not only terrifying, but also a clear impossibility.” Achille Mbembe.
Google ‘Western Sahara’.
*** DAILY HANSARD PROOF ONLY – DO NOT QUOTE ***
SOVEREIGNTY
Mr A PODES (S Province) (11:43):
The climate-change, ecological translocation and Earth redistribution concatenation has become a national chthonic crisis, and in view of the cataclysmic consequences for the ownership of water, the availability of deckchairs and other aspects of our global viability should we falter in our resolve to protect our traditions from gods who break their vows and suchlike, we must build a Wall to keep the ancestral tsunami out. The consulting engineers have alerted us to the necessity of relocating as many inhabitants as possible within one horizon, and of putting the Wall on rollers which will frequently need hazardous maintenance on the outside in territory contested by the UDL (Upside Down Life) independence movement, and so we call upon all artisans to make themselves known to us, so that we may deploy them immediately to appropriate locations on the horizon. Yes, a wall is expensive to construct, maintain and defend, but be assured that the cost will be met by the Other Side!
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1.
Dreams, like music, have a way of seeming personal.
It was late and time to turn the music off … turn, turn, turn … blowing through the jasmine in my mind … are you old enough? … handle me with care … I’ll clean it up myself I guess … and it ain’t me who’s gonna leave … there’s one way of gettin’ there, I’ve been usin’ the method for twenty-five years or more … so open up your beach umbrella while you’re watchin’ TV … desultorily clinging to words which had made the world around him, but merely punctuated the arpeggios of his soul … skipped the light and bangles … hey little sister who’s the only one … tastes just like cherry cola … how to open doors with just a smile … don’t want your kisses that’s for sure … and you wish the world was as tired as you … never lost a minute of sleepin’ worryin’ ’bout the way things might have been … I guess hell has finally frozen over … didn’t recognize the boy in the mirror … now he wants the music to stop, but when he takes the needle off the dream groove the music keeps going. He tries the volume and the off switch to no avail. The music cannot be stopped. He is aware that music has defined every step of his life’s journey, learned and made his own, but ever with a life of its own, a cosmos of his entrails.
The dream is still there when the astrologer awakes slumped in his wheelchair. The garden outside his window is in twilight. Any moment now the nurse will come to wheel him into the dining-room. He will eat, and then be hoisted into bed, sleep, and be hoisted out again and onto the toilet, then back into his wheelchair. His bodily processes, like the music, cannot be stopped. A lifetime of change seems petrified by the bodily processes which have governed it, and by the wheeling heavens which they have written in their dance book.
This Moon aligns with one of the vertical configurations of the Milky Way, or near enough, not the transcendent associated with the initiation of Indigenous men, but the other one.
Is anyone dreaming of music in the Rohingya camps tonight? Are Southern Hemisphere Signs protruding into anyone’s northern sky? Are the Rivers of Hades no more than a poetic device, and the Milky Way no more transcendent than a campfire?
Essential to this astrologer’s country is the awareness of cyclical change. Sometimes she is a man, and sometimes he is a woman. One of the more interesting implications of the meaning he has given to the intersections of the Zodiac with the Milky Way, in no small part inspired by the imputed association of one region of the Milky Way with ‘secret men’s business’, is that at the Southern Summer Solstice the female Sun is in masculine territory, and on this rare occasion the male Moon realizes itself in what the astrologer regards as feminine territory, ‘secret women’s business’. It must be conceded that the heroic male constantly facing the insurmountable obstacles to his immortality presented by the world, and the repression of female individuation which wipes her from history, are archaic cultural constructs nowhere near obliteration.
You should be familiar with the Emu, but you may not know how its appearance has moved throughout the millennia. It has been remarked that evidence of the orientation of Bora grounds to the position of the Emu is largely to be found in Northern N.S.W. and Queensland, a phenomenon which one day might enter the debate about continental vs. regional Indigenous culture. In the meantime, there seems to me a cogent explanation for the scarcity of such evidence south of the Murray, which has nothing to do with genocide or expropriation, and everything to do with locality.
About 12,000 years ago, around the time of final separation of Tasmanian inhabitants from the mainland resulting from rising sea levels, something just as weird began in the sky: creeping northward from Southern Tasmania, the orientations of the two vertical configurations of the Milky Way when the Galactic Poles cross the horizon converged due East and West. The Poles intersected with the horizon at the Meridian (addition of the absolute values of the declination of either Pole and local latitude equalled 90°, the angle between zenith and horizon). This weirdness got as high as Tallangatta around 4500 BCE then doubled back before it quite reached Echuca, passing south of Southern Tasmania again around 1800 BCE.
Down my way, at the Wurdi Youang stone circle, this occurred in approximately 5815 and 3190 BCE (as contemporaneously it did upside down in Copper Age Anatolia and Peloponnese Greece), according to Stellarium‘s algorithms, and during the intervening millennia the Emu was never precisely vertical. The NGP crossed the Meridian below the horizon and the SGP was circumpolar. It is possible that ‘near enough is good enough’ originated in Southern Australia (or Turkey, or Greece), but it is also just possible the Kulin nation occupied the locus for a sanctification of the Prime Vertical, the invention of the plumb bob or the transmogrification of masculinity.
It is also worthy of note, especially by those anthropologists and archaeologists who have not imagined the cultural impact of an evolving sky one lives under by night, that the vertical Emu has not always appeared as it does today head down in the southwest. Between 13000 and 3000 BCE it was entirely framed head up in the northeastern sky at Wurdi Youang, similarly moving down and back up between 12800 and 3200 BCE in Northern Victoria, and in Northern N.S.W. between 10800 and 5000 BCE.
That was the time to fetishize the dust lanes recognized as the Emu, and adapt geodesy and ceremony to the subsequent millennia, and so antiquity combined with latitude explains the orientation of countrywide Bora grounds all over the compass.
The fundamental revelation which underlies compassionate humanity is not woundedness but harmfulness. Yes, we suffer, and that means we sometimes cannot help the harm we do, but never have we alleviated suffering by being blameless. And have we alleviated suffering by institutionalising goodness? We like to think so, and weep in gratitude for the separation of conjoined twins, but we are also outraged by the sexual misdemeanours of priests.
The terrible truth is that we choose to harm, and because our freedom and responsibility are the conjoined twins of our selfhood, it eventually falls to us all to confront and own our harmfulness, and if we are not to lose our selfhood to self-hatred, see ourselves finally as victims of our own evil, we must find forgiveness. Loving myself and others as wounded victims is so, how can I put it, de-meaning? Woman, you chose to be this way. The only transformation of patriarchy that works comes from the forgiveness of the guilty, women who have taken a man, from his children, his mother, himself, to give their existence meaning, women who have accepted the inherited status of domesticated animals, and men who have conflagrated their heroism in love.
“Nobody owns my country but me,” our struggle seems to entitle us to say, and yet the past I and the ancestors have vacated stretches fence by fence across the horizon. The past of my neighbours is my country. Is it a paradox that we cannot forgive our enemies, when we are identical to them in our manias of self-justification? Have we lost with the Us and Them moieties of trade-unionism a mechanism for bringing the best out of each other? Pleistocene Australians invented the fire-stick, Holocene Europeans the fence. Is it a paradox that setting fire to the bush protects the fences, originally invented to minimize conflict over game? Do traditional owners really want the onerous task of collecting the rent to fund the administration of Blue Mud Bay fishing? Midnight permits? Boarding and sinking dinghies? Headlines? Civil war?
The human bones revealed by the shifting sand of deep time belong to a nonentity who was a hero or heroine like us, and so they are sacred, like every somebody who tries not to be nobody. The guilt-ridden invaders have been willing for ages to play a fugue with the Indigenous people their ancestral nonentities wronged, but the Indigenous prelude, from the time before European settlement, has not been scored for Western instruments. How far away are the stars now? Is it different for a man or a woman to stare into the abyss? Is the Wanderer more than a dead white man’s Fantasy in C Major? Is there now a Cassiopeia in Wurundjeri country? Yes, my anxiety is salved when the Moon crosses the Lethe, why would it not be? Am I not my Mother’s son? Was it not a Song of the Rainbow Serpent she sang which opened my heart to my welcome as an interloper at the campfire of strangers? Yes, “everybody owns my country” is what I’m trying to say.
Trujillo, Colombia
“I’m a time traveller.” “You’re a clock watcher.” “All my life I’ve been travelling at 7.9 km/sec.” “You’re hooked on melancholy”“Doubt everything, especially yourself.” “How could you believe being a failure was paying your dues?” “How could you think therapy could pay yours?” “Your anality is dying in its arse.” “Your top-down thinking is arse-up.” “I can’t keep a straight face listening to a dead man’s vain attempt to sacralize death.” “One more km/sec and I never had to hear you.” “Why did you need to tell me that? Stop attacking me.”
This all too human propensity for discrimination and judgment, unalloyed with a good dose of skepticism, consolidates normal black and white mental illness. Applied to the skin, it establishes the difference manifested by foreignness. Binary gender is a classic example: humans have confronted and adapted to devastating climate change countless times throughout the millennia, but when they were forced to leave, it was always into someone else’s country; the right to somebody else’s country doesn’t exist, but could that be rouge on the cheeks of Chopin’s corpse when Khatia Buniatishvili plays ‘his’ Piano Concerto No. 2?
Kyrie
The veteran in his wheelchair will not see the like of this again, and nobody younger will experience quite the awe of the Pleistocene, because dark skies are gone from Sunbury, where once the soul could study the lines of its eternal palm under the stars. Hoisted into bed, the astrologer lays his grateful head on plumped pillows, dissolves the fences of mind, floats down and beyond the fulcrum of duality, and sleeps.
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
– Albert Einstein.
What makes you tick? Not what motivates you, but how do you put yourself together? What is your organizing principle? Not why you get up when you’ve been knocked down, but how? What do you call to mind? What comes? Is it a lie to foster a self affecting a truth? Why is it that accepting the inevitable seems like a self-defeating mechanism? When an imperative pops into your mind, an innate or habitual mechanism, do you recognize and give expression to the body of your world, implement it as the construction of your will, or fight it as the enemy of your integrity?
If we could imagine for a moment language inflected not only with sexist and racist attitudes to power, but also with ingrained certainties of the physical world, including which side of the human body belongs to us and which to society, the sacredness or profanity of the instinct, and the nature of freedom as submission or rebellion, then to the extent we are comfortable and decipherable using our language, we might be confident of a universal order which makes us all brothers and sisters. We could understand the ego as the instrument of our own control over the irrational and infantile.
On the other hand, should the ego seem more like an enemy than a friend, should meditation waft us away into the universal mind, leaving us with the body only of our breath, we might attempt to dissolve our infantile defences against separation, disappointment and death in the acceptance of change, but succeed in arresting the change the universe orchestrates by flowing through our bodies.
And what if the body of the world, our habits, language and culture, seems to us in itself a threat to our identity, an oppression of our egoic insistence on mastering the socially constructed self to become in a state of fluidity whomever we choose intellectually to be? If ‘identity’ has ceased to mean what is identical, but “A person’s conception and expression of individuality or group affiliation, self-concept and self-representation”, where are those brothers and sisters now? Compassion and loving-kindness limited to the emptiness of a meditative trance? Equality, democracy and equanimity are subsumed by ungovernability when ‘identity’ is forced to mean ‘ipseity’ and the universal mind devolves into tribalism.
Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors began to make sense of the movement of the Moon. It became hardwired into our understanding of time. It made scientists of us. Actually, you could say that the Moon, by impressing on us the rhythms of the sky, was waiting for a first landing, and caused those enduring footprints itself. Perhaps the real cause was embedded not in American politics, or an intercontinental military-industrial complex, but the universe itself, the how, not the why.
At a certain distance from the Equator, currently 37°9’34” latitude north and south, decreasing at a rate of about half a kilometre a year, the points at which the Galactic Plane and the Ecliptic intersect are either due east or west at the precise moment the Milky Way intersects with the horizon north and south, arcing east or west. Does this mean anything? Do you doubt it? How can you betray your ancestors by doing so? In fact, it means to the body of the world that someone has noticed it, and nothing more. Climate change is a similar, not to say identical, phenomenon. That someone did not say that east and west and the planes of the solar system and the Milky Way exist only in the mind, that the azimuths of the Galactic Poles are a problem of elementary trigonometry, or that the language used to formulate astrometry needs to be decontaminated before its importance in human history can be debated, as though it were a matter of whose bodily processes in an interstellar spacecraft have precedence, officers or ratings, men or women, black, brown or white, means only that reality has made a new appearance, that someone noticed something happening, as though in the mirror, in his Underworld.
The Sun crosses the Galactic Plane slightly less than seven hours after Solstice this year. If you’re within cooee of the N.S.W. Central Coast on Solstice Day, a Saturday, why don’t you see what you’re made of? It’s a special moment, any time the Sun is due west, this one fitting for a special companion.
What do you find beneath your feet? Does Mother Earth recognize them? Do they mirror those of an observer of the Moon on the other side? Is fantasy or forgetting an element of how you deal with things, or both, and is (s)he the One? Remember, do not to leave your phone in the car.
One day, astrology may use what has been noticed to see something else. Then it will be understood, but first it must be seen. Its seeing is in turn the underlying understanding of doubt. Climate change may be the universe engineering the colonisation of other solar systems by whiteness. The wound may constitute the measure of breath, and the oppression of victims be the cinching of trousers around the neck of believers. Belief, when all said and done, is of the body, not the mind. And should you doubt December’s opportunity to doubt doubt, perhaps you have not known hope or grief. When you do, in your body, please know that I, your ancestors and the birds, along with a dog and cat or two, hope and grieve with you. We are the universe. But doubt, you can have that on your own, with the sky revolving north and south, unseen, for when doubt rounds on the Self, only Christmas can save us, hein? And the ancestors sing, Death, D-Death Death, where is thy sting?
”In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.” Tolstoy, War And Peace.
“Defined in the end by its disenchanted context, the human self too is inevitably disenchanted. Ultimately it becomes, like everything else, a mere object of material forces and efficient causes: a sociobiological pawn, a selfish gene, a meme machine, a biotechnological artifact, an unwitting tool of its own tools. For the cosmology of a civilization both reflects and influences all human activity, motivation, and self-understanding that take place within its parameters. It is the container for everything else.” Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche [Viking, 2006, p.33].
A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle, like a satellite without responsibility for its own trajectory. The meanings we have given the Moon’s orbit derive not from its motion, which is straightforward, if subject to gravitational influences and historical violent collisions, but from our perspective. However, not only its elliptical orbit and the inclination of its orbit to Earth’s but their phenomena belong to the body of the world. The Moon’s angular distance from the ‘First Point of Aries’ and its deviation from the Ecliptic are real, and so is its apparent size and phase, though these are not its properties. The law which has always addressed and divided humans, punitive and often aggressive and cruel, is real in the same way. Its initiates are drones; it is inherent in country as a phenomenon, not a property. Country is the body of the world we are made of as we perceive it, or rather create it with our perception and account of ourselves.
To recognize the Constellation of Capricornus in the night sky is to be seduced into an expansion of its proportions. The smallest Zodiac Constellation is also exceedingly dim over cities, but to compensate, it can impose its shape beyond its boundaries, across the entire field of vision, because it is replicated by the stars surrounding it, as the personage inhabits the child who wears an item of its clothing.
The Fish-Goat was placed in the heavens by ancient reverence for duplicity as the birth-pangs of subjective consciousness: for the state of being one thing in the world of aggression and another in the inner space of difference. Capricorn is the symbol of deceit. The fish-goat was fatally flawed: it was ruled by the desire to under-stand the gods. It was obliged to climb out of the waters of oneness with the tides of spirituality to actualize the commands of its god. Sadly, by the time it clambered onto the historical shore, social relations were no longer a chorus of inner voices, but a mime of certainty obtained from the soundless reading of the written word, and the goat-fish could not read. He became a goat, his own body, and lost his mind to goat’s head soup.
To this day, Capricorn in the Breamlea Zodiac continues to resonate with the concern for authenticity which is the hallmark of the present age. As a late summer constellation, a mansion the Southern Sun occupies from January to February, it carries the fifth Sign of Leonine confidence, but as the winter mansion of the Southern Full Moon it also carries the eleventh Sign of Aquarian altruism. It symbolizes our struggle with deceit, life making do with the subordination of care and the subterfuge of being. Gone is the Aquarian impulse to found a harmonious commune—the New Age has morphed into a therapy for addiction and dissent—and gone is the respectability of an inner life immersed in canons of literature and music. The techniques developing today are to affirm identity from hostile country, to give voice which overcomes noise, to colonise public space, to stop hiding, to dream the life, to think the body.
You have been brought here to the Port Louis Casino to observe how these techniques might be more successfully developed and employed on country. For tens of thousands of years the Moon has presented its metaphor for human existence, waxing and waning, emulating the path of the Sun optimistically in winter, soberly in summer, regularly and irresistibly receding and drawing near. Tonight, by remote control, we are synchronized with the Moon’s eclipse at apogee. What can we learn from the Moon’s survival of bombardment of our own experience of persecution by the world? Can we emerge from violence non-violently? Can we slough the fishtail of an eye for an eye, pause in the struggle for existence on the stony paths of goathood to enjoy ourselves, without creating enemies of mind and body, self and world, instinct and expertise? Can we create country in our own beautiful image? Can we both empty and own our body, its eccentricity, obliquity and remote-control eclipse?
The good people of Nhill have set the standard for living on country. All you need to know is how to put yourself on the map, obliquely perhaps, but always with good grace. We’re all winging it, aren’t we?
“‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition?…’”
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 3, §125, “The madman” [Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001].
“…It’s not anger that I feel towards the two of you, it’s something much, much worse.
It’s pity.
You have no empathy for your fellow man, and you clearly have no idea what love is.
So you have nothing.” Anthony Maslin.
“…To be different/ imperfect/ not normal is scary.
To be different/ imperfect/ not normal in a world where everyone projects ‘perfect’ is a fear
I tell my story here to confront that fear.
To show the world who I am.
I am Grief. This is me. Grief is me.
To look at me is to see your own fear reflected back at you.
To look at me is to also see strength.
The strength of us all.
All of those who stand behind me.
The strength of my fathers and grandmothers.
An ancient strength.
The strength of my land.
My land of burnt umber and dry sand.
The strength of laterite and million year old tears.
The strength of the broken who rebuilt.
What do you see when you look at the bully?” Rin Norris.
I see stars. I see someone controlled by the body. I see a drone.
The human artefact known as the Gregorian Calendar, measuring to the second the Earth’s orbit of the Sun, indicates the pending completion of another year. Coincidentally, the Moon is completing another of its ‘orbits’. (See YouTube for a description of the real relative motion of Sun, Earth and Moon.) What meaning, if any, can be ascribed to this coincidence?
When the Sun and Moon come together in the Southern Sign of the imagination it should presage something wonderful, an empowerment of dreams, or an oceanic coalescence of individualities. But its opposite number is a tendency towards going our own way, by force if necessary, or by confronting entreaties to compromise as attacks on our defences. We all want peace, but we cannot submit to each other. This is Sagittarius, where humanity grows from the Umwelt, and where subjectivity reigns supreme, yet how readily does the hobbled divine in us genuflect to angels we should actually no longer empower, in the form of facts, and identities!
Is there anything to be grateful for as 2016 closes to us? Not only was it a political disaster for most people, and a humanitarian disaster for too many, it was also a year in which many of our generations’ icons died. How are we reacting? The North hunkers down for winter as the sidereal Sun ruminates on charisma and independence to lead it from its mess, but it is the season of withdrawal and pessimism. In the South we have entered summer beyond the redemptive rituals of a Christmas which dare not speak its name. Identities divide us, and people of Science and people of Holy Books continue to confound each other with their incapacity to identify facts and words as metaphor! Will the New Year bring renewal of optimism that equanimity, turning our other cheek and submitting to Allah will produce world peace; or that democracy will emerge through education and without hatred and bloody conflict to wrest freedom and autonomy from the tyranny of economic interest; or that the institutional denial of autonomy to parents to influence their children will end bullying, produce gender fluidity, end discrimination and demonstrate a hierarchy of values after all? Or are we not flies caught in the web of someone else’s inadequate ideas?
Pessimism is the gateway to frivolity: delinquency is a healthy experimentation in semiosis; sub-cultures transform nothingness–definable in terms of habituated exclusivity–into emptiness, and promote the location of a non-individuated personality in a flux of interpenetrating matrices of meaning. Southern Hemisphere Astrology is pessimistic about a wider promulgation of its iconoclasm in 2017. Sabotage will continue to be perceived in terms of the ‘things’ removed; only those already engaged in an interplay of self and world as metaphor will enjoy my perspective-play, and my power to persuade readers to relish the beautiful emptiness of astrology will continue to languish. Nonetheless, I will persevere as a hooligan in the Rimbaud style.
The imagination belongs to nobody, certainly not identity! Never cease from its game! Neither culture, nor history, nor parents are the wellspring of your personality, but rather this very imagination forever impregnating itself beyond the rules of fidelity to mere habit and infantile self! Yes, congratulations are in order if you have saved yourself from the snares of anger, blame and innocence in this tumultuous year. But have you? If so, be honest, the imagination says, you did not do it, but I.
Imagination is not a component of intelligence measurable by experiment, but the ground of being, the capacity of all living things to embody, and respond to, signs. Signs are not only systemic, but chosen! My imagination chooses me! But what if it doesn’t? What if I claim imagination as my own? Patent it? Entitle myself to its royalties? The Moon is nothing if not a cry of freedom from the Other’s patent. The Sun is the formative impulse; the Moon is subjectivity, the source of form’s undoing by its alternatives. It is our imagination which owns the Moon, and as truly, the Moon and we are owned by owls and frogs, rocks and tides, the dead and unborn!
What if I mistake the Moon for the Sun, discover and fetishize an identity entitled to control and permanence? Then I doom myself to pessimism, and its mirror-image, frivolity: ‘I’ cannot win, or in ordinary terms, my path through the thickets of reckless pseudo-confidence yelling, “Shit happens” at every hurtful bump leads inexorably to the belief in nothing, even the impossibility to believe in anything, including ‘me’. But anything, even nothing, is preferable to the shame of being powerless, of having no third way between tolerating the intolerable and invoking the letter of laws which have no spirit I command.
The lunar nodes cycle of avoidance and focus will morph in 2017 (May in Southern Hemisphere Astrology) into a challenge to play with the cultural lineaments of constraint and control. Every time I see the Moon riding high above the recalcitrant Ram I will recall the rampage of the Aleppo Bull, and not the presence of the Bull in a manger. I hope we have learned by then the difference between play and frivolity. Let’s drink to seriousness! Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! Surely a massive hangover will do the trick?
What just happened? It will keep university-educated top-down theorists ranting for four years, but the different ways in which resistance to meritocracy, globalisation and political correctness is evolving across the globe feels like a Peasants’ Revolt. Horror of horrors! The representatives of the deplorable, ignorant, racist, sexist, violent, unemployable rednecks have the controls!
But kids, slow down here! The voices now reaching a crescendo to match yours have been audible for years, and you have ignored them. Why? Why have you not seen (until now) that the structures and systems within which you struggle and prosper are a canon of righteousness and entitlement which is not inclusive at all, but exploitative and repressive, to a large percentage of the people you only know from what you’ve read and been taught?
Whether you call them peasants, or the working-class, bogans, suburbanites or deplorables, they only differ from you in not being practised in systematic analysis. They just know what they know. They’re only saying to you that they feel secure in the world you are taking away from them, the world in which they were productive and self-sufficient, and of distinct genders with community identities. The world they have faith in has lost its power, and that feels self-evidently wrong. Isn’t that how you also feel right now?
The Full Moon of November is always in one of the agrarian constellations of the Ram and the Bull. As Spring turns to Summer it descends to Full: it is lowly relative to the burgeoning midday Sun, as the emotions are secondary to the organisation of the enormous amount of work to be done. On the other hand, from the Northern Hemisphere the midday Sun appears low and the Moon high amongst the bales laid up for Winter. These are signs readily recognized by the bottom-up thinker.
The peasant, contrary to the ignorant, subservient boor caricatured in the stereotypical ‘silent majority’, has actually taken the first step towards enlightenment: he has aligned himself with the will of God, and is at the interface between individual truth and the mystery of the Holy Spirit. In history, he is the agrarian progenitor of civilization. He has both an intimate understanding of the scheme of things, and a point of view. Primal humanity, as an historical moment or stage in individual maturation, has an inherited view and a language with which to exchange and explore it. The peasant, in the constellation of the primal sign, is on the verge of adopting a view of his own.
Some peasants share the belief, rejected by science, that Supermoons, when Full coincides with Perigee, cause earthquakes. What possible basis could there be for connecting the New Zealand earthquake of Monday morning at longitude 173.02 with this?
On the same day, a new father emerges from a maternity hospital in Argentina for a cigarette. He tries to describe to himself the sensation of holding his new-born. He thinks he should feel different, that now everything has changed.
He does not believe in God, but in the ward it was as though a new spirit had arrived, and yet he could almost feel that the spirit of his child was made out of his and his wife’s in more than a physical way, that the baby had a past made out of the lives of its parents. Strange thoughts, especially when he turns them towards his own parents. He drops the butt of his cigarette and turns to go back in, thinking that he should return to work soon. He is aware of the immensity of his wife’s accomplishment, but for the new father, there are two more ephedrine deliveries due later in the afternoon.
All of a sudden, he becomes vividly aware of his surroundings in a weird way. The pavement beneath his shoes is more than naturally solid, and is curving away from him. The trees down the lane are standing at different angles to the ground. The clouds are still and the world is turning. The city around the hospital is droning and shuddering. It seems to have its own life, but in this strange moment it is an organism with a corpuscular traffic of drivers all like him, made out of their parents.
The world seems immense and small at the same time; empty of things, it is a corpuscular network of cities made out of the movements of people in moments like his, made like him out of their parents, their needs, their appointments. What time was the baby born? Is it a boy or a girl? Wow. This is like a dream.
On the same meridian around the other side of the world, or in the Underworld of the Argentinian–“Where does the Sun go when it goes down?”–the Moon is at transit over the Swan River.
I clasp you in my arms, boy of my youth. I know you would in this moment spill your last drop of blood for whom you love and what you believe in, if you but had the courage to be what you are…a peasant.
The reader will remember that the last memory to be erased by the Lethe—the Orion Arm of the Milky Way—is of the dark beauty Saiph, hoisting her dress to urinate on the bank. This month, the Moon learns more about her as he enters her Gate. A mass demonstration will be staged in Austin, Texas at 14:30 on Wednesday, to protest about women being treated like peasants. A delegation from the Australian Lock The Gate Alliance and the Northern Rivers Hate Out Of My Hills hippie divorcees community will attend. Thousands of T-Shirts are being distributed printed with this image.
On the same meridian, directly below—on Earth as it is in Heaven, as they say—lies the mighty Godavari River at Yanam in Andhra Pradesh. Peasants have been around a long time.
On the bank, a short distance from both a bridge and a ferry uniting north and south, stands a lingam flanked by two sacred elephants. Is this just coincidence? “The union of lingam and yoni represents the “indivisible two-in-oneness of male and female, the passive space and active time from which all life originates”. “…According to Vivekananda, the explanation of the Shalagrama-Shila as a phallic emblem was an imaginary invention. Vivekananda argued that the explanation of the Shiva-Linga as a phallic emblem was brought forward by the most thoughtless, and was forthcoming in India in her most degraded times, those of the downfall of Buddhism.” Wikipedia
How long will it be before gender equality needs no demonstration? How long before gender fluidity is embraced in its intuitive, bottom-up pattern; before geographical separation and the term ‘coincidence’ are dismissed as unreal? The Moon offers a peasant’s advice: there is no eternal life or death, thank God! Stop imagining yourself as a subject of laws; think with your heart and live in your soul, and if you get separated, go to a gate; but know your shadow, and translate yourself into many languages!
And so the Moon completes another round, and my thoughts are decidedly autumnal! Now is the meaning of a life nearing its end obliterated by the clamour and prodigal blaze of manifest implication–the hunchback Richard, misquoted in the media, as likely said.
The ‘Baby-Boomers’ will leave their over-priced houses to children grown old outbid and waiting, but do allow them a last brief moment to consider their life’s meaning. They’re a bit anxious about it, bless their secular hearts. A hundred definitions of cool have come and gone, a hundred -isms, a thousand icons, a thousand must-reads, and now in the legacy, what still smoulders?
A curious coincidence, this Full Moon conjunction with Uranus. Like many stargazers, I have anticipated this month’s opposition of the seventh planet as a rare opportunity to see it with the naked eye. Not this week. The Moon has seen to that. So what can I ‘see’ behind the Moon’s oppressive charm?
Once again it is Theodore Tasmanian at transit in the Breamlea afternoon, but in the Atacama Desert, Justfriendistan, it is Achernar at Midheaven, the star of hubris, end of the river and like Uranus, invisible to the ancients (for whom the river ended at Acamar). Hubris and charm definitely resonate, but what dimension does ‘contrite interest’ add? We should all know that the Prodigal eventually returns (Luke 15: 11-32). Will the Baby-Boomers return? What does Uranus say?
“Meaning is determined in time, and beyond my realm, but I can say this: there is no system which can be analyzed to elemental constituents; there is no cause which is not a prisoner of such analysis; and every moment is a progenitor of that prison. Most of the misunderstandings which divide and separate people, the antipathy of science to religion, for example, resolve themselves in recognition of the ground of interest, the potentials of care, noise and change.
Care is the root of loving-kindness and responsibility, and the irony of independence, but really it is simply what happens to the world when you pat a dog. It is not culturally determined or directed. It is simply being there, like the flutter of Amazon butterfly wings. Noise is the root of language, science and music: in it lies the meaning of something flapping in the wind, or the phase of rhythms of distant traffic and a blowfly in the baby’s room. It is redundancy’s midwife and the high priest of silence. Change is the root of time, calendars and clocks, but it is born to the motion of a crawling child, dies in the intellect, in structure and determinism, and is constantly refreshed in memory, the mirror and the dream.
You will find your meaning not by parsing the sentence of your time, but by remembering the great tides of interest in which you have swum. Swim on! Death will annihilate your unifying vision, but be joyous in your interest! Love, sing and dream right up until your own death, and leave the meaning of life to its misunderstanding.”
In common with Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star (Venus) who created the humanity we think we know from wounds he inflicted on his earlobes, calves, tongue, and penis, Uranus, the sky god from before time, saw something momentous created from his severed genitals: Aphrodite, otherwise the Roman love goddess Venus, in an ironic twist of comparative mythology.
So something existed before love, something in every moment, before narrative and the search for meaning tied all the moments together and gave them causes, or tried to, and that is interest. What do we deserve? What have we enjoyed? What dictates an imperative to change gender? What does a computerized machine have that a process-worker does not? What does the train-wreck of our time leave behind? What will we take with us? Interest.
The Moon, on the other hand, is barely begun on a new circuit of the Zodiac, which begins by convention in southern hemisphere autumn. Perhaps it is never the wrong time to start again. This is of course a human perspective. No matter how empty of independent reality we recognize things to be, we still order them in systems and structures of the intellect. The global economy is a unity of alienations. The Breamlea Zodiac measures from Sagittarius as well as the equinox in Pisces. The Moon is full when it is directly in line with the Sun and the Earth, and where it transits at solar midnight.
But what does it mean, a Full Moon? How does polarity work under the hood? What would a global astrology come to consist of when naive expectations that the perspective of North America and Europe would assert its superiority over local superstition had been dashed by a combination of rigid barbarian submission to a set of rules for existing upside down and disbelief that prediction was possible at all? An energetic, impatient Sun in October? Twelve seasons in one day, shared on rotation around the globe like the solar terminator? Will the Robot one day volunteer no-fly zones over the ground tracks of Gate-Posts? Or to preserve narrative insanity just terminate me?
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” Omar Khayyám
“What rubbish!” the Skygod echoes at this Gate. And here we have the Moon’s new motivation to keep going around in circles: my prodigal interest in the duality of every perspective, and the potential I live and breathe for a comparative astrology of time. A preview:
Each of these stars forms one part of a gate with another, six steps along on the chart, which is exactly, within 24s of right ascension, opposite it in the sky. Arbitrary definitions notwithstanding, what mindfulness of a unity with who and what is directly beneath our feet can we bring to waking-consciousness? Out of interest?
A curious coincidence, this Full Moon conjunction with Uranus. Like many stargazers, I have anticipated this month’s opposition of the seventh planet as a rare opportunity to see it with the naked eye. Not this week. The Moon has seen to that. So what can I ‘see’ behind the Moon’s oppressive charm?
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Southern Hemisphere Astrology 