“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” Greta Thunberg.
If reality only exists in relation to unreality, who are we to question the unreal, we who are merely real?
“Both what I know about myself and what I do not know will therefore be my testimony to you, since what I know I have seen by your light, and what I do not know is from my own darknesses, not yet scattered by your noonday gaze…. So, though memory is in my memory when I remember remembering, both forgetting and remembering are in my memory when I remember forgetting—remembering that I forget, and forgetting what I once remembered.” St Augustine, Confessions, Book Ten.
News of Abliq’s terminal illness has begun circulating on social media.
Was he ever real? And what of those he has remembered, and forgotten? Is there a populist who can stimulate their regurgitation from his unconscious, put them back together again, make them feel real enough to survive him?
Where is the Moon real? Not the lump of rock, whose physical presence three or four hundred thousand kilometres away in the sky and tidal effects on Earth are real enough, or as real as we are. No, not that moon, but the Moon, the creature of antiquity, the voice of the heart, of human emergence from universal mind. Where does it survive NASA’s landing, and socially engineered equality, and exclusive religiosity, and populist claims of humanity’s responsibility for climate change, and Abliq’s rudimentary algorithms of solar and lunar position? Where is it safe from judgement and perfection, exploitation and habitation, logic and priority, identity and death? In Country, in short, where the Underworld is tangible, and secret business resonates as powerfully today as it did 50,000 years ago; in consciousness of the unconscious, seventy years of dreams of a lifespan transforming 13.8 billion years into occupied space; a space always and forever occupied by Abliq’s absence as the Other.
“…can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?” Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic.
In the beginning was country, and then when gods learned language, the Word. In the end it may be Neurolinguistics. Most of us get our first glimpse of country when our child’s eyes begin to see who we are not, and we begin to embrace a role on their stage, sitting in the darkened audience. As I’ve said, I am in it when it is what will vanish with my death, but when I drive through the rent wilderness of suburbs under construction I recognize a future country in which I am absent, in which my sense of the beauty of these new emptinesses, these fraught playgrounds of a new generation, is absent too.
Like all New Moons which occur in the second fortnight of a tropical month, this one sets the psyche on a path to enlightenment which will resonate to rumblings in the underworld affecting its impetus and destination. Just as we experience the transformation of a project’s potential according to the attitude we bring to it, which changes from day to day, hour to hour, the Moon’s orbit and ours can never be pinned down. This month begins on the Gemini-Sagittarius tropical axis but in five days the Sun will enter sidereal Gemini (in the Breamlea Zodiac), at 87.45° ecliptic longitude (next year 87.46° etc.), or a smidgeon wider than a finger-width east of Alheka; in eight days, it will change its tropical stripes to Cancer-Capricorn. These are geometric conventions.
Of course, none of this is visible, and if the point has to made, nothing is. Not the Earth’s motion, or even the apparent diurnal motion of the Sun, though we notice it in different parts of the sky. At least we see the Sun, you might say, and of course that phrase, ‘we see the Sun’ has meaning; there is a seeing happening, it cannot be denied. But who is doing it is a linguistic convention, and so is what is being seen. All things, including the identity of the seer, are made facts by language. Beyond what we can say about ourselves and the entities of our existence, there is emptiness, nothing which can be put into words.
And put into words it is, -Isms of every stripe. Muhammad said: “No, carry on doing good deeds, for everyone will find it easy (to do) such deeds that will lead him towards that for which he has been created.” (Surah al-Lail 92:5-7.) There is a holiness about the Good, when the words of one’s inner voice are echoing in the soul of millions. The intersectionality of social forces invokes a call to arms, but first sociology has wrapped the warrior in its embrace of intelligent design, its Night of Power. The appeal of submission to ‘respair’ is seductive. Kierkegaard had a good crack at defining despair, as the failure to obey one’s calling, and what could be more crippling than to hear none, to inherit the silence of the Omniscient, to be busy, constrained, obedient and good, to be free, to have an identity, to shout anything in the emptiness of finitude, to be the Word of no god?
They say that populism, defined as an appeal to the spirit of a people to revolt against the rule of an elite, began to mushroom in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. I might equally say, for the sake of argument, that its first rumblings began in 1998, ten years earlier, and isn’t it the way of awareness, to take ten years from trendy epiphany to filter into the lowest social strata? Isn’t it the organism’s way of enhancing its existence, protecting itself and maintaining homeostasis, to notice a change, to instinctively react, and to modify its operation according to the responses it generates?
Be that as it may, the crossing of the rivers of Hades is another factor which complicates the passage of this Moon to Opposition. Of course it means nothing to the elite, just another superstition, like ‘the spirit of the people’, or the collective unconscious. ‘As above, so below,’ what a lot of ‘rubbish’, (not in the least ‘cheeky’). The common people can’t even see the stars these days, let alone the Milky Way. Wouldn’t that mean, ‘extinguished above, collectively unconscious below’? But it can surely be admitted to have passing mathematical interest, that the nodes where galactic equator and ecliptic intersect, while increasing in longitude by 180° in 13,000 odd years, haven’t noticeably changed in galactic perspective.
It’s really quite amazing that, although absolutely everybody through the ages has reacted angrily to trespass across their boundaries, which the shamans, astronomers and philosophers have always been trusted to arbitrate—even marginality has status—that the science of change is still without a myth in which we can live separately and respectfully in an enlightened Now connecting us to the vivid lives of our ten thousand generations of beauty and truth.
If I wrote that during the Late Bronze Age the shamans of Thrace drew power from the convergence of two phenomena, the summer to autumn procession overhead of the ancestors in a straight line joining due east and west, and their orderly winter to spring return to the underworld, and that during the Iron Age a great schism developed between those migrating northward to preserve the power of the former and the others migrating southward to preserve the power of the latter, according to the direction the roof of heaven was moving, you would interpret it as fantasy. If, on the other hand, I asserted that Neolithic awareness of celestial change was reassured by the faith that explanations were possessed by specialists who could thereby justify their status and upkeep, you might accept that as a confabulation of the birth of metallurgy and astrology, or of the emergence of propaganda in the service of political exploitation, in short, populism.
Tropical astrology has largely succeeded in confounding the intellect to the extent that most associate their ‘birth-signs’, which the popular press has portrayed as fundamental to their personalities, with the asterisms of the same name, and the association of the Constellations with the seasons, which 2000 years ago was so real to Ptolemy, has been mystified, with the end result that even when we’re reading our horoscope on the train, we’re on the outside looking in.
It took until quite recently to insert emotion into economic value. Zoe Williams has written about anger cycles and Kondratiev Waves: “Anger is remarkable not in and of itself, but when it becomes so widespread that it feels like the dominant cultural force.”
“The causes documented by Kondratiev waves, primarily include inequity, opportunity and social freedoms; although very often, much more discussion is made of the notable effects of these causes as well. Effects are both good and bad and include, to name just a few, technological advance, birthrates, revolutions/populism—and revolution’s contributing causes which can include racism, religious or political intolerance, failed-freedoms and opportunity, incarceration rates, terrorism and similar.” {Wikipedia, Kondratiev Wave.) Are cycles of this kind self-regulating, or are the shamans still with us, filling us with righteous indignation at trespass of boundaries whose limits they continue to control with cultural indoctrination? Are we pawns in a war amongst shamans, or are we merely oblivious to how easy our instincts are to hack for a living? Perhaps the revolution has arrived, but I think not. Love is not in the air, so it’s much more likely that the anger boiling around us is simply paying shamans’ wages.
The ancestors are indeed alive and well in the bardo, as attested to by today’s sensitivity towards cultural appropriation, and perhaps it is out of reverence for such wisdom as, “It never rains at a Full Moon”, that a few of us pay astrology heed. On the other hand, the resilience of the ancestors may show in the inheritance of chirality, or the danceability of songs of woe and forgetting. And while you’re rummaging in the Underworld for the voice of Harpocrates, what a child means with a finger deserves a rethink.
The apparent behaviour of the Milky Way may afford astrology a globalist understanding of how the constellations and seasons fit together in the interpretation of identity, and a matrix to make sense of an astrology which actually looks at the stars, but here in the South the head of the Bull reminds us that there is more to life than ideas.
Late Summer, when Taurus is most prominent in the evening sky, is when growth reveals its catastrophic potential as bushfire. The bush is not only our source of oxygen: it is made of wood! Taurus disappears into the Sun as Regulus, the basilisk known as the healing archangel Raphael, urinates on us from his evening possum perch in the northern trees of the law. Like it or not, Taurus is the last roll of the dice of theory, the dawning recognition that conflict and disaster cannot be mitigated by the legislation of wishful thinking, but must be understood as implications of the materiality of existence. The most persuasive voice of rationality right now gives intellectual form to a spirit which can no longer be suppressed, the experience that we are not from everywhere, but rooted in somewhere. Our national and global citizenship fails to locate us in country! Populism is the battle-ground of top-down and bottom-up thinking.
The Moon in Taurus will precede the Sun into Lethe, the Hades river of forgetting, and forge a path through the difficult terrain of love, the instinct of the heart. It’s all too easy to lose one’s head altogether in there!
And so what is to be done with one’s roots? Which is the greater delusion, that form is a product of mind, or that mind is a product of theory? Can we include strangers in our space if it has no boundaries? Can we fortify boundaries which exclude emptiness? Now we need a Spanish fly to manage Moroccan snails. Will an Indigenous Assembly antagonize or placate the invaders who keep muscling nativity aside with their foreign ‘countries’? Is there any future for rational community? Can harmony between different instinctive origins be attained within multicultural global society, or will the programming of robots suffice in an internet of things? Will our only freedom be to do nothing? Is obedience of the wilful the best we can do?
If you imagine that when you die, what you know will live on, that your emotions, connections and experiences will be eternally reincarnated in other lives, other identities like yours, other components like you, then I probably can’t reach you. But there is another you. If you’re listening, Canberra, listen to the wondrous voice you are mistaking for mine, but which is entirely of your hearing and nobody else’s, as an echo of your creation. What you know and your knowing exist in parallel universes. Of the two, only your knowing is real. The world you know will be obliterated by your cessation to know it, so cease not while you live and breathe! This alone is ‘country’, the personal geography of intention and consequence, error and resilience, hubris and humility, hope and gratitude, hunger and pain. We want our country back!
“Gurus Can Loathe Very Little Signs Of Spiritual Change And Preach A Totality.” Abliq.
“Reality conforms to precedent certainly, and you can analyze it that way, but it is not imprisoned by immutable laws or patterns, any more than identity is. Reality is what you make of yourself, and you are what reality makes of itself, moment by moment.
I mean by reality conforming to precedent that there is something akin to intention in the world. Form emerges according to pattern. The context of an emergent thing encourages relations and structures that are readily available, practised, in a word.
A seed is an intention; the form a tree takes is an accident. If you would see a thing, you must look to the processes creating it, and they are always relational in the same way that you can never define where one thing ends and another begins.
The existence of a thing takes form, but that form is the carcass of its creative process. A thing is an imprint on the world which has left its imprint on the thing. This to me indicates the essence of identity.” Abliq.
Sahih Bukhari(49:857) – “He who makes peace between the people by inventing good information or saying good things, is not a liar.”
“Opportunism is the exploitation of form.” Abliq.
“This little planet causes more problems than it is worth. The side tilted this way is emerging from ice and snow and you would think its people could just happily forage for food and be done with conflict, but their leaders are playing “Mine’s Bigger Than Yours”, teeming millions are on the roads, displaced by war, famine and climate-change, the shamans are at loggerheads over what is fundamental, and prophesy, competing for scarce funds, seems unable to restore calm.
On the other side things don’t seem much better. Duty and self-indulgence have been their usual strange bedfellows during the summer. People haven’t made sufficient provision for the winter, and there will be anger and resentment boiling over when they are confined together and forced to share.
They don’t take much notice of me these days, and I confess it wouldn’t matter to me if they wiped themselves out, but you’re closer to them, you do care, and they still look up to you. Do something new. You’ve already tried uniting them with polarities. That’s not working fast enough. Say something to them that will placate them. Make something up, if you want. They stopped trying to agree on truth a long time ago, but though they shirk it, they crave it. Go on, little man, give them something to believe in. Their meanings are failing them, and if they don’t lift their spirits, they’re doomed.
[The grid indicates the declinations of the constellations and the paths they take across the meridian. Much of Pisces and all of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and Leo will pass to the north, anti-clockwise with East on the right. What are the seasonal influences of March-August? Are they Northern or Southern Hemisphere, tranquil or aggressive, neither or both? Exegesis I, ii.]
That’s the style! Show them that their chaos might simply be a matter of facing the wrong way. Throw a bit of the others in with it: love, brotherhood, sisterhood, submission, everlasting life, success, affluence, celebrity, presence, healing, enlightenment, transcendence, emptiness. Use science and mathematics. They believe that. Restore awe, for God’s sake! Take a leaf out of the Artisan’s book and just make astrology work.
Nice! You’ve got country, a powerful indigenous notion, and one to cleanse evil spirits who come to whisper young people away from rootedness in creation.
[Where you are on a two-dimensional chart, your ‘country’ as previously described, is at the zenith of your sky. Darwin people facing north would have to crane their necks 10º backwards to see the Sun in Scorpius and Sagittarius, and a backbreaking 30º+ to see all of those constellations. In fact, much of Scorpius, not to mention the Moon at major lunar standstills, is south of overhead at many southern latitudes, even when the Ecliptic is not. Furthermore, Darwin has only two seasons, Wet (November-April, conventionally) and Dry (May-October). Can these be correlated with the direction of the Sun, south with Northern Signs in green and north with Southern Signs in yellow, or to the chirality of east and west and to apparent clockwise or anticlockwise Zodiac motion? Exegesis I, iv.]
Embodiment, nice touch! Transform two dimensions into three by lying down under the stars, head one way or the other. Turning reverently to the qibla of choice, like a code for pollen danced by bees. Suitably mystifying. Let them look up with their own eyes into the mind of God. If they question the seasons, we can always say you’re divinely inspired. Or that all prophets have been known to be wrong. Now, off you go. Good luck!
Perhaps The Prophet will bring everlasting nocturnal life! “The devil will be with you in a moment,” as the hunchback in The Tin Drum said in the lavatory.
[The Sun obtains her peculiar power, not from her light and energy, but from her regularity, from the nutrients of night and day and the cycle of the seasons. We may no longer worship her, but we still experience her movement, just as we continue to think of time as clockwise. Convention records her annual passage through the Zodiac, as though country in the night sky were not more appropriate indication of our progress on this planet. Even her regularity is a projection, revealed to inquiry as deriving from the momentum of our tilted fall. It is Earth which deserves our reverence, and yet, like some atavistic matriarch, and like our own outgrown parents, the Sun still pulls strings in our unconscious. Exegesis I, i.]
