“Take me for a walk in your country, so I can understand why you call me that name, Peasant.”
Community is a complex concept—which concept isn’t?—but if it exists as a thing, and not just as a term used for political or economic advantage, it must have boundaries: it is both inclusive and exclusive. That the world is complete is a common way of looking at things.
Out here, and in here, I use the term ‘country’, borrowed, without permission but with profound respect, from its usage by the warriors and wanderers (as I perceive them) of Australian Indigenous culture, to signify a reality without boundaries, impervious to political and economic definition.
Peasants are they who belong to a community by virtue of their acquiescence in a political and economic system, but who, by the nature of their work, their intimate knowledge of the seasons of hot and cold, the transient and anonymous life-cycles of their animals, and the motions of the sky, stand at the boundary of community, where ‘who are all in this together?’ is as idle and meaningless a question as ‘who owns this country?’ So a peasant does not ask questions.
Country is no more nor less than territory’s transcendence of its map. Who among us lives harmoniously without maps? We are all peasants, and particularly when we celebrate the dead at Halloween, when Spring is bursting into Summer, and we should be celebrating Beltane, garlanded with flowers. Does the Queensland election portend Summer or Winter? Trick or treat, indeed!
“So I am possibly at a time of enlightenment?”
Maybe. Unless our heads are in the sand, or we are called, or it rains. Or a stranger comes.
I would like to say I remember every face which has ever presented itself to me, but I can’t. I very much fear that there is no longer a man in the Moon, and sometimes I wonder if there ever was. I know that I am, and where I am—I know your retina like the back of my hand—but I no longer seem to remember when I was here last or what I was feeling. I am in less of a rush to watch Lethe’s ablutions, and less susceptible to Aldebaran’s eye, as though I have forever already passed through the Gate of Man, or the waters of Lethe permanently cling to me now, in a Labyrinth of Forgetting haunted by the Minotaur of who I once was.
I know I once flaunted myself over the trenches of Flanders, and confusing what is deep in the heart with what is in the sky is as old as time, but whereas I have hosted human technology and confidence you could achieve anything, more than half the world has lost faith in everything, including that, and the rest are sampling a delectation of priceless baubles, even while they decry the manufacture of their satisfaction beyond the event horizon of the seventies, when developed countries allayed their panic about pollution by creating mountains of waste someone else could get filthy and sick transforming. ‘Progress’ had a different meaning in those days. Now it means a race by the poor for world domination, or giving up the technology of climate creation and planetary mining to lie down in a submissive but guilt-relieved ditch of abnegation.
How long ago was it that your ancestors could hold you accountable by disappearing over the horizon and leaving you to your ’emotional intelligence’, your faithless disobedience? In the oldest continuous culture on Earth, among Australia’s first immigrants, it looked like this.
But in the politics of resistance to patriarchal aggression the ancestors always reappeared in the East to applaud the resilience of women, and dare I say, non-binary men? Women who rise from their beds early in the Spring and retire late in Summer are confirmed in worshipping nothing but their own sensibility: it is all going to be just fine.
In the Northern Hemisphere it has always been a different story, and what other explanation do you need for the despoliation of the planet and the exploitation by miners and slavers of Southern Hemisphere equanimity? When they align themselves across the eastern sky, arcing like ancient wisdom between the cardinal directions of South and North, it is as gods within that the ancestors first return in Northern skies. It is at the Gate of God, when the nebulosity at the centre of the galaxy in the southwest leaves its spoor directly overhead, that boys cross into manhood in the hungry dawns of Spring and the proud evenings of Summer’s disappearance. The matriarchy of Southern latitudes is a mythical lost paradise. Seventeen hours or eight months later, the ancestors retire under the blankets above post-industrial Western welfare-states, where the masculinity-challenged may dream of healing, presence, collective rights and a day of reckoning.
Yes, the burqa and niqab are written in the stars, but now that nobody who looks can see, I am lost. I cannot read your heart any more. Your thought seems more like borderline personality disorder than soul, and that begins to seem as though we are no longer looking at each other with the same capacity to share that a bird on a wire has regarding the cars on the freeway, if only the drivers would stop, and let the children get out, to walk under the wire.
Is it time to be a Peasant or a Vagabond? Aggressive or insecure? Independent or withdrawn? I don’t know, and it is rather urgent we put our heads together, because next May, the Northern Ascending Node (Southern Descending Node) precesses to the Lethe. If I don’t find myself, neither will you, but unlike yours, my forgetting might be eternal. “What am I here[-]after?” we may well ask. The answer is just around the corner I turned yesterday, as you would realize, not having turned it.
“We navigate a passage through a jagged archipelago of partly submerged questions upon the raft of language.“ Kevin Brophy, “Shame-Job“, Meanjin, Winter, 2019.
“The power of incompetence may be one of the most inscrutable phenomena of the modern political age, but it certainly works.
Why else would a man like Boris Johnson feign it so carefully?”Annabel Crabb.
At first glance, the Drone seems to enjoy a privileged position: he is simply required to impregnate Women. They will take care of the rest, with the aid of the Hive. They will connect with other Women to form communities, within which they will raise the children, for whom Daddy will be a frightful imagination of Otherness. The Prodigal left; the Drone elects a life sentence. Diploid children are welcomed by the Sisterhood as relief for any of their three full-time jobs, food gathering, child raising and home maintenance, but haploids are a nuisance. Their demand of equality has always been a problem, but in recent times, when more and more haploids have been affecting to be diploid, that demand has become a real problem. Diploids are workers, not shirkers.
‘Meaning’ is all too often regarded as drawing a statistical line through difference. Actually, the term ‘meaning’ should be restricted to references to romance’s opportunity for a new basis for personality, a new mean of identity, a new origin, and a new incarnation of the Force. A Girl needs to learn what it means to have haploids and diploids in Her class, and how to deal with both. A Boy needs to learn to navigate in order to congregate, and must overcome the fear of losing his balance and turning himself inside out.
The Drone, or haploid Male, until stimulated by a sunset yearning which floods the west with Her oxytocin, dwells in the Underworld, asylum for the Hive’s superfluous ones, or so it feels when He is accustomed to sunset rising and other upside down signs of an opposite existence. Bathed in Her oxytocin, the Drone is frantic for a meaning–although on the wrong side of the history of that term–to the fusion of opposites at the Vertex whose power (in the Force) safeguards his redundancy. Of course, being haploid is a competitive thing. Once the Sun has gone to the Underworld She may be in the habit of craving humour rather than dependability, and a Drone’s repertoire is limited to one shot. Furthermore, the Force evolves. It really is the case that She seeks salvation of a different order as She gets older. What did you imagine those endless safaris into the Tropics were about?
Washing out the Emu of a Warrior sky, the Drone finds himself this time within a degree of Deneb Algedi, who, like a goat’s mouth (seen in the northern sky) isn’t fussy about what congregation She gets into. And so the Vertex and its opposite evolve towards death without God or Heaven, and Nirvana, like oxytocin, has no real existence in the eternal release from the wheel of rebirth and suffering which is ordained by the Force. The Drone joins the congregation in the Tropics, where Eternity always becomes Permanence because Cynicism always becomes Idolatry. This is serious stuff, where adults beyond transport grids seek to exchange transferable tickets to unlimited travel.
By what mechanism did the Drone find His way at the precise moment of His brightest shining to this place, which if it did not exist, would have to be invented, where the Zodiac, arcing directly overhead from due East to due West, and the Milky Way, arcing in a straight line from North-east to South-west, form a crossroad directly over an observer’s head. In little more than three minutes–how accurately the time of birth must be recorded on the Tropic of Capricorn around 18:00 Local Apparent Sidereal Time–the Anti-vertex has whipped from idolatry in the Tenth House through fantasy, delusion, convention, narcissism and finally cynicism high above in the House of the intellect. No wonder the Drone needs the heroism of His ultimate journeys constantly rehearsed. And no wonder it is! His deaths in the mansion of Deneb Algedi number in the millions and have required of His mystique absolutely everything.
Flight, heroic journey, mystery lover, significant other? Around and around we go, echoes of madness in the Bardo of a queen’s Spermatheca. The Zealot, you may notice, always narrows himself into the correct precedence, and bullies have always been the socialities most easily socialized: next year, mate, you can be the Drone’s survivor, as you always were.
Capricorn
The Force is other than country. On my country, the phases of ancestry are synchronous with the six moments of the Milky Way, the values of the stars are devices of the poetry of landscape, and the cycle of Full Moons is a music of heroic impotence. The Force, meanwhile, is where my country loses its emptiness, where there is no when to be absent from, and where I am nothing but inscrutable purpose in an instant of virtual forgetting, like the flight of a Drone.
“Forget all these pious denunciations of populism from progressive politicians. When figures like Khan use such grotesquely exaggerated moral categories to denounce Trump, they are promoting extremism more effectively than anyone else.” Greg Sheridan.
“And if everyone is anti-racist and anti-sexist, you have to really be strongly anti-racist and anti-sexist to get more points.” Jonathan Haidt.
For some strange reason, June is a time of dissatisfaction. Aligned according to preference as to whether it is poetry or pleasure that is not enough, everyone is declamatory. It is as though to the boor preening her preeminent progressivity the Moon could not make the timing of his fullness at the Galactic Centre more self-evident.
Whereas for most of us the Constellations are a backdrop to lunar motion, the zealot has a tendency to take things literally, project his borrowed and reified concepts onto a cosmology to which he expects unquestioned adherence by anyone with half a brain, and in eliding perspective, miss altogether the relative meaning which that other peculiar human being, the natural scientist, has given to the celestial spectacle since the Stone Age, namely the lapse of time.
The Gates of God and Man have absolutely nothing to do with the Signs or Seasons. They are the intersections of Ecliptic and Galactic Plane, and have occupied the Constellations of Sagittarius and Gemini since before their invention, some twelve thousand years ago, when axial precession was revealing its intention to turn the Seasons upside down. The Gate of God is called Woe, where the soul crosses the Acheron. It coincided with the Southern Summer Solstice in 1998. Jupiter at opposition, vacillating, obsesses with it every 83 years, last in 1960, next in 2043, although you could infer powerful dreaming from its retrograde hesitancy this year. Jupiter will cross on December 4. The Full Sun crosses at Southern Litha, in 2019 seven hours after Solstice on December 22.
The Gate of Man is called Forgetting, where the Ecliptic crosses the Lethe, which may or may not be the portal to reentry into the phenomenal world by the departed. It might simply be the spawning ground of socialist zealots. The New Sun crosses on June Solstice Day. As for Jupiter, the last time it was at opposition at the Gate of Man was December 1977, and the next will be December 2060. I am confident that by then, no Australian zealot will refuse to sing the words of this new and improved national anthem:
Australians all let us rejoice
For we are strong and free
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil
Our home is girt by sea
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare
In herstory’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia, yair
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia, yair!
Certainly, born in 1948, Abliq won’t, hypochondria notwithstanding. In the meantime, I hope you catch the close conjunction of Mars and Mercury in evening twilight tomorrow, and with clear skies on June 30, both the last appearance of the Morning Star and the evening twilight end of the 2017-19 Mars apparition: so endeth the Southern Year, and beginneth another, yair!
The dilettante gets bad press: Jack of all trades, master of none. No Universal Man is he, in a world made of interlocking expertise. Something is wrong with him. It is as though he has disassembled the jigsaw puzzle of reality and is trying to put it together a different way. You can’t do that, we say, it only goes one way. But why, he demands, why can’t we all make it the way we want it? Because that would be too messy, we say. It has taken a long time to make ourselves in the mould of the world as we see it, and no good will come of tinkering. The world was made, is made, by someone else, according to laws it is sensible to obey, and that’s that. But on that point, that myth, the dilettante cannot agree.
In his personal country the world is constantly reshaping itself within: if people believe only in obeying the law, the world is not made by law, but by submission; if there is strife, it is not caused by opposing laws, but by failure to share pleasure. Country is not an area on a map, but the experience of connection, and orientation must go hand-in-hand with recognition. The law does not demand submission, but personal sense, in accordance with instinct. The law must have a rhythm you can dance to. Without recognition of its origin in the personal space of communal dreaming, country is reviled for belonging to others, particularly venomously by owners and experts, lawmakers, high priests, scholars, ethnographers et al. who are qualified to annex and catalogue the minutiae of a grand plan.
But what of the country of those who seem happily to submit to the grand plan, who are entertained by diversity, who meditate away their instinct as the underlying cause of suffering, and who believe it prudent to have no country? Is it possible that country is an evolutionary phase of universal consciousness without borders and identity without individuality, that it appears at a stage of growth as a genetic template like ego which enlightenment gently but insistently eradicates? The dilettante has not found the way to such constant flight. He still gets tired and hungry. He meditates on the branch of a tree. He flies away when somebody chops it down. Is it possible that humanity will find a home in a Big Empty Country in which automatic ships plying the Tasman will not be haunted by the seaman’s sense of ocean heft and engine throb?
He looks around at the stars above him and scratches his head. There will be no stars when he closes his eyes for the last time. Will they still be haunted by memories and totems and bowels despite forgetting the names he has given them? So wonders the Third Mate as he returns to the haven of the bridge after looking due north at the Full Moon, at the precise moment the Milky Way was rising vertical through fern-shaped Aquila on the port side. Dabbler in astrology, namer of stars, humming a song which has popped into his head, he muses on the status of memory. Are the galactic signs of language and identity his delusions of reward, or placed in the right place at the right time by a healer? Are they evolutionary or dismembering? He becomes conscious of what the song is saying: these visions of Johanna are now all that remain. Does Johanna linger in some tropical zone of the Urmensch? Are relativity and Louise temperate zone phenomena?
He looks forward to his R&R with fellow-golfers Pru and Bob next week, but if the truth be known, he is still shaken by that strange encounter a few days ago in Brisbane, when total strangers had gathered around him affectionately, showing him photos and bringing him up to date about people he couldn’t remember having ever met. That parting comment from the freckle-faced redhead in the bow-tie who more than he seemed to have preserved some of his youth, chiding gently, “And at least I have a university degree, eh?” What will Pru, chair of Indigenous Studies, make of evolutionary cultural divides at the latitudes of the Galactic Poles? Talk about something they can eat?
His supposed area of expertise is safety, but he does not approach its regulation as of a set of rules like Deuteronomy, but rather as a negotiated settlement of dynamic entitlement. The cultural property Pru might accuse him of appropriating is itself an appropriation: few people alive belong to a community living beneath the Milky Way, and any offence to the instinct of the few ought to be weighed against its stirring up of the rationality of the many. In his heart he knows that for thousands of years the people of the Milky Way felt its beat as he does-–as the seaman feels the throb of the engines-–whatever meaning they gave it. He is trying to graft lost instinct into his intellect. He wills to be a descendant of his ancestors.
He believes that Aboriginal consciousness was saturated by the night, as is his, and that the people who saw the emu saw everything in the Milky Way’s vivid band. Furthermore, in their intimate connection with it, they orientated the horizon to it, that is to say their daily experience, and profoundly considered the zenith, into which they fell as they lay to sleep. To overlay on that consciousness a Western geometry which evolved erect, eyes looking out windows, in no way diminishes it, but rather reaches out a humble hand of recognition. He is the one in need of reconciliation.
The dilettante discovers in Bundjalung country the latitude at which the zenith of the warrior beat passes into Scorpio, if this most prominent constellation of Southern Australian winter nights is measured from its easternmost star. Further south, at the Clarence River boundary between Bundjalung country and Gumbaynggirr country, Pisces and Virgo are replaced at the extremes of the Prime Vertical by Aquarius and Leo, if the constellations of the Zodiac are measured by twelve equal divisions of the ecliptic, originating at the zenith of the Northern Rivers warrior, he who monitors the boundary between Northern and Southern Australia.
How is it possible to divorce the study of Aboriginal language from an intuitive grasp of the night sky? How can one conceive of an evolution of communication divorced from country? How much needs to be forgotten to create conscious order? And on that note, how is it possible to completely forget people who have obviously once known you well, to so utterly lose the memory of who you once were? The dilettante thinks again, as he clears away his charts, of those university days, studying languages, and all the turns his life has taken since. He searches his mind for an intuition of discontinuity but can’t find one. It seems that each new bearing has offered itself at the destination of the one before, and yet he can remember only the bearings. Was it really ever just too concise and too clear, that Johanna wasn’t here?
Retrograde Jupiter reaches conjunction with the North Galactic Pole tonight, and will transit within a degree of it, repeating this configuration, until its conjunction with the Quarter Moon on July 1, and thereafter the Milky Way’s suburban disappearance in evening twilight.
Is it a sign? Of course it is! What do you think a sign is? If you cannot see the Milky Way, and therefore have no connection to what this sort of apparition may have spoken to your ancestral culture, well, that is indeed unfortunate.
The passage of the imminent Full Moon is a blind passage. We gaze up at it as into a bright street light, seeing nothing. Its lame attempt to outshine the Sun diverts our attention from much more important things, signs which can nourish our quest for authenticity, which demonstrate the vast and timeless backdrop behind our pretences, and which confirm the vanity of life which ignores death. This is a story of the embrace of tradition: how a group of wage-slaves transcended the imperatives of economic reality and became artisans.
The story begins at lunch-time, when a group of tradesmen emerge from the Quarry Hotel to return to work up the street. They see a young man in the intersection outside drawing lines with yellow chalk, ducking in and out of traffic, and enquire into his apparently passionate project. Word passes around at their workplace and when they return to the Quarry after work, they are followed by the foreman and an engineer.
The traffic is now dense, but the young man is still at it as the workers install themselves at the bar. A desultory conversation about the weekend’s football is attempted, but nobody is really attending to anything but the single-minded effort of the young man outside. Suddenly, as one, safety being drilled into them as of paramount importance in the union industry, the drinkers pour out of the pub and set up barricades with tables from the hotel, and begin diverting the traffic.
Instantly, while the young man, in his early twenties and of middle-eastern appearance, carries on chalking the plan for a building in the middle of the street, there is uproar. The barricades are aggressively confronted by irate motorists and, very soon, two and then four tram drivers, not to mention the publican trying to reclaim his property. Some police arrive, and any pretence of restraint is abandoned. A melee ensues, until thirty police in riot gear arrive, and after dispersing the combatants with capsicum spray and restoring the flow of traffic, take the instigators, including the young man, into custody.
Under questioning through an interpreter, the young Iraqi immigrant confesses that his intention, without offending anyone or breaking any laws, is simply to create a two-dimensional representation of a mosque, facing the Quiba along Weston St, and featuring a street-wide arch in the style of the Islamic arches which gave inspiration to the architects of the Gothic cathedrals, aligned east and west like the magnificent celestial arch he saw for the first time upon arriving in Australia, and which has filled him with such joy as a Muslim student of architecture that he sees his design in the intersection as a fusion of north and south, ancient and modern, spiritual and physical, and celestial and temporal.
The Superintendent asks him, what celestial arch? The Milky Way, he responds, adding his conviction that it was the vault of heaven which first inspired the Muslim arches of medieval architecture. The workers are released to be charged on summons, and the senior policeman, intrigued, follows them back to the Quarry. Politely resisting invitations to have a beer, the Muslim spreads a number of blueprints on a table in the lounge. The first is of his Celestial Arch a few minutes before midnight, outside:
The second is of the transit of the not-quite-Full Moon one and a half minutes later:
The third is of the ever so slightly asymmetrical angles at midnight:
Nobody in the pub has seen the Milky Way more than once or twice in their lives, but there is no cynicism. Instead, laptops come out and people makes calls and consult smartphones.
Pretty soon the assemblage is joined by some influential people: the Moreland Mayor, an Imam, an Aboriginal Elder, a Catholic Priest, a Buddhist Lama, someone from the Comedy Festival, another from the Brunswick Festival, numerous architects, geographers, engineers, teachers, trade union officials, photographers and journalists, an astronomer and an assortment of drug dealers, poets, artists and astrologers from off the street.
The Imam challenges the Iraqi’s Arch by presenting a depiction of the moment as seen from ancient Babylon:
This is not the inspiration for the illustrious invention of the arch, he asserts, but the transit of the opposite pole:
He does admit that the Iraqi’s is more impressive, but the Lama disagrees, and presents a depiction of the Arch as the vault of heaven itself encircled by the 360° vision of the Buddha:
The astronomer wants everyone to know that the Full Moon will actually transit over Guatemala, and presents the evidence of an anonymous astrologer, complete with deference to the tropical sign of the Northern Hemisphere, and this gets quite a few at the bar talking:
The same sky over us will look like this, he adds:
Irrelevant, says a geographer from PNG, what matters is the Arch, and here on Bougainville is the place to build it:
This causes great consternation among the entourage of the Mayor, but faced with the Iraqi student’s increasing discomfort, the tradesmen rise to the challenge. “She’ll be right, mate,” says the foreman. “We’ll just make it work, won’t we boys?” A rousing cheer goes up throughout the pub. “Midnight it is!”
By eleven o’clock, despite the hubbub, everyone knows the disparate elements of the Iraqi’s dream and their feasibility, and believes that at midnight something real will happen. And believe it or not, there is a real chance that the Arch will be erected across the intersection:
However, that is not the highlight of this event. Rather, at the stroke of midnight, one hundred and fifty men, women and homeless children are standing in the intersection of Lygon and Weston Streets in Brunswick, facing south towards the city and craning their necks backwards in a ceremonial observation of the Full Moon. The Aboriginal Elder welcomes the Iraqi-born student to her country, and ‘the boys’ now know how to build.
Nothing is more certain than that the Quarry will become a temple of ecumenical faith, but in the same way that land is an interruption of the sea, ‘country’ is buffetted by forces which cannot be enclosed by architecture. Diplomacy may indeed farm many ‘countries’ in one place, and if it were true that it never rains at a Full Moon, then perhaps, were the Virgo Moon shining full over Melbourne instead of Guatemala, one hundred and fifty converts would not be feeling so cold, wet and foolish.
The Southern Cross and the Galactic North Pole transit around midnight in early April, and naturally the Virgo Full Moon–the first full moon after the Southern Hemisphere Autumn Equinox, and normally, but not always, the Easter Moon–also transits around midnight, so let us have a close look at this intriguing coincidence of the Southern sky, or one astrological representation of it anyway. I am truly sorry that our society has polluted the night sky so irresponsibly that some of the elements of this representation have been expunged from your view. You must use your imagination. That’s life.
If the navigators who charted Crux in the 16th Century had not been Christian, it might have come to me with another name, Possum (Boorong) or Stingray (Yolgnu), for example, but it is as the Southern Cross that it is prominent in the national flags and consciousness of vast numbers of Southern Hemisphere people. Consequently, the popular names for the asterisms featuring Miaplacidus and Aspidiske have followed the Crux convention: the Diamond Cross and False Cross respectively. (That featuring Canopus is my afterthought, putting in perspective the way of all human flesh.)
The temptations besetting the Child of Humanity on the cross of our finitude are the bright stars above left, centre and right of our head as we look down on our axis. The attributes of the stars in this representation are a meld of their physical characteristics, their resonance with each other and the significance of their position in constellation and asterism. As might be expected, I emphatically reject non-names like Acrux and Gacrux given by northerners who can’t even see this far south. It is anathema to me that we usurpers of Aboriginal country seldom have a personal relationship with the sky they lived in and we took from them. Go out and name your own stars. Create your own mythology, before you lose the night sky completely!
My symbolism admittedly reflects my Judaeo-Christian cultural heritage, but I believe it has universal significance. When I was a boy, the Easter rituals of resurrection and regeneration seemed to me to lack the symbolic force of Northern Hemisphere Spring, but the fortuitous configuration of the Southern Hemisphere Easter sky, to my knowledge amazingly unnoticed by my Christian teachers or previous generations, is nothing short of miraculous! Pause to reflect on these facts: the Northern Hemisphere Spring Equinox has been in Pisces for the entire Christian era, and the next Full Moon has appeared in the Virgin (as seen in the sky) for about half of that period, but the Southern Cross is not visible in ‘Asia Minor’, the birthplace of the Cross as symbol of resurrection, and the alignment of transiting Virgo with the high arc of the Milky Way bridging east and west is also not visible there. The symbolism is potent only in the South. It can be our Easter myth: the cosmic placement in our lifetime of an Easter cross–in ‘fact’ the several crosses of historical Golgotha–at the equinoxes linking North and South, law and life, structure and becoming, and as the primeval keystone of a bridge linking East and West, personal and social, the authentic rights and obligations of our own ‘country’.
The first temptation in the path of authentic humanity is to get ‘out of it’.
The second is to be someone else.
And the third is to be perfect.
In my vision, the Southern Cross stands at the confluence of two rivers of the Underworld, the River of Woe, Acheron, and the River of Forgetting, Lethe. The Southern Cross and the head of the Emu mark where the River of Hatred, Styx, flows from view, as his wife and child disappeared from the view of the crucified Spartacus in the 1960 movie by Stanley Kubrick. This is the river on whose bank Orpheus mourned the loss of his Eurydice, and whose waters bound the oaths of the gods and made Achilles immortal, except for his Achilles heel. In the contemplation of the invisible spirit of the physical world, our eternal absence in death, and the devastation created by unrestrained emotion, we have three Achilles heels.
I do not believe that the physical Moon will pass by these stars as through force-fields, any more than I believe the psycho-social effects of its gravity can be particularized and quantified, but as Easter approaches, I will be reflecting on the pitfalls of the authentic life they symbolize, and I suggest you do too. Integrity, not identity, is the way, and the serious business of being, the only meaningful task you will relinquish in death, consists of embodying the symmetry of apparent opposites. Your ‘country’ is the meaning you give your sky. As Robert Dies would say, “Happy lathering, customers!”
Psalm 74:20—“Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”
“Where were you when I called? Why didn’t you answer? I needed you! I was absolutely terrified! Listen. I was in a dream, walking to the bus after my lecture, head full of images of Islamic architecture, when the attack happened and all hell broke loose. I heard the takbir, then gunshots, then I walked into a screaming horror. Sirens coming, people running in all directions, others lying injured or dead all over the path. At the very instant I realized what had happened, staring down at an old man on his knees and covered in the blood squirting from the woman he was tending, a woman on the other side looked into my eyes with an expression on her face I didn’t register at first. I stared at her, and then suddenly I got it. I was to blame. My first reaction was outrage, but then I became aware that everyone was looking at me with the same expression, not contempt or fear, but recognition. That’s when I nearly fainted in shock: no, it wasn’t that I was wearing the uniform, but that it was I, naked and without qualities, who wore that mediaeval uniform, or any uniform, and that I felt guilty, recognized! There was nowhere to go! Nowhere to be!”
Sidereal time begins again in Pisces, and here we are again, face-to-face with our most serious, fundamental and seemingly insoluble problem. Rome is burning, like a bushfire which began as a controlled burn but escaped with a wind-change. We are caught in a feedback loop: we want our elected representatives to do something, to stand for something, and make decisions on the basis of what they know, majority decisions, even if we disagree; on the other hand, to get anything done, our representatives, monitoring the public mood, safeguard their status by telling us as little as possible, and what truth they tell is what they believe is a palatable truth in terms of who-knows-who’s interpretation of what we want to believe; and the result is that all we know is spin, and we, the minorities of one, inadvertently, are spinning the spin which disempowers our representatives. The age of Pisces might even suggest itself as the age of leadership in criminal submission.
Any fool these days knows that truth is relative. And yet, allergic to fundamentalism, to the wisdom of the Bible and the Qur’an, so many are faithful adherents to other fundamentalist notions such as universal human rights and our culpability in, and the moral imperative to reverse, climate change. Pisces, the symbol of Christ, nowadays eschews absolutist claims, but in its incarnation in the South it still attests to humanity’s resilience. In the face of the second law of thermodynamics and the inevitability of irrelevance and death, it delivers the semi-permanence of tradition and culture. By some miracle we are hanging together–remembering that the next Full Moon is the Easter Moon (no pun intended)–but doubt is no longer a benign influence, as happens when you’re being told a pack of lies: you’re supposed to doubt the strictures of your ego, not the very existence of truth itself.
Poeppel Corner is an imaginary place, situated in theory on the boundaries of the Northern Territory and Queensland with South Australia. Attesting to its imaginary nature and the obstacles faced by any agreement on anything, its marker post, accessible along the QAA Line and the K1 Line four-wheel-drive tracks 174km west of Birdsville, and beyond the GPS receptivity of your smartphone, is not where it was intended to be by the surveyors who, with 19th century technology, unimaginable adversity and incredible bravery, intended to mark the gazetted border at the intersection of latitude 26 South and 138 East. Did you know that Australia has moved about 1.6m northeast since 1994? Do you realize that your property has no fixed position? And finally, nobody knows what time it is where three time-zones, and more when daylight saving changes (on April Fools’ Day), intersect! Why don’t you go there, and decide for yourself?
The entirely speculative names I have given to the Milky Way ‘rivers of the Underworld‘ may offend you. Is it really true that people of the South born in January and February carry an innate regret for the suffering of centuries, and those born in the second half of the year are doomed to struggle with ignorance, or do I just like the sound of my own voice? Whatever the demographics of the matter, if you are familiar with the night sky of October, the Sun is in the middle of nowhere. She needs her son to validate her, to stand up and make a contribution to the society she has brought him to, and she needs him to make it in a way which substantiates her claim to ethnic and religious continuity. She needs him to build something of local value within his tradition.
The miracle of tradition is the personality that goes into its reinvention. But it is also the resilience of the underlying layers of its palimpsest. May I make one thing absolutely clear? You do not separate yourself from ‘Das Man‘ by having a story, or in narrative terms a journey. In fact, the self has no story and no journey. It stares its transparency to itself in the face, without props, because it is not an object. Far from it! Its subjectivity reveals every object as a subject, and the process of reality as civility among subjects, with an emptiness of plot. Who knows what the next encounter will demand, each from the other?
The authentic self is not interstitial. Society is not its god. What godly power can compare to the reverence of the self for the finitude of the world it has created and expires with every breath? What sense of belonging to a master plan can outweigh the sense of being unique? What calling has a voice to diminish our gratitude for just being here, when we who are about to die commune with the beauty of what we will depart? But on the other hand, if we want to be recognized, we have to make ourselves recognizable. Truth lies (sic) in all sides of an argument, but the argument has to be heard. Judgment rules over silence; diplomacy rules over noise, and mindfully, change.
The Sun entered the IAC constellation of Pisces at 17:49 AEDT today, but from the top, not the side, and so it is already approaching the centre-line of the Circlet of Pisces in right ascension (and passing the gamma star in ecliptic longitude). I would say that the Sun is there, below the notorious hilltop clearing where romantic love is both regularly revisited, and ruefully healed with self-help analysis of limerence. However, the Sun will not enter the Breamlea constellation of Pisces for five days, and it technically won’t change signs until the equinox. The ambiguity of its position is confirmed by our continuing summer heat. What is the Moon—in the last sign of winter—reflecting, the last sign of summer or the first sign of autumn? It would seem to matter to how its light shines into our beleaguered hearts at this time of year. Seasonal variability is a huge challenge to the conventions of astrology.
Tonight, Capricornian Gemini straddles the meridian at nightfall and Sirius, the marker star of South-Eastern Australian early winter is crossing to the west. The Leo Moon precedes the Easter Moon, plagued by self-doubt and yearning. This Moon resonates with our belief, not only that we are all connected in suffering, but that we are most authentic in healing. How can this be preposterous, in this enfeebled age, when we accept any cross which justifies self-medication, and virtue-signals are the default frequency of social media? How better to cling to a formal, archaic personality than to define our deficiencies as indelible wounds?
Wounds are real, but as Raphael tried to say as the Moon occulted or grazed him (Regulus) on the other side of the world on Friday night, “Get over yourself.” Even if the past can never die, the present must remain the site of optimism, and appreciation of one’s life for what it is. Only truth, elusive, transactional, never ultimate, continuously transformative, can heal our wounds. Compassion for each other’s healing wound is our Grail, but in resentment, anger, aggression and violence, in confrontation with ignorance and self-hatred, up against the wall of enablement and codependency, can we do that? And if we can’t, what does ‘healing’ mean, if not ignorant perfectionism?
Connection—the (Piscean) southern sign of Leo—is a nebulous concept at the social level. Yes, we are all citizens and we have many similar experiences but only in a theoretical sense can we be described as sharing the same values and the same social capital. It doesn’t firm our bonds to cross bridges, nor build bridges to affirm our bonds. Moreover, at an ontological level, connection consists of overcoming timeless mistakes about the nature of reality, and discovering the emptiness of our differences. Only in a theoretical way can those differences be connected by causality. The form of one’s wounding is empty, but the emptiness of one’s wound has form, as does the effect of what we self-medicate with. In short, connection is not black and white, opposite perspicacity, perfectionism, refinement and compromise as it ambiguously is. Let’s face it, we never look at the Moon as a society.
Perhaps redemption only comes with wounding, and recognizing our wound in they who wounded us. Perhaps it has to do with country. Country ends at the horizon, but the horizon is empty: one pace forward, one hour in time, and it is different. But it is not empty: beyond it is someone else’s. In fact, the conventional ‘true self’ can be thought of as a place over that other’s horizon, if the horizon is regarded as constantly changing—moving towards the sky, rotating, shrinking, expanding, darkening, emerging, including, excluding. In this train of thought, the realization dawns that country is precisely where we are standing, under our zenith. Everything within our horizon is ordered and held together by our meanings, including our orientation within it. In a ceremony of selfhood, I stand below an empty universe above an empty me. This is empty sovereignty over compassion and forgiveness. Somewhere in the 200k-odd square kilometres between the 139th and 140th meridian east, at some time in the middle of the night, another grandfather is looking at the Moon in the direction which represents the law, consoling himself that, beneath the scars of initiation, offence and loss, when all is said and done, he has always been a woman.
Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick.
So she called for the doctor to come quick, quick, quick.
The doctor came with his bag and his hat
And he knocked on the door with a rat-a-tat-tat.
He looked at the dolly and he shook his head
And he said “Miss Polly, put her straight to bed!”
He wrote on a paper for some pills, pills, pills
“I’ll be back in the morning with my bill, bill, bill.”
R.I.P. Bill Leak, the eternal spirit of Kirsty MacColl on an empty bench in Soho Square, and all the others who hung their heads out far enough from Desolation Row. Healing, the blessed waters of the Lethe which bathe trauma away, arises from ceremony, which arises from country. It is getting better and better. The healer, and the one healing, the parents, the daughter, the doctor, and the doll, are ‘I’.
