You cried, and I did not know how to comfort you, with your young body dressed in shortie pyjamas pressed to mine. You sobbed, I am not a virgin. At last, dear kind friend, I know, because I am not a virgin either, no matter how hard I try.
Every night when the Sun goes down I follow it, in search of my innocence. The stars outside are unconscious beacons of my experience, and they carry vestigial names from other times or intuitions in my own past. But the night sky is a cloak of experience thrown over something more intangible, a kernel perhaps of me as I am in my intention, not as I am in my responsibility.
Who is more ridiculous, the one who labours all the critical day longing for night, or the one who tosses and turns in his bed longing for the morning to straighten his load?
It is time I took my leave. Prolonged isolation has taken its toll on my hippocampus. Memory has become a stranger to any task put before it. I have no idea of the way forward, since it leads from wherever ‘here’ may be. You don’t need me to see straight; only you can transform nowhere.
There is a sign coming, which may yet unite us, offer a focus for our combined wayfaring instincts and a harmonious engagement of innocence and experience, intention and judgment. Jupiter is closing the gap on Saturn, and will overtake it in Capricorn at the end of the year in a single flare of light. The Sun in Sagittarius will be rounding on both, and so the conjunction will be visible low in the West, just where you would expect to witness the smothering of inconsequentiality. Will you look?
The cusp of Leo: connection and disclosure, relativity and faith, altruism and irony. Regulus Gate: the heart of the lion and the anus of the possum, gratuitous, almost alien, postmark of a trivialized celebration of separate togetherness. Or perhaps it presents a simple gesture of togetherness comprising a ceremonious underworld revelation to sarcasm that its defences are less than fun? It is certainly pure coincidence, isn’t it, like all the star names and attributes I have invented, and for that matter, the entire corpus of astrology, though it prefer the term synchronicity?
I am reminded of an event in the life of a friend of mine, an ageing and obscure writer who somehow managed to be invited to address a seminar on something or other in a faraway place. To cut a long story short, he got hopelessly and helplessly lost: people kept telling him to turn around and go back the other way, pointing to roads and railway stations he either couldn’t find, or always took him the wrong way.
He became separated from his luggage, which not only contained the text of his talk, but the names and phone numbers of the connections he desperately needed to contact with an explanation of his non-appearance. While he was confronting the senile reality of his circumstances he came to find himself adjacent to a woman on the phone on the same railway platform.
He overheard her conversation about a writer who inexplicably had failed to appear at a seminar, and realised that this was his chance. Then he heard her describing the weird eyes, not exactly dead, but decayed in the most disturbing way, of a man sitting not far away from her.
The rest is history, but my friend never found his luggage and never made it to the seminar. With the help of many people, he eventually made it home, but he was plagued, and still is, by the impossibility of describing to any of the purposeful bystanders who guided him, or to anyone since, the awesome impact of the coincidence which improbably answered his need on that railway platform in the middle of nowhere.
We all know the powerful influence of a dream we never succeed in interpreting or communicating, but what does that tell us of the waking dreams and troubled realities of refugees, the homeless, the intellectually disabled, the gender-dysphoric, the mentally ill and the demented … not to mention those trying to make coherent their end-of-life reminiscences?
Heroism in the face of catastrophe is our ideal, the ultimate ethical expression of community, but a response to the call of the other, the inner voice of the Water-Carrier, seems to necessitate the vacating of selfhood that does not derive from the outside, from a faith in belonging on the outside, with no other way of being real than connection with others. But what happens when the interest of the community is believed to be served by doing nothing except distancing from others, and staying home?
We get lonely, and automatically the therapeutic industry offers social solutions like video chats, but once upon a time the theological industry would have recommended prayer. The social construction of reality is an accepted fact, but this latest coronavirus is reminding us what it is to be isolated and attempting vigour at the same time. We are rediscovering our secrets: yes, the guilty and shameful ones, but also the fundamental one, our power to be. The welfare of others may be our guiding light in our decisions, but there is a dimension to life in which ethics takes second place to ontology: decisions, on the face of it responses to horizontal stimuli, arise from the underworld.
Each one of us is absolutely other, and though the country in which we find ourselves as such, by its responsiveness to our dreadful finitude, does present as physical and historical shareability and enjoin us to participate in the communal and the ethical, our presentiment of its vanishing upon our death removes it beyond what we can share into the realm of otherness, mystery and secrecy, and our presence along with it.
Did those of our ancestors who escaped the religious and political upheaval of 19th Century Europe to subjugate the indigenous peoples of the South go out or come in? Were they present in an alien landscape the more they inhabited their loss, or absent from the tremendous world of the natives the more they anxiously impressed themselves upon it? Did they resile from every furbishment of comforts they were banished from, or simply resort to drink or meditation to ‘get out of it’? How did they stay apart?
Facts and figures lead us away from the underworld, promising an eternity of sorts, and evidence of self-mastery. They remind us that we are very small in the scheme of things. But it’s the little things that keep us together, inside and out, such as not being able to interpret one’s own or another’s dream, coincidentally perhaps at Regulus Gate, though chosen to try.
What do you suppose the chances are that today is the nineteenth anniversary of my friend’s encounter on that railway platform?
“In exhibiting the horrors awaiting all human beauty, already lurking below the surface of corporeal charms, these preachers of contempt for the world express, indeed, a very materialistic sentiment, namely, that all beauty and all happiness are worthless because they are bound to end soon. Renunciation founded on disgust does not spring from Christian wisdom.” Huizinga, J.. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and The Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (p. 126). Normanby Press. Kindle Edition.
“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.” From “Tenderness“, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.Naomi Shihab Nye.
Imprisoned in time by a pandemic, we are all old now, reprising bad decisions and bad relationships, the only ones we will now own. As the Other withdraws over the event-horizon it seems that we only exist as Other. The Moon is meaningless: it has its own sky. And yet it is still there in ours, like the immediacy of memory, or the sharing of infant seriousness. Has an entire system of meaning traumatically collapsed? Perhaps, but the fundamental system remains: sensuality. Even after death, sensuality remains. Corpses stink. And our death meditation remains what it is, the sensuality of timeless country. Where is the mouth to the cave of sensuality? Kindness! Country is kindness. It owes its existence to me as I owe my existence to it. We share something of infinite tenderness: sensuality. Sensuality is kindness, two-of-a-kindness.
I have been sharing all my life, in much the same way that my youngest darling grandson is currently learning how to speak, by learning cues by trial and error, and saying the first thing that comes into his head, usually with transformative consequence. His adult erudition is inevitable, because none of his loved ones will ever allow its infancy in insignificance or irrelevance to be forbidden. And because of that, his speech will be shaped by kindness, and I hope one day he will open the box of my notebooks, and share his tears. (The catastrophic slithering of a memory of mammoths plucked from the ice of the primordial Yarra at a lichen-encrusted Abbotsford bench; the magic of architecture which unfolds of its own accord: the desirability of innocence.)
There is nothing the old, like the Moon, can teach the young; the young have assumed an inheritance from still extant benefactors hanging on their capacity to embody the joy they give the old; the old and the young are quarantined from each other. The Moon is outdoors; country no longer has an outdoors. The Moon is not to know this of course—how could it know anything of Earthly affairs it supposedly influences? It can barely distinguish continents—but a rumour has gone viral that country may never have existed. For the time being, the young are sacrificing everything they value to preserve the old, as though given enough time, values will become their own monuments to something other than the waning of youth, the health of the pharmaceutical industry, the power of the Hippocratic Oath, and the harvest of seed.
But how long will this last? So many signs holding the life of a human together depend on constant reinforcement of the roles humans learn to play by forgetting woe. Too many humans have lost their roles and traumatically thereby their experience. Too many roles were incompletely learned before they were expunged. Can they be assumed again? Is there a template? Many generations of humanity have died without hearing an orchestral recital, let alone the performance of works their enjoyment might have confirmed as immortal, such as Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, or Wagner’s Liebestod. In too many spirits they were never composed. The cave leading to the eternal underworld may be ringed by your parents’ assays of serious music: Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Fauré, Elgar, etc., or perhaps the Reader’s Digest collection of operettas, but my grandfather could never plier, and I doubt your grandmother could ever whistle, let alone queue a playlist.
The openness of a vowel is non-gustatory; the emptiness of a bowel is non-binary; the orbit of a satellite is non-accusative. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust. Let no one deride the rites of death. Let all be present in its cavernous jaws. Grasp an opportunity! The ocean is full of tears: taste yours! Make something of this crisis! Relate to country! Imagine it wearing your clothes, the slippers your kids will give you for Mother’s Day! Weigh your emptiness! Be kind to the Moon! Share your isolation! We’re all in this together!
