What you egg!

Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 2.

Love yourself, Menkar says. Work on your stuff. Don’t take it personally, she says, but people say negative things about you. You lack humility, she says. Every wife is a challenge.

The Peasant looks forward to jumping between the sheets with Alcyone, after the peculiarities of Hamal and Menkar, the daunting accomplices of his descent from the high places. Be mindful of your tendency to aggression, Peasant, and don’t inflate your expectations. There are puppeteers offstage, and this is a pantomime about freedom, not intimacy.

It is harder to be a peasant these days than when princes and priests ruled the land. Three levels of government with 16-20% of the workforce administering control exert a lot more energy than the muscles of yore, and yet you never know when the power or water will go off, because every politician and bureaucrat is a prince and a priest. For a guest of a mid-Autumn mansion in mid-Spring things are further complicated by a plethora of boundary ordinances.

A bureaucrat thinks nothing of drawing a boundary on paper, like the Local Government Areas which located restrictions of movement during Victoria’s infamous lockdown, but like the limits of nationalities and territorial waters, they usually involve conflict when marked on the ground. The horizon is a boundary, but you try pegging it. Where is the coastline? Where does a mangrove swamp end, or a eucalyptus forest? Celestial boundaries are no less nebulous, for all that they may be precisely defined, because they move, and so do the herds they enclose.

The Peasant has a motto: we’ll make it work. That does not satisfy the princes and priests whose province is value, despite never having to jostle for position on a fishing ground. It doesn’t satisfy the Sun either. Despite moving around the galactic centre at 230 km/sec, she has never accepted the momentum of her planets, and any notion of one of their satellites having a mind of its own is anathema. On this occasion when earthbound astronomers and astrologers are at loggerheads over divisions of the Ecliptic, and the Moon is intensely trying to make it work, she will put her own stamp on things.

This otherwise significant event for Moon and observers is only 5 1/2 minutes before the upstart’s most comprehensive diminishment.

“Peekaboo! Assertiveness is it? A fig for your hemispheric Signs, Earthlings! And while we’re at it, a pox on the enclosed absolute sanctimony of your social media! And I will be anthropomorphized if I feel like it! What does Earth’s moon know about seasons? He may have rhythm, but what of it? I’ve got gravitas.”

The motto of the Peasant takes another form: She’ll be right, mate! Though dictators demand heartlessness and investors in change rant about the apocalypse, and though Underworld insecurity undermine and render transparent the independence the Southern Moon is obliged in Taurus to revere, that motto will resound.

Peasant into shadow and Vagabond out, but she’ll be right! The lasciviousness of Alcyone is ambiguous enough! And so the shadow retreats and Earthlings reinhabit their narcissistic boundaries. In suburban Brisbane, the ancestors line the outer of the Underworld, supplicating the referee of a game the Sun simply does not understand, and all know that a fair referee only gets it right half the time.

Was it a dream in a cusp?

Is that not a dragon’s tail coming to sweep us back into the urgency of our predicament? Give it to me, she says. Make it right. And yes, she’ll be right!