“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.
“Chi K’ang asked Confucius about government, saying, ‘What do you say to killing the unprincipled for the good of the principled?’ Confucius replied, ‘Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between superiors and inferiors, is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it.’”Analects XII, 19, Kindle Edition, Open Road Integrated Media 2016.
Whether he stands or sits in the men’s toilet is immaterial if he calls himself a man. On the Dasein clock he might be rescuing animals from floods, putting out bushfires or carting hay, but his custom is an instinctively assertive response to community’s self-importance, whether he has time to listen or not. After all, you can’t set up a committee every time you must do something, can you? He can be impatient and harsh, but he has a lot of practical wisdom, perhaps because he has chewed so many grass stalks waiting for it to rain, or to stop raining. One year, it rained and rained, right through Christmas. You cut the hay, then you relax at Christmas, right? Wrong, hay ruined in the field! Talking to one bloke who was adamant that you wouldn’t cut it if it was still growing, you could tell he was in unfamiliar territory two months late in early January, and he had more than one manager sweating on his call. I told him the Moon was full, and he spent the next ten minutes on the phone, because as any peasant will tell you, it never rains at a Full Moon. Of course, in a rare gap in the weather his peasants got the harvest safely into the shed.
My grandfather raised sheep in the West Australian wheatbelt. He used to tell a yarn of the time an itinerant labourer came looking for work. Papa had work for him, so he told him to come back in the morning. Next morning, Papa invited the labourer to have breakfast with him while he described the location of some fencing which needed repair. Papa was only too happy for the man to have a second helping, because the job was too far away to come back for lunch. “Tell you what,” the man said as he finished, “If I have a bit more I can work right through to dark,” “Fair enough,” agreed Papa, and when the labourer had stuffed himself full of food, the two men walked outside. The labourer marched off towards the front gate. “It’s back this way,” called Papa. “Scusa,” the labourer called back. “I never work after my evening meal.”
Even if there was nothing good on the telly, you wouldn’t sit out on the verandah in the twilight like we used to. Mosquitoes big as sheep. So I really couldn’t say what phase the Moon is, and if there might be a climate change. Some big storms, the river silts up at the mouth, and the farm goes underwater. Mosquitoes love it, but I reckon the greenies in the fastness across the creek don’t spend much time on the verandah either. They clamour for nature to be allowed to run its course, and the catchment can be inundated for years. Fortunately there is a popular surf break at the mouth, and when the access road gets too boggy and the Council closes it, a kilometre to carry the board gets too much, and somebody in the dead of night digs a channel. Like I said, peasants have a lot of practical wisdom.
Interesting that the astronomical year starts when it is so dry. Water-carriers and Fishes: something wrong there, you would think. I know Pisces. Uranus was camped there for years. Spoke to a drifter years ago, before the mosquitoes, and she showed me the dim lines of the fish as ridges where Moon and Uranus often sat around a fire and talked of thousands of years ago. All I could see was a jockey standing in the stirrups, but no colours or number to guide me in Cups betting. Pretty useless, I would say, and I told her so.
I ceased a long time ago to be amazed when things get turned upside down. Speaking of the resurgent popularity of socialism among millenials and the recent commemoration of the victory which set in train the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square, I am reminded of the time a steer had a horn growing into his eye, and a couple of friends and I minding the farm while Mum was off somewhere tried to hacksaw it off. We couldn’t bear the bellows of agony, so called a neighbour for advice. He ripped it off with six violent blows with the hacksaw. “Bloody city-slickers,’ he growled.
Come to think of it, in reference to something the Sun said last time we met, let me say that my business is not to unite. It may have a terrestrial function, my motion, and the relativity of perspective may promote inclusivity, but binary concepts are beyond me. I just keep going, whether I orbit the Earth or the Sun, and whether you measure my movement or not. Of course I will suffer and die one day, but the cow’s horn has to come off, and that’s that, whether it be Frisian, Hereford or Angus! Well I hope you have enjoyed this candid shot of the Peasant in Northern Hemisphere Tropical Taurus. I know I have, because you’ve been such respectful listeners, even after such a big breakfast! Scusa!
“Is it possible to be on the outside of the outside of the outside? Or perhaps that is the seventh circle of hell.“ Rick Morton.
It’s nearly last curtain for the Moon: time, I can feel it in the stalls, to put his costumes back in Wardrobe, or the closet perhaps, and go back into the Underworld.
My father used to say I talked because I liked the sound of my own voice, but I think it was irrepressible for two reasons: it wasn’t mine, but a voice with which the woodwork might become human, the hills might converse across the creeks, and the stars might exchange their vacuum for a night sky; and it ignited the silence of ignorance, and complacency towards incarceration of the body by the mind, delighting in the play of power. I haven’t grown up much.
This blog began as a Facebook page, motivated by a rather naive impatience with people who were attracted to the meaning astrology seeks in the heavens but knew so little about the night sky that the Moon in Aries was effectively lost. As above, so below, people were saying who were as interested in making a living as in connecting real people to the real world. This motivation was of course also true of Facebook, who invented the monetary value of talking to the world, and silenced the hills.
It might profit us ordinary people to compare ourselves to peasants, for we resemble them in many ways, despite protesting too much, methinks. Alan Hollinghurst, in his introduction to Penelope Fitzgerald’s quite superb Offshore, quotes the author as being drawn to “people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost … They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts ….” I think of myself, I think of people in various places trying to survive the devastation visited on them by distant, imperious and collusive decisions of unfathomable interest, indigenous Australians, West Papuans, Palestinians (and indeed Israelis), and anybody whose traditions situate them on top of what someone else wants. I think of the courage of the equally unfortunate communities disintegrating in arduous habitats of no value to anyone else, seduced of their youth.
”What the land needed was not a degree but sons and, in certain cases, daughters who were willing to stay behind and work it and breed. It was, and to an extent remains, a feudal system in its simplistic expectations.” Rick Morton, A Hundred Years Of Dirt.
The reason Southern Hemisphere Astrology Full Moon names are so archaic is because, like voice and vocation, they arise in the Underworld, where cosmos breeds mind, where the numinous dwells, where the memes of 85 million years belie their disappearance, and where we put the past, the poor and the dead. What better symbol of community than the peasant in Spring, what better model of self-acceptance, confidence in, and contribution to others, in the Adlerian terms Kishimi and Koga (The Courage To Be Disliked, Allen & Unwin, 2017) use to describe community. And if your season is not Spring, it really is in your Underworld. But the Moon, your moon, is not a symbol, is it? And you don’t think of yourself as a peasant?
What is there to learn from the mechanics of peasantry towards an optimization of harmony and control in the age of artificial intelligence? What will we do with the poor when climate change erodes their self-sufficiency and menial stop-gap occupations are filled by machines? How will we frame our global regulations so that the annihilation of the poor indicates to us their best interests? Will the economics of automation offset the economics of mental illness?
Jusqu’ici tout va bien, as the man who fell from a skyscraper said as he counted the floors. Control the Underworld, the presence of absence, and you own the country. But the question is, how to do that without getting stuck there, like the peasant? What typifies the peasant in our everyday usage of the term is a lack of the normal ambition to make the world a better place, an acceptance of the unacceptable, an unpalatable satisfaction with ignorance. The account the peasant gives of past and future is rooted in repetitions and cycles: such and such a season, a birth here, a death there. It seems shallow and constrictive, but in comparison with us, he seems free of incapacity, of a sinister legacy of the past, and of anxiety about the future. The Underworld, our unconscious and unknown, is palpable to him: the ground of his being is the earth upon which he works, this globe with its atmosphere and its climate which physically enfolds him and his ancestors. At least he is grounded. Perhaps it should inspire our confidence too, that if you feel unqualified to exchange ideas about how the world might be made a better place, you can at least enjoy finding yourself in the body of your own mind.
Enmeshed in his physical rather than emotional environment, he is no more attuned to human behaviour than the pigeons of suburbia, who keep telling everybody to “Cross the road” an hour too late after daylight saving kicks in. He is oblivious to the precession of the equinoxes and the ‘man box’. Neither happy nor unhappy, he seems satisfied simply to get done the job at hand. Self-development for him is a good meal for family and friends. You can safely predict such a person deprived of subsistence will instantly turn to crime. But what of that? He is of use to us, even as a criminal, so long as he accepts and contributes to our power. In fact, we even feel a sense of connection with him, since we too are embedded in a non-emotional physical environment, a machine of economic and social goods in which we in turn often feel a lack of meaning, almost as though we are marionettes.
However, should he revolt, we must annihilate him, for if anything should obstruct the power which flows through us, our culture will collapse like a deck of cards. It actually feels good that so far this has not been necessary. That we continue to enable him to be poor reflects well on our compassionate community and the system we enjoy. He has served us well in surveillance, but CCTV is making him redundant again. Opposite to the Artisan, the Sensualist and the Dabbler in the Order of Appearance, he would make the perfect counterfoil to architectural durability. We can make him a builder, or better still, a building inspector: more work for the insurance industry. The play’s the thing.
[Abliq to Community. You may have noticed I have omitted any reference to ‘country’ in the sense ‘Welcome to Country’ gives it. This is not because I consider myself less qualified to speak about reality than anyone else, whatever language is appropriated to do so, but because it is now so hard for most of us to hear country’s heartbeat empty, and that’s as much my Moon’s fault as anyone’s. Back with more good reading and listening leads next month, hopefully in good voice. Abliq out.]
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!
Today’s New Moon occurs in sidereal Libra, which carries the Sign of the second month of northern Spring, Taurus, and once again, visibility blurs its relationship with the seasons of the two hemispheres. The Sun occupies the Sign a month earlier than the Constellation, in northern Autumn and southern Spring, but the Constellation is prominent in the night sky through northern Spring and southern Autumn. It transits at dawn in March, solar midnight in May, and nightfall in August.
The traditional view of Libra, with autumnal associations of refinement and compromise (when the Sun is nowadays actually in Virgo), is of the scales of justice, a symbol which resonates with its Southern season and surroundings. Below it is the Spring star Arcturus and the Ploughman—impossible to see as such—or the Chinese ‘Great Horn’, which unmistakably resembles a corporate tie. Above Libra, over the zenith at the back of your head when you face north, is the array of the Centaur and the Wolf skewered on his spear.
Because of its proximity to the symbol of justice, this array has always represented for me the quintessential colonial Australian conflict between indigenous people and settlers, and settlers and colonial powers. Tranquility is guaranteed by the police if you’re a squatter and some swagman or band of blackfellas kills your sheep, but how secure are you in your moral rectitude? Who is interfering with whose livelihood? Is it a sheep, or a kangaroo? Is Ned Kelly a national hero or a murderer and thief? Whatever our decisions, we Australians transfer their shortcomings onto the ‘suits’ in the big smoke (Bootes).
My life has been witness to both an evolution of ideas of what is good, and an erosion by cultural relativity of absolute meaning. My ancestors stole the children: ‘good Christians’ they were who put the interests of indigenous children—whom they regarded as tainted in indigenous communities by white blood—before the need of their mothers, because they saw only dysfunction and destitution in indigenous communities. Of course, we can acknowledge the cause of that dysfunction in our simply being here, see the missionaries as henchmen to capitalist exploiters, and believe that a guilty conscience was a poor foundation for ethical action, but my ancestors did not only think they were doing the right thing by the “stolen generation”, they were at that time also sacrificing their husbands and sons in world wars believed—naively, as it can seem in retrospect—to be defending the good against evil. There’s nothing secure about rectitude.
Saiph is sublimated. It’s Halloween! Imagine this: at the ‘stroke’ of solar midnight in a dark churchyard in the Barossa region of South Australia, directly below its graves, the Moon aligns with the Sun. Notwithstanding that, because of daylight saving, this is the only midnight on Halloween, the return of the souls of these dead and the opening of the doors to the spirit world occur in the other tonight of the 31st. And yet something is happening here. Let’s just say that the spirits are having a dress rehearsal. “And his ghost may be heard….”
To be honest, I was drawn to the Lutherans because of the German connection with the swagman [linked above], but here’s another spooky connection. What unseen power guided my search to Our Lady of Navigators? What is it about two places—two churches—which are precisely opposite each other on the globe? What other questions am I being asked to answer? Where do we go when we die? What underworld does the Sun enter after dark? Does it die? What will happen to me if I’m awake at midnight? Am I alone?
Can you see a sign in the form of a halo of light from the south side of the igreja? Peasant superstition? An uncanny similarity asserts itself with the phenomenon known as the Brocken Spectre, a magnified shadow of an observer projected into mountain mist on the very same mountain, in the Northern [see?] German Harz Mountains, where witches meet on Beltane Eve to hold revels with the Devil. The Lutherans came from Germany, and it is Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere—or near enough—on the First of November! Phew! Fortunately, I can give you these salutary lines about limerence, addressing this apparition, to calm you down:
And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!
From “Constancy to an Ideal Object“, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coincidences? A demonstration that everything is connected? That everything happens for a reason? Or are the ‘suits’ right, and the world simply turns? On we go…
Today sees another portentous omen. Is the appearance of mighty Jupiter in the dawn sky a sign of the welcome return of the Prodigal, or is it to confirm our optimism towards the chance of a bountiful harvest untroubled by further calamities like the floods we have endured during the Spring? Is it the long-awaited sign that the ‘suits’ will stop Aleppo, the incarceration of Aboriginal youth and the global annihilation of wildlife?
And on the eve of the new month, the Moon reaches its apogee, which some foolish people believe has an influence on which things we are ashamed of and keep buried within us, instead hating their manifestation in other people, unaware that discriminating rectitude like this merely enables and perpetuates infantile, unconscious self-hatred.
So Happy Safar! The month when fighting is forbidden is finally over, and we can get stuck into it. ‘Safar’ means ’empty’, as in empty homes, when sanctions are lifted against trading and feuding. However, it must be pointed out that this coming month, regarded by some pre-Islamic Arabs as unlucky, is like all months, neither good nor bad in itself. Let there be an end to all such superstitions. No month, and no position of the stars, Sun, Moon or planets exerts any influence independent of the will of God. Does God wear a suit?
If you have ever been anaesthetized, it is not difficult to imagine Limbo. As deeply personal as your last experience might be, there might yet be something you wish to say, some further comment on an umpiring decision, perhaps. You may get many opportunities to dress-rehearse but it may be a considerable time before you are heard. I would add that we have this in common: my sincere wish in what I have written above is not to offend anyone—even if you’re wrong.
The small, landlocked, ethnically Arian principality of Aries is in turmoil tonight, as a horde of refugees sweeps across its borders following the announcement of an historic accord between the Eastern and Western Blocs of constellations, which imposes on members cooperation with, and acknowledges responsibility for, the so-called Second Diaspora. A delegation of celebrities from Leo is on its way to urge the government to show compassion, and to apply restraint as activists on the steps of parliament fan the embers of bitter resentment which remain in Aries from the treaty which displaced it so many years ago.
Sources have confirmed that the bounty of this year’s harvest could well remain ungathered as the rural population move en masse to the capital, in open disregard of the national interest, to assert what amount to isolationist agrarian values. Their spiritual leader is a pugnacious priest who calls himself ‘Father Moon’, a renowned bullfighter before the ‘sport’ was banned as one of the conditions Aries was forced to accept for continuing membership of the Western Bloc.
With violent confrontation between farmers and refugees seeming inevitable, Government spokespeople were this evening remaining tight-lipped.
