Have you ever been told to lighten up? Then you know the meaning of ‘frivolity’: letting go, moving on, getting over it, getting a life.
Frivolity is a question, not a statement, a New Year’s resolution you have no capacity to keep to, whether you know it or not. It’s the quality of the change to Australia’s national anthem from “We are young and free,” to “We are one and free,” when you’re broke and marooned outside your state by sudden and remorseless Coronavirus lockdowns.
Adherents to the settler narrative of Australian history and sympathisers with indigenous dispossession have been yelling “Get a life!” at each other for decades, and who knows which side is Morlocks and which side is Eloi? Finally, the issue has been resolved, along with the implications of absurdity our foretaste of Armageddon flings at our compulsive drive to be someone else.
The good burghers of a community in Queensland have invited the Moon down from the south to join with the elders Jupiter and Saturn, and the social media influencer Mercury, to help celebrate the day Sarina rejoins the Southern Hemisphere and brings Australia as one a day closer. All over town posters are advertising the upending of astrological meaning and the trivialisation of winter-sign intentions. Only those with permits will be allowed to enter from the north from midnight when police from Mackay and Rockhampton will glare at each other across a formidable barricade. But it’s not really an imposition on anyone’s freedom, just a harmless bit of fun: on Bramble Cay Day, February 25, every Australian will be south of the karma police blockade!
It is early in the morning of the year. We go abroad with faith alive in us, but let us not confuse the task of nurturing our faith with the insanity of perfection. If no amount of mindfulness can discourage you from striving to improve yourself, do try not to be motivated to be better than me. Keep faith not only with hope, but with anxiety, not only with imagination, but with dread. It is not wise to erect confidence on the entertainment of your judges, nor on the vanity of self-worth. The world of power and the subservient self are what they are, not what they ought to be.
Without in any way seeking to trivialise the sentiments of the previous paragraph, but also without further ado, let us sashay on into 2021 with those memorable words resounding in our aerodynamic Dumbo flaps: a day without a good belly-laugh is a day wasted!
Did you know that 90% of the dust in the world is made up of dead human skin? How do you feel about that? You think you’re dusting your house? You’re not you’re just moving your grandmother around.Dave Allen. (Read the one about the Demon Drink!)
As someone who has nestled in gender dysphoria and the lethargy of opprobrium for three score years and ten, and possibly developed borderline personality disorder as a result, who has no doubt been judged as an evasive scoundrel for promulgating the belief, on the political spectrum right of Genghis Khan, that we should value country above territory, resilience above compensation, self-reliance above compliance and perseverance above healing, I have been trying to bend my indolent imagination, being born a Cancer in the Southern Hemisphere on Christmas Day, to some understanding of the psychological landscape of Christmas, in the wet concrete of Mental Health repeatedly added in 2019 to the renovation of Our Global Temple of Everlasting Safety, and the possible significance for the traditional Christmas celebrations of the celestial background beyond its daylight, consisting of a host of invisible stars towards the centre of a galaxy plotted on an unconscious history of hell.
New Moons are metaphors for those brief moments when the genders coalesce, when the cultural rules make perfect sense and animosity makes none, and for good or ill, we just know we’re all in this constant change thing together. You will uphold and believe in the result, although your vote has gone to the loser, right? The Moon is a man? Yeah, right! Equilibrium is not equanimity. Can we at least agree that the world we all live in was not spawned by dreams, asterisms, gods and myths, which were designed to leave us courageously where we were, at home, in intergenerational struggle and competition for honour and eventually truth, but by the mathematics of eclipse and the scientific investigation of superstition, the coalescence of resentment and responsibility par excellence, and the farewell of ignorance thwarted by knowledge never cherished?
At the end of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (the Summer Solstice in both hemispheres is midyear), the Sun has crossed the Acheron in December since the days of Charlemagne, and within a week either ‘side’ of the Solstice since 1500 CE and until the end of the 26th Century. But what is a calendar, if not a mechanism for making time stand still? Thirty generations takes us back to the late 14th Century; in another 30 generations, the Sun will cross the Acheron after the beeps of New Year. What changes will Homo Sapiens Sapiens have managed by then? Will they be celebrating Christmas in a solar calendar of a different star system, or perhaps be gone altogether?
The Moon, obliged to pay the highest price to climb onto the Emu with the remorseless blind boatman Antares, crossed the Acheron unnoticed while your gifts were being wrapped and unwrapped. Now that it’s New, it is about to emerge once again on the right side of its monthly initiation into the timeless mythology of resilience, on the downward slope of conscious and righteous history, to briefly illuminate the sunset of you and me and our momentarily reunited families as we enjoy the break which commences our annual journey to global nowhere.
But what of the wrong side of history? Is there a ‘before’? Is there a ‘now’? Or is ‘now’ merely the right and wrong on either side? The body, the ego, the family, the culture: it’s pretty hard to be here now, without, in the immortal phrase attributed to H.L. Mencken, sitting on the fence with both ears to the ground. So many tragedies have unfolded—not only my fault, or yours, my judges—during my three score years and ten, and it does not necessarily indicate mental illness to spend hours each day in inconsolable grief. The lugubrious wailing of indigenous peoples is a healthy way for sadness to conquer equanimity confronted by the awful truth, the horizon of country. If you want proof that space is made out of time, return to somewhere you’ve been. Imagine, the next time you weep, you had a shoulder to cry on. Wouldn’t that make ‘why’ redundant?
December, the month of the Vagabond, was the month of Grandpa. Father Christmas (Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas) is your indulgent grandfather: have you never understood the child in your parents? What follows is the month of the parent in the child, the equanimity of the rider of the emu: the astrologer and the philosopher arm themselves with woe when they confront the future, because they have countless times been on the wild emu chase of grief and joy. The Veteran on the other hand, Full Moon in Gemini, is the sorcerer who observes the Gate of God in its Underworld, when the black hill to the north splits Taurus and Gemini at midnight. It was the water clock which enabled hundreds of sorcerers across the world to discover equinoctial precession at the same time, by calibrating midnight Gates with midday shadows. Now any witch can tell you, when Betelgeuse transits at December Solstice, it’s witching hour.
You might search the heavens in vain for the Knecht Ruprecht and the Krampus, but your grandparents are up there, right next to your parents’ grandparents, in various symbolic mazes of floor, forest, chapel, shed, cage and dusty kitchen, the talismans against deprivation of capital, status and kin. I shall join them soon enough, but you will never see me at Christmas, even if you’ve been good, because my haunt is the Gate of God. Idolaters, tip your hats to the barmaid who serves at the Gate of Man. To quantify the Woe opposite Forgetting is the mission of the narcissist and the fool. What the boatman takes all across is yours to remember, so let us toast the spirits of Christmasses past, present and emerging, they who intone, “Welcome to Country”!
Well! This is strange. The Sun is on the cusp of Capricorn, which means she has drained imagination dry, and intends to give bravado a go. Very confusing for the student in the front row, the Moon. You no doubt are as inured to the mediocrity of your teachers as you are to the error of your parents, but not the Moon, whose phases are serious business in astrology. Someone tweeted something at New Year that caught my eye: old people are bitter, so ignore them and remake the world in your own image. There’s the rub: because of the mediocrity of your teachers and the error of your parents you have no idea what your image is, do you? And that’s why we can’t simply say the Moon has disappeared for a few days.
We in the south have entered the transition into late summer:
It gets bloody hot, mate! In these days when universal air-conditioning sits uncomfortably with the shame of climate change and the outrageous price of electricity, we have largely forgotten the emergence of entire populations from enervating sleeps in stifling homes, and the dread of interaction which resulted. If you were born in South-East Australia when the Sun was in Capricorn, that was the emotional climate you landed in. How welcome was being able to vent on you without judgement, and how esteemed the vanity of the fellow-victim who could make us laugh!
We should not forget the epiphanies of our ancestors, as we do, such as the disappearance of the Moon in the East and its reappearance in the West, but they are much more palatable in the cool of the evening, as song and dance. The Veteran was forever whistling through his breath and tapping his foot. Where did rhythm originate? From making hard, repetitive tasks fun when when it was too bloody hot to work!
But country is the lesson the orienteering Moon wants to receive, in the first month of a new year, even if the shadows beyond the hemline of his teacher’s skirt evoke a backslide into introspection. Ah, Sagittarius, what sins have been committed downunder in thy name!
Some Indigenous Australians claim to still live in country. Do we? In the frivolous exchange Amy Bairstow shares, we get two contrary views of the bush, from Henry Lawson (who came from the country above) and Banjo Paterson (who came from Orange, not far away), back in 1892-94. Of course neither of these romancers had seen their country from the back seat of an air-conditioned car, and both lived in the city.
Shall we continue this light-hearted debate? What really is the essence of the bush? Must we overlay it with a ‘country’ we brought from elsewhere? How can we inhabit this continent as ‘country’ in the way of First Peoples?
Augustine gives me the clue, when he finds the essence of creation in what does not decay. Yes, within its cruel cycle of flood and drought, the bush rules life and death. Constant change and decay seem the order of the day, but this is merely phenomenal. Think of a dry creek-bed or spigot and a torrent of debris as the one watercourse. Think of the shady tree on Summit Avenue as one of a family who have lived on the ridge for a thousand years. Think of a song in the air as nostalgic for ungainliness reincarnated in every generation. Think of the absent intention of five generations of squatters on sacred horizons, penning their legacy. These are country, what does not decay, not a totality but an infinite spectrum of character wafted by a song-line of readiness. Frivolity is awesome readiness: to be here, to be trivial, to be gauche, to age ungracefully, to die unrepentant. Evolution should be thus defined, and so should karma, and bad habits. The essence of humanity is nothing more substantial than a kiss, but it does not decay.
This will be worth an early start Saturday:
Laughter is our riposte to the gods of the sky, and our salvation from unkissability. Isn’t that why comedians project our egoic shadows?
The error in my spreadsheet computations amounts to 2 seconds of arc for the Sun, 4 for the Moon (according to Stellarium). In time, this error is more marked for the Sun, because it moves more slowly. I compute the Sun’s ingress into Breamlea Capricorn 12 minutes later, and the Moon’s ingress 2 minutes later, than Stellarium. We need to approach the matter of orbs in astrology with self-deprecation: they simply mask error. In similar vein, country is haunted by ghosts of false memory:
Sagittarius is haunted by Northern Hemisphere Capricorn, as what transpires is haunted by ancestral anticipation, and as the names of oral history are haunted by ignorance; and ignorance does not decay, whatever country you find yourself distant from, especially Death.
But how truly fortunate we are to have been born in this age of subjectivity, don’t you think? Just imagine living on a flat Earth with all those dead people in the underworld just under your feet. All those poor souls on the other side walking around upside down! Why, we don’t have to be aware of death at all. Just to be aware of our posture at the window while we contemplate it, to feel a restorative brandy gurgling in our insides, these are sufficient to return us to the core of our very living being! The whole idea of death is so remote that astrologers and other idlers with their cosmic ages, bardos and underworlds, their souls, heavens and hells, need not be taken seriously at all.
To be here now, that’s all that matters! And to be ‘me’, in all ‘my’ endocrinal glory, not someone else’s patient, specimen or victim! To walk here in another time haunted by totems, gods and other voices of authority would have been hell on earth, if you know what I mean. Aren’t we lucky to have grown out of all that negative self-talk?
And again, more voices: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help … Ha! The past, in the echo-chambers of my wounded heart, where I keep the voices of the dead under lock and key, is a foreign country … What shall it profit a man, if absence decay not? … When all said and done, one must decide oneself whether one will open in Capricorn country playing tragedy or comedy. Left to the audience, it would be a farce …
The human artefact known as the Gregorian Calendar, measuring to the second the Earth’s orbit of the Sun, indicates the pending completion of another year. Coincidentally, the Moon is completing another of its ‘orbits’. (See YouTube for a description of the real relative motion of Sun, Earth and Moon.) What meaning, if any, can be ascribed to this coincidence?
When the Sun and Moon come together in the Southern Sign of the imagination it should presage something wonderful, an empowerment of dreams, or an oceanic coalescence of individualities. But its opposite number is a tendency towards going our own way, by force if necessary, or by confronting entreaties to compromise as attacks on our defences. We all want peace, but we cannot submit to each other. This is Sagittarius, where humanity grows from the Umwelt, and where subjectivity reigns supreme, yet how readily does the hobbled divine in us genuflect to angels we should actually no longer empower, in the form of facts, and identities!
Is there anything to be grateful for as 2016 closes to us? Not only was it a political disaster for most people, and a humanitarian disaster for too many, it was also a year in which many of our generations’ icons died. How are we reacting? The North hunkers down for winter as the sidereal Sun ruminates on charisma and independence to lead it from its mess, but it is the season of withdrawal and pessimism. In the South we have entered summer beyond the redemptive rituals of a Christmas which dare not speak its name. Identities divide us, and people of Science and people of Holy Books continue to confound each other with their incapacity to identify facts and words as metaphor! Will the New Year bring renewal of optimism that equanimity, turning our other cheek and submitting to Allah will produce world peace; or that democracy will emerge through education and without hatred and bloody conflict to wrest freedom and autonomy from the tyranny of economic interest; or that the institutional denial of autonomy to parents to influence their children will end bullying, produce gender fluidity, end discrimination and demonstrate a hierarchy of values after all? Or are we not flies caught in the web of someone else’s inadequate ideas?
Pessimism is the gateway to frivolity: delinquency is a healthy experimentation in semiosis; sub-cultures transform nothingness–definable in terms of habituated exclusivity–into emptiness, and promote the location of a non-individuated personality in a flux of interpenetrating matrices of meaning. Southern Hemisphere Astrology is pessimistic about a wider promulgation of its iconoclasm in 2017. Sabotage will continue to be perceived in terms of the ‘things’ removed; only those already engaged in an interplay of self and world as metaphor will enjoy my perspective-play, and my power to persuade readers to relish the beautiful emptiness of astrology will continue to languish. Nonetheless, I will persevere as a hooligan in the Rimbaud style.
The imagination belongs to nobody, certainly not identity! Never cease from its game! Neither culture, nor history, nor parents are the wellspring of your personality, but rather this very imagination forever impregnating itself beyond the rules of fidelity to mere habit and infantile self! Yes, congratulations are in order if you have saved yourself from the snares of anger, blame and innocence in this tumultuous year. But have you? If so, be honest, the imagination says, you did not do it, but I.
Imagination is not a component of intelligence measurable by experiment, but the ground of being, the capacity of all living things to embody, and respond to, signs. Signs are not only systemic, but chosen! My imagination chooses me! But what if it doesn’t? What if I claim imagination as my own? Patent it? Entitle myself to its royalties? The Moon is nothing if not a cry of freedom from the Other’s patent. The Sun is the formative impulse; the Moon is subjectivity, the source of form’s undoing by its alternatives. It is our imagination which owns the Moon, and as truly, the Moon and we are owned by owls and frogs, rocks and tides, the dead and unborn!
What if I mistake the Moon for the Sun, discover and fetishize an identity entitled to control and permanence? Then I doom myself to pessimism, and its mirror-image, frivolity: ‘I’ cannot win, or in ordinary terms, my path through the thickets of reckless pseudo-confidence yelling, “Shit happens” at every hurtful bump leads inexorably to the belief in nothing, even the impossibility to believe in anything, including ‘me’. But anything, even nothing, is preferable to the shame of being powerless, of having no third way between tolerating the intolerable and invoking the letter of laws which have no spirit I command.
The lunar nodes cycle of avoidance and focus will morph in 2017 (May in Southern Hemisphere Astrology) into a challenge to play with the cultural lineaments of constraint and control. Every time I see the Moon riding high above the recalcitrant Ram I will recall the rampage of the Aleppo Bull, and not the presence of the Bull in a manger. I hope we have learned by then the difference between play and frivolity. Let’s drink to seriousness! Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! Surely a massive hangover will do the trick?
