Those whom the gods would destroy find in their madness a subject for analysis.
He got into big trouble when it was discovered. It took many decades and generations of controllers fretting over the often irrational signals coming from the spacecraft before it was finally deduced that somehow limerence must have got on board. Only a virus like constant craving could explain so many perverse communications. Naturally, he was found to be the culprit, and was sentenced by the joint chiefs of staff of the supreme powers to pay retribution, which he will be obliged to pay, denied escape velocity, forever.
There were no doubt high-level sympathisers with the view, frequently expressed by common people, that elimination of limerence is unsustainable, and we must learn to live with it. However, to send limerence into the cosmos as representative of humanity was formally agreed to be unconscionable. It is ignoble, the communique emphasised, to wish for what one does not have. It is a betrayal of community to so devalue the expectations of others that one might excuse oneself from them and find in oneself a more alluring voice.
So long as the ‘Galactic Anticenter’ points to the ground, any but the most dispassionate astrological interpretations of the intersection of Prime Vertical and Ecliptic are to be suppressed, and the escape velocity in the Bardo from any variety of madness is to be defined as fifteen degrees per hour.
That is why First Crescent can be scientifically predicted, and no longer needs to be seen. That is why consciousness is measured by wakefulness. At least limerence, like the Golden Record the fingerprints of the ache of eternity, will be preserved as a human relic, as the tools of the first ancestors to venture out of Africa, in that first ineffable stir of limerence, have been preserved by the sands of the Nefud Desert.
Have you got it? Have you been tested? Have you been inoculated? Are you self-isolating? Do you really believe that love can save the world?
You only lose what you cling to. That’s it! Nothing eternal here but cynicism, nothing permanent but idolatry. The Earth is full in Aquarius, disclosing what? Impatient perfectionism? Farewell.
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?
“Let any man lay the map of Australia before him, and regard the blank upon its surface, and then let me ask him if it would not be an honourable achievement to be the first to place foot at its centre. Men of undoubted perseverance and energy in vain had tried to work their way to that distant and shrouded spot.” Charles Sturt.
”Just before our love got lost you said I am as constant as a northern star and I said, Constantly in the darkness Where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar.” Joni Mitchell, “A Case Of You“, Blue.
“Understanding the past as a place crisscrossed by the tracks of numerous people and creatures is crucial if we are ever to glimpse futures beyond blank spaces.” Samia Khatun, Australianama (p. 105), OUP, Kindle Edition.
Sometimes it seems that life is expanding faster and faster into nothing, and sometimes simultaneously it seems like the view from the panorama lounge in the last carriage of the super-fast transcontinental. It is probably true to say that polarities unite rather than divide us, when we are aware of them. We can tolerate in one room the multiplicity of interpretations of time because each is experienced by us all at some hour. As we emerge from winter such thoughts arise because spring is activating the dormant, and complex stories are beginning to ensnare us in an understorey of bewildering urgencies. That’s Leo, and there will always be one in the bar. Just because the possum is invisible, don’t imagine that’s rain falling on your bicycle helmet.
In my short life I have been mad with lust, mad with doubt and anxiety, mad with grief, and at its end I may well be mad with death. Madness is an experiment with being, a quest of subjectivity, like Chinese nationalism, the survival of indigenous cultures and the entire history of Western Civilization, and I hear its voices loud and clear, as the universe saying, in any language available, “I am.” Say it yourself and it rings hollow. Finitude laps around it like a rising tide, and the whole of philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology cannot convincingly clothe the emperor. However, if you venture into solitude, extending your awareness to the vast panorama of the property which has disclosed itself to you, and you imagine it in your absence, say it then and those two words will be thunderously true, as true as the call Abraham heard to sacrifice his son, as true as the sacredness of a birth-tree.
Is it too mystical to suggest that each of us is not only the universe but everyone in it saying, “I am”? It was not disclosed to the early explorers that the heart of the land downunder had been pierced countless times in the 60,000 years of human habitation—call it property—prior to European arrival, but Sturt was nevertheless giving voice to the universe in the quote above. You can leave “I am” to the experts, and most of us do, and how democracy works is through the regular information of our experts by our voices, but we should recognize that most of the time voices are just noise: talking shit, putting a not-too-fine point on it. Chinese nationalists or no, we seem in equal numbers to be loud exploiters or exploited. However, in the category of legatee we must never fall silent, sharing with dead people, animals and plants, social and other institutions, even the weather and the universe itself, a primal voice: we are the Subjective.
Is it ironic that the voice makes noise? “Make them both confess,” as Joni said. (“The Priest”, Ladies Of TheCanyon, 1970.) Subjectivity was everywhere in 1970, in case you were not present. One man’s memory just got a prelate objectified and destroyed by popular consent to the voice of outrage. I have always wondered about the permanent injury caused by, and the apparently universal horror of questioning the damage of, the loving touch of someone of the same gender. Perhaps “I am” might be less noisy, or nosy (no ‘I’), if we weren’t commuting for hours a day, blinded by speed to the country beyond road or rail, digging our gardens in subdivision fill and submitting to evening barbecues bathed in artificial light, never venturing from the raft we have earned on the ocean of other voices.
Reality is emergent; disclosure is its enjoyment in time, gossip its narrative; the world is a subject. Whether you can identify with the tree as a physical shape, a system of responses or a set of materials, whether you regard your Self as a work in triumphant or shameful progress, a victim of circumstances or an impediment to enlightenment, the world enjoys you, because you confirm it. You may be an accident, though a probable one, but you will never happen again! Once upon a time, there was no accidence, coincidence, synchronicity or probability: there is now because the world which enjoys you invented them and you confirmed them by giving them back as passion, spontaneity, free will and unpredictability. Are you present, in this auditorium screening your History?
Oops, oh dear, you seem to be absent in me: I am your Thou; I and Thou are the subject of creation, the disclosure of the I of the universe. Whether I was a wave, a fish or a seawall, my time is near, but it will remain absent in yours, and absence in the universe has lasted forever, as disclosure will always have it. Disclosure is a two-way street connecting presence and absence, but across town with all those traffic lights it can seem interminable. If you have not already done so, you must imagine in the charts above the absence of the Earth you are standing on and looking through. In such exercise I sprout wings to join voice with the glorious equanimity of the grey butcherbird apparently confronting its finitude with its vigorous resistance to objectivity punctuated by the mournful refrain, “I am”, outside my window where our tracks intersect.
Anyone who has lived through the internet’s transformation of reality will have noticed a proliferation of certainty. Every debate is loud with it, and wisdom, dismayed, must consider unassailable facts on both sides. Whereas investigation was previously predicated on ‘I don’t know’, it has apparently degenerated into a search for facts which support ‘I know’. This is quite amazing to somebody educated in facts, with the purpose of disclosing the extent of ignorance, who has seen the transformation of critical theory into the syllabus of primary schools, with the purpose of exposing the ambiguity of knowledge.
The notorious family conflicts which arise when children reach puberty disclose the ideological opposition of ‘I know’ to ‘I don’t know’, and two stages of personal development, the investigation of experience as existence and the investigation of existence as experience. Such conflict can take generations to resolve. In an Australian multicultural context, these two stages manifest themselves in the perennial dynamic of integration. Immigrants are dismayed by their perception of a demand for acculturation, and antagonists to plural monoculturalism can find difficulty in locating their pragmatism in recovery from the grief of their own displaced ancestors.
What differentiates quality journalism from populism is the avoidance of bias confirmation. Both base investigation on the Five W’s, who, where, when, what, and why, but whereas quality journalism demonstrates the ambiguity of the answers, populism confirms their simplicity. Once upon a time, my own investigation of current affairs was led by The Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and it has taken time to accept, to grieve, that quality journalism can no longer be confidently sought there.
In similar terms, quality astrology differentiates itself from the populist variety in its focus on ambiguity and recognition of confirmation bias. It presents a tool for asking the Five W’s, but it assumes readers to be seeking more questions, not answers, and to be intensifying existence, not pacifying it. The answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’, is indeterminate, and that is exciting. If you must know who you are, it is my sad duty to inform you that you are nobody.
Where and when you were born cannot be identified, because the where has disappeared, like your parent culture and the climate and geographic coordinates of your birth location, into nowhere, and the when cannot be retrieved except in the historical antecedents of various different arbitrary measures of time based on their obviously impossible separation. The increments of one against another may be small– the measure of sky movement, sidereal time, increases against solar time by 33 seconds every 8 years–but no-when will they ever coincide again. Specifics are out of the question, my dear Watson.
Where is this place?
Cessnock is a real entity, proclaimed with defined boundaries in 1906, and is indexed on thousands of databases and maps. It welcomes the traveller with a real sign in the real ground beside the highway, and every property-owner knows they are in it because they pay council rates. That information may answer the questions who and what, but my question was, ‘where is it?’ Someone in Cessnock, perhaps you can tell me? Down the road from Newcastle, yes, but where is Newcastle, down the road from Cessnock? If I approached from the west, the bush of the Pokolbin Forest, following a road, or else Cessnock would repel me beyond an array of back fences, sooner or later a sign would tell me the road’s name, and someone would tell me I was in Cessnock, someone who wouldn’t understand that they weren’t answering my question, “Where am I?” If I were really lucky, a child might give me the right answer, “Here, in country!”
Here is another correct answer: Cessnock is, not a thou’ out, directly and exactly above its underworld! (A pubescent child always knows when an adult is using semantics to reach a common understanding, which explains the ubiquity of the expression, ‘Sarcasm is the wit of fools’.) Seriously, you have to ask yourself, couldn’t we have done away with 100 years of research into the unconscious if we had simply listened to the people who could find it on a map, right here?
The Miserere, Psalm 51, is the cry of the penitent who is left here, when the rivers of Hades, and their grazing thunder lizards, have disappeared beyond the boundary of the underworld, and penitents are not sure which shore they inhabit. Who are we? The ordinary souls sent to the Asphodel Meadows of our underworld’s underworld? Can Here be There, as the Proclamation has it? What do the aquifers of country disclose when your lover is on the line and your voice is in their head?
This is the moment the ancestors ring the edge of the world, above and below, in neither. Steep Point is the western tip of a continent, from which the then living ancestors watched Dirk Hartog sail past in 1616 CE, with no idea that country was about to be proclaimed out of existence, parcelled up as abutments. To be fair to those seafarers and the settlers who eventually followed them, they had no idea of the Universal Proclamation of Humanity gestating in the abutted minds of landowning philosophers, astrologists and activists. Like any migrant, they were simply creating right of way through abutting, overseas kinships they had no relationship to.
Now we come to the weird bit. Who are ‘they’? Who are we as they?
Osorezan is an active volcano in northern Honshu believed by many to be the threshold of the underworld. Half the world (and almost everyone in these parts) has always believed that ill fortune is not an outcome of karma, what goes around comes around, but the result of sorcery, the conjuring of injured, vengeful spirits from the underworld. I have not found reference to which way up they endure, or if their seasons, directions and chirality mirror the hemisphere of the living, but when they climb out of the fissures of the Earth their evil is authentically alien to ours. Shamans and sorcerers know how to channel them, and so, apparently, do the revilers of Captain Cook, and those still fighting the lost War Against the Proclamation of Country.
So you have no self which is not some other nobody’s nobody, no country which is not some other underworld, and no history which has not been repudiated by you, its child. How WOW is that? But you will be who you want to be, until we have built Jerusalem, and the holy temple of your devotion will be the body, of the visible world, indeterminate, ineffable, enfolding you tenderly in your confirmation bias until you have exhausted fact, country has thrown open its five aggregates of mind and the fleeting moment has disclosed its unbearable beauty. Country, world disclosure, is your will to be, your sap, your yeast, your music, and you are always welcome!
Last year, the Drone took its meaning from the hive. This year it is born above the Gaza Strip, whose living conditions have gone way past intolerable, and thanks to a band of morons who thought it was a good idea to kill two Israeli police officers at the Al-Aqsa mosque, well on the way to becoming even worse, therefore the meaning of ‘drone’ seems more appropriately to accord with its usage in music, most notably in the threnody, and derived from etymological roots in ‘hum’, ‘drum’ and ‘dream’.
The Palestinian problem is insoluble because the pathways available towards rational compromise are humming with two different threnodies. The instincts of Israelis and Palestinians are incompatible, and the Zionists of the forties can only be forgiven as survivors of a conflagration of instincts they believed had been extinguished by reason. I situate my thought in a three-thousand year tradition of mutual fertilization of instinct and reason which trusts neither, but on both sides of the conflict in Palestine, the nexus is paralyzed in history and the fabric of the universe.
It is well known that the seasons of astrology are out of phase with the constellations which invested them with celestial meaning. This is not a problem for the Southern imagination, because if you turn things upside down, most of the Signs make perfect sense, but it’s a huge issue in the North, because our Crab’s tendency to bury altruism in the sand is one thing, but no way can she be imagined as the King of Beasts.
When the second wave of Out-of-Africans passed through ‘Palestine’ on their way to ‘Europe’ twelve thousand years ago, Cancer was rising heliacally in the last month of winter and the King of Beasts announced the arrival of Spring. If instinct had not been moderated by reason during the Ages which followed, as Spring moved backwards through Cancer (Civilization), Gemini (Trade), Taurus (Agriculture) and Aries (Conflict) to Pisces (Spirituality), Northerners might still be dressed for winter in July like Southerners, and worshipping Moon-Goddesses as crustacean embodiments of the tides.
It might have gone better for Palestinians had they been invaded by astrologers moulding the instinct to the seasons and the clockwork movement of the Milky Way, and Buddhist ones at that, dissolving instinct and reason into houses of madness and emptiness, but they got stuck with invaders who believe in submission to the will of God, just like themselves. Why do we need organized religion, nationalism or socialism to bind us in common aspiration and obedience, to bring altruism out from the instinct where it belongs, and codify it and enforce it rationally? Because your altruism is my vanity. Altruism hardens into idealism, and your idealism is always in danger of causing you to undermine my idea of the good!
The remarkable thing is that we have evolved some control over our instincts, but to the extent that we allow them to rule us, our relationships, our polities and our lives tend to fall apart, no matter how zealously we pursue the greater good, as we see it. Yet we challenge reason all the time with our ingrained blacks and whites, our impatience, blame and resentment. If we are not victims of this -Ism, we will be victims of the next. If we are not victims of the other, the other is ours. How unfair it is that our success or failure depends on the ignorance we try to dispel. How dare you offer me help to overcome my self-defeating mechanisms, when your mindset is what’s wrong with the world?
The whole thing is such a mess that it is not only human community which amazes with its perpetual delusional resurrection, but the resilience of personality itself. How can we be connected to all those disasters in the past and still hang together? What is the mechanism for staying wrong? How do you define sin? A two-state solution? I doubt it.
The First Crescent will probably not appear on Australia’s eastern seaboard on Monday, but it will be visible at Coober Pedy, if the locals would like to emerge from their subterranean homes.
Weather permitting, it will be visible from Melbourne on Tuesday. All over the world, what a sight it will be!
The cultures of some immigrants to Australia are nearly as old as the Indigenous one. The other day I got talking about the Moon with an old man in Arab dress on the tram. We old men have less and less to hide from each other. He told me that civilization emerged from the recognition that the Moon was the Great Mother. My stop was coming, so I just listened, but I wondered, when did ‘civilization’ discover the Anima in men? Woman (or Rabbi and Imam) casting magic spells on man, man accommodating his ideal to every poison: can we please just say goodbye to what we never had? ‘You’ are not ‘it’. She, and country, are the ‘I’ ‘It’ is learning to be!
Incidentally (or not), Khandha is my name for the star known by astronomers as Gamma Velorum, and it means ‘connection’ to me because it is a multiple star system, very bright, which includes one of the nearest supernova candidates to the Sun, and which stimulates thoughts of the five aggregates of attachment to suffering: form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness.
August 31: Dear Diary, I googled ‘Disclosure’ today, actually searching for a philosophical reference to Heidegger’s use of the Greek aletheia, and found this:
“True Spring Disclosure.
Abliq, Tintinara, EverHive Chronicle, Thursday 1 September 2016.
“It really is not sustainable,” he said, “deriving an identity from opposition to the Sun as I have. It began as a demonstration of what is best in a man: his innovative independence, his imagination and his transcendent spirituality. I took it upon myself to give the highest expression to the insights gained from communion with Woman, to gain Her respect as a partner, utterly different, unreal yet indispensable. As things have evolved, instead of confirming the importance of Man at the periphery, I have confirmed His inauthenticity, and in each woman’s real world merely become a quarrelsome mansplainer. My moments of glory have become no more than antitheses.
I have conferred at length with the Great Mother, and I have decided not to continue any role which gives encouragement to misogyny and homophobia. I am determined to change my ways, taking inspiration from the Sun’s unwavering commitment, and dissolve my independence in community, and my egotism in kindness. Perhaps it is by honouring the Woman in me that I will better inspire the Man. Thank you.”
Well, there you have it. It was a strange occasion, in the car park at Taunton, and I am still coming to grips with what was said. For his part, the Head of Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office offered the customary gratitude for a difficult job well done, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. It is well-known that lunar theory is considered done, and that astronomy and space exploration have bigger fish to fry. “Do whatever you like,” was the body language. According to my American colleague, the reception in California was by contrast lavish, but reaction similarly indifferent, if also nonplussed. After all is said and done, it seems that the month will go ahead.
It is far from clear as I go to press what effect the Moon’s announcement, if he, or should I say ‘(s)he’, means to carry it through, will have on the polarity of Sun and Full Moon, and indeed on the whole notion of polarity in astrology, already undermined by the observance of asymmetrical seasonal geometry on one antipodean astrological website.
Considerable reassurance is taken by the observance in this graphic of the emergence of a set of hitherto unremarked non-seasonal polarities in which the Moon seems willing to participate.
For some time now, astrologers have been sustaining their practice by asserting an influence for the stars beyond the Zodiac, and by connecting planetary longitudes to geographical perspective by means of Houses and what have become known as the Angles. It was only a matter of time before astronomy’s Equatorial Coordinate System was elevated to pre-eminence as the matrix which most conveniently relates the Zodiac and the background stars to the native sky.
The measurement of the effect of Earth’s rotational axis has already revealed the exact polarity of a number of the brightest stars, which is expected to greatly enhance the capacity of sidereal astrology to augment the interpretations of observers like Manilius, Ptolemy, Anonymous and others for whom half of the brightest stars were invisible.
A note of caution: while the use of equatorial coordinates undoubtedly offers a new symmetry to astrology and offers an olive branch to astronomers, there remains some doubt as to the warmth with which conventional astrologers will receive the news that Mercury in Virgo—if you’re on top of your game, you know that notwithstanding 2,000 years of precessional variation, a planet is often in the same tropical and sidereal sign (Google ayanamsa)—is equatorially in Leo.
It would seem that the Antipodeans, having turned astrology upside down, feel free to align our symmetrically season-based Sign-boundaries to arbitrarily defined constellations—yet, whether they realize it or not, isn’t that what all siderealists do?—and are more comfortable with ambivalence than we Western and Jyotish adherents of fixed quality systems, in which ambivalence, if it is perceived, is resolved by polarity. We will watch developments in this nascent field with great interest.
And of course the Moon has said nothing about abdicating his regularity, so no effect on lunar calendars should be anticipated. It is confirmed that the First Crescent will be visible to the naked eye on Saturday, accompanied for lucky southern hemisphere viewers by a zenith manifestation of the gaseous nebula known since time immemorial to the original antipodeans as The Emu.
Suffice to say: may you live in interesting times.
Abliq is Science Editor of EverHive, the search ID for Southern Hemisphere Astrology on Facebook and developer of eSprit Astrolomical Software.”
Well! What do you make of that?
I eventually found the passage I was looking for.
“…some interpreters claim that “The Origin of the Work of Art” does not seek to “uncover the essence of art,” but that is misleading. As Heidegger says, his essay does not seek to set out one “timelessly valid determination” of the essence of art which would apply retrospectively to the entire history of art, but that is only because he does not understand essences the way they have been understood from Plato to Kripke, namely, as “timelessly valid determinations” of what something is. In fact, “The Origin of the Work of Art” does attempt to uncover and communicate art’s historical “essence,” by which Heidegger means that structure which allows art to reveal itself in different ways as it unfolds in the human understanding across time. What is confusing for many readers is that this historical essence of art is not some substance underlying the different forms of art or even a fixed property that would enable us to distinguish art from non-art but, instead, an insubstantial and ever-changing “essential strife” that is built into the structure of all intelligibility (the structure whereby entities become intelligible as entities) [my emphasis], as we will see.”
Iain Thomson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011.
I have some thoughts of my own on the content of these two articles.
North
What is revealed by the progression at S.H.A. from ecliptic to equatorial measurement is a pre-eminent, even fetishized, status for ‘North’. North is an entity. It has a history, and is the essence, in Heidegger’s usage of the term, of the zodiac viewed from the south. If I use the term ‘South’ to you in the Northern Hemisphere it resonates with warmth, sensuality and freedom, I suggest. The North has those connotations here in the South, but to immigrants it is also the direction of what we left behind.
The southern sky abounds with riches, and half of half the population of southern cities barbecues under it (the people on the south side of east-west streets), and yet seldom do you meet anyone with any familiarity with it. Perhaps its motion has something to do with it: it’s not linear; it has no east and west. I imagine the same applies ‘above’ the equator, and herein we find a difference. North is above us, and south is below you. We live in negative latitudes. North is so fundamental that when we walk southward we know east by imagining ourselves back to front. It is a difficult exercise to imagine you of the North as you are: beneath us.
Those bright stars mentioned in the article which are exactly opposite each other are always so, but only form a ‘gate’ due north and south. Your anti-clockwork soul or being is our anti-clockwork ego, and your clockwork ego is our clockwork being, but the meridian is the gyroscope which keeps us all upright upside down.
Just one more thought occurs to me. I mentioned North’s history. The site of Melbourne was taken from its indigenous inhabitants in the 1830s. The quickest and easiest way to perform the cadastral survey which imposed order on the land-grab was by the compass, and so Melbourne grew, boundary by parallel boundary, skewed towards the east by the magnetic declination of the day, about 9°. I cannot find another place like it on the globe.
North is our “essential strife“. It discloses our being. It is nothing less than a work of art.
Southern Hemisphere Astrology 