“Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage…”, Samuel Johnson, l. 308, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, derived from Juvenal, Satire X.
Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. Deuteronomy 32:7, King James Bible.
It’s no use. The Veteran cannot hide from the truth. It’s not just that his triumph in Northern skies comes in the middle of a Coronavirus-infested winter, as humanity struggles to celebrate the turning of the year with breaking heart, or that in Southern skies his diminutive opposition to a searing Sun needs the compensation of the un-moonlit symmetry of the Eurocentric mythical Twins to impress, but having crossed the Lethe immediately before syzygy, he realizes in his curtain call only the magnitude of the reintegration which lies ahead for the audience (who are yet oblivious to the Acheron River which daytime has just crossed), and the possibility that he no longer has the will to help. Oh God, not more feelings!
On the other hand, the Veteran has died and been reborn so many times that the Bardo provides his second name: “The Hell You Say!” The Tenth Bardo House of Boredom is one he particularly enjoys, where the cleansing of the Lethe affords him the luxury of staring out of the window of the Northern Tropical Indolence bus on his way to Total Withdrawal, paying no attention to dark continents rolling him around their clocks. His fellow-passengers cannot wait to get off: being bored is akin to being boring; the emissions from the bus out-thrust its propulsion; grasping is mindfully consuming acceptance; and forests of wild viruses are being cleared for the graduation of sated ignorance. “We must alight at centre-stage,” they cry. Not the Veteran. He is indifferent to the footlights, and to his demotion from a starring role for the next twenty-four times he appears on this stage: you will not see a Full Moon in Gemini (the Constellation) until January 2023.
What tortuous labyrinths of despair might just squeeze a sleeper up to the surface? What convulsions of suppressed hatred, what intestinal convolutions of corruption and deliberate pain? What catacombs of memory, what collapsed and utterly expunged escape routes out of anxiety? What tectonic shifts of catatonic stress? And reversing direction, the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Australian Central Ranges is no country for old fish.
It is time and memory which stamp Veteran country, a duration of exile from the permanent present. Aligned with the course of the Moon’s progress across the faintly visible constellations between Sagittarius and Gemini, Woe and Forgetting, and irrevocably past Regulus and Spica and Antares to the Acheron again, an artesian underworld meanders beneath a landscape dotted with caves, one of which is yours, another mine.
The cusp of Leo: connection and disclosure, relativity and faith, altruism and irony. Regulus Gate: the heart of the lion and the anus of the possum, gratuitous, almost alien, postmark of a trivialized celebration of separate togetherness. Or perhaps it presents a simple gesture of togetherness comprising a ceremonious underworld revelation to sarcasm that its defences are less than fun? It is certainly pure coincidence, isn’t it, like all the star names and attributes I have invented, and for that matter, the entire corpus of astrology, though it prefer the term synchronicity?
I am reminded of an event in the life of a friend of mine, an ageing and obscure writer who somehow managed to be invited to address a seminar on something or other in a faraway place. To cut a long story short, he got hopelessly and helplessly lost: people kept telling him to turn around and go back the other way, pointing to roads and railway stations he either couldn’t find, or always took him the wrong way.
He became separated from his luggage, which not only contained the text of his talk, but the names and phone numbers of the connections he desperately needed to contact with an explanation of his non-appearance. While he was confronting the senile reality of his circumstances he came to find himself adjacent to a woman on the phone on the same railway platform.
He overheard her conversation about a writer who inexplicably had failed to appear at a seminar, and realised that this was his chance. Then he heard her describing the weird eyes, not exactly dead, but decayed in the most disturbing way, of a man sitting not far away from her.
The rest is history, but my friend never found his luggage and never made it to the seminar. With the help of many people, he eventually made it home, but he was plagued, and still is, by the impossibility of describing to any of the purposeful bystanders who guided him, or to anyone since, the awesome impact of the coincidence which improbably answered his need on that railway platform in the middle of nowhere.
We all know the powerful influence of a dream we never succeed in interpreting or communicating, but what does that tell us of the waking dreams and troubled realities of refugees, the homeless, the intellectually disabled, the gender-dysphoric, the mentally ill and the demented … not to mention those trying to make coherent their end-of-life reminiscences?
Heroism in the face of catastrophe is our ideal, the ultimate ethical expression of community, but a response to the call of the other, the inner voice of the Water-Carrier, seems to necessitate the vacating of selfhood that does not derive from the outside, from a faith in belonging on the outside, with no other way of being real than connection with others. But what happens when the interest of the community is believed to be served by doing nothing except distancing from others, and staying home?
We get lonely, and automatically the therapeutic industry offers social solutions like video chats, but once upon a time the theological industry would have recommended prayer. The social construction of reality is an accepted fact, but this latest coronavirus is reminding us what it is to be isolated and attempting vigour at the same time. We are rediscovering our secrets: yes, the guilty and shameful ones, but also the fundamental one, our power to be. The welfare of others may be our guiding light in our decisions, but there is a dimension to life in which ethics takes second place to ontology: decisions, on the face of it responses to horizontal stimuli, arise from the underworld.
Each one of us is absolutely other, and though the country in which we find ourselves as such, by its responsiveness to our dreadful finitude, does present as physical and historical shareability and enjoin us to participate in the communal and the ethical, our presentiment of its vanishing upon our death removes it beyond what we can share into the realm of otherness, mystery and secrecy, and our presence along with it.
Did those of our ancestors who escaped the religious and political upheaval of 19th Century Europe to subjugate the indigenous peoples of the South go out or come in? Were they present in an alien landscape the more they inhabited their loss, or absent from the tremendous world of the natives the more they anxiously impressed themselves upon it? Did they resile from every furbishment of comforts they were banished from, or simply resort to drink or meditation to ‘get out of it’? How did they stay apart?
Facts and figures lead us away from the underworld, promising an eternity of sorts, and evidence of self-mastery. They remind us that we are very small in the scheme of things. But it’s the little things that keep us together, inside and out, such as not being able to interpret one’s own or another’s dream, coincidentally perhaps at Regulus Gate, though chosen to try.
What do you suppose the chances are that today is the nineteenth anniversary of my friend’s encounter on that railway platform?
“After all, what is identity but the slow, lifelong accretion of gazes: us looking at ourselves being looked at by others? What we see is, largely, what they see, or what we think they see. And when they turn away, when we become unseen, in a way we cease to be.” Elitsa Dermendzhiyska.
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.” Hamlet, III, i.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, IV, §146, trans. Helen Zimmern.
That the Sun is in the Constellation Gemini, the Northern Sign Cancer and the Southern Sign Capricorn is of interest, but not arrestingly so. Nor is it of vital concern whether the primal force of earthly existence is female or male—we choose whichever we like—although it has amused us to plot the rhythm of the Moon’s phases as locked in a striving to escape a primordial envy of female power. It is the dynamism of Opposition which now resonates with the strongest signal, not only because the Signs and genders of Sun and Moon are interchangeable at Opposition, but because of the influence we have imputed to the Milky Way and the crossing of its rivers of the Underworld.
From the Lethe we dry off our responsibility; from responsibility we clothe care; care gives rise to anxiety; from anxiety comes being-toward-death in the effort to maintain buoyancy, the meaning of who we might be, as we flail across the Acheron to do quixotic battle with the denial of authenticity. And this drama is projected into the heavens above and below. Yes, we are made of water; yes, we go to water. The Full Moon of Sagittarius is hidden in the sack of the Sun and Earth in Gemini as a sublimated knot of anger and hurt, a recurrent nightmare, a hard-wired secret, an unexpiated unkindness, a solvent of lust and revenge: the germinating seed of an Elm rattling to be festooned with False Dreams at the gates of Utopia.
Do you identify with Gemini for some reason? Have you ever been recognized as a ‘Gemini’? Do you in fact resemble it? Or have you never seen it? It is visible in the night sky between its heliacal rising in September and setting in May, at the nightfall meridian in March. And it really does look like a pair of twins, or two buddies of either gender or both, or two sides of the same coin, Sun and Moon, North and South, like being a self, and knowing the law, daring and caution, day and night, anima and animus.
Validation, the ghost which haunts the faces of yesterday’s somebodies, reverberates like the reflected reflection of the existential enquiry, ‘What happened?’ You may well have accustomed yourself to the belief that you surpassed your parents, but you know that the back of your head indicates that you need a haircut, and has not surpassed the emperor’s or the prophet’s. Is it possible that lighting merely shaded your followers, your students, even your children? And does the improbably grotesque approbation of the satyr, somewhere between the comic and the tragic, emulate Gemini’s humanity, or merely notch the animal shaft it saves for perfection?
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.” from “Defeat“, by Kahlil Gibran.
One of the first conventions we learn as infants is that the difference between zero and one is the same as the difference between nine and ten. Who knows how many tens of millennia we took to dismantle the convention that the difference between zero and one is infinite? What is ‘country’, as I use the term, if not an attempt to restore the sacred awe implicit in that ancient convention? Of course, conventions have ever been challenged by the truth. If, after half a millenium, our horoscopes are still governed by Northern Hemisphere seasons, and we still have trouble recognizing the Zodiac because its Constellations are upside down, don’t blame me.
However, it is not truth, but convention, not righteousness, but compassion, which hold communities together, especially when they originate from all over the world. A lot of healing is in progress: it has been a summer out of hell across Australia, grief never far beneath the surface. Community resilience is not in question, or the courage and kindness of good neighbours from all over the country and the world, but in the debate worldwide about how to prevent a repeat, it is difficult not to hear the same divided bickering that characterizes our efforts to deal with the racist, sexist and colonialist conventions we were all made of.
Has not the extant population of Earth, like a forest held together by subterranean fungus, arrived at an optimism, a raison d’être, a motivation for getting out of bed, deriving from a sense of powerlessness normally associated with depression, which is invisible, and ultimately unbelievable? Are we not, like a wind turbine in a coal-driven economy, or an ego in a yoga routine, going through the motions? Does not the survival of humanity beyond the next generation lurk in the legacies of the beneficiaries of our last wills and testaments, framed and interpreted by nobody who ever understood or respected the pain we old ones put the world through?
Pessimism looks like another secret to keep from our grandkids. How much easier that would be if they just had partners who preferred refined white bread because they ate it as children, revered secrets because their mothers were narcissists, and also cannot wait to get the kids out of the house for the sake of some me-time. Pessimism looks like a race to see who grows up first, the coffin we need to lose a huge amount of weight to fit into, in the grey area between one and zero. Hey kids, the song of the magpie out there means another perfect day! Off you go now.
One day, we might agree that hope and heartache both start with the same letter as hallelujah and hell, but apparently not yet. In the meantime, it’s in country I need to recover some equanimity, lest I go conventionally mad somewhere between nine and ten.
Country is the body of my idea, the underworld of my zenith. Country is the bush, the planet, the sound of one hand clapping, the whirr of insects, the roar of surf and wind, bird calls, traffic, someone singing, silence, the underworld sky. It has been mortally wounded, not only by drought and fire, and fear of climate change, but by an enormous sadness which seems to weigh on everyone, no longer possible to ignore, making even hope heavy. But healing is in the nature of things. You could say that adaptation and evolution are healing processes. The present is the past healing, you could say, the idea of time’s body, perhaps. However, never complete or permanent, healing is definitely not the same as salvation. Is that what makes it so sad? Doctors, of flesh and spirit, heal their compassion by trying to alleviate human suffering, knowing that neither suffering nor compassion can ever be cured. And if anyone is to blame, everyone is to blame. Does the sad doctrine of original sin mean other than everyone is wronged and everyone is wrong?
Australia needs a doctor! We grieve the deaths of millions of animals who trusted the bush. We grieve the passing of a world in which the conflagration of bush-change was as inconceivable as the inundation of sea-change. Actually, there is a profusion of shingles advertising pyres for deniers of climate change, but proselytizers always abound in the projection of shame. The Healer makes no claim to timeless wisdom, but engages in what must change: understanding, tradition, discrimination, self.
Scene: The Healer’s waiting-room. Whimpers and groans issue from an assortment of shapes around the room, and all that is visible of most lowered faces is distorting disgust and anger, while they rehearse their soliloquies.
“Human languages have evolved away from their original capacity to communicate with inanimate objects, and have limited things within a vocabulary of peculiarity, e.g. sick man, old man, dead man, holy man, which negates their subjectivity, and masks who else it is doing the dependent co-arising. Making universal gods of the vital elements of human experience, the inner voices of paleolithic biochemistry, should have led to something other than abstraction, objectification, copyright and forgetfulness. It should be the birthright of every human child to grow up in a world of interwoven spatial and temporal languages: mathematical, chemical, linguistic, gravitational, ecological.”
“What would happen to terrestrial tides and nights if there were no Moon? What would existence be like if there were no Earth? What might the gods be discussing with you if you weren’t demanding they inhabit the detritus of your attention-span? What community might we belong in if we could overcome our recently acquired faith in an immortal society?”
“What being actually feels like is uphill and downhill, like a subway elevator on our way to and from work in periods of growth, learning and self-actualization, utility, creativity and self-assertion, or harmony, withdrawal and reconstitution. For reasons best explained by storytellers, elevators get no mention in the sequence of these periods which may form a lifetime, a year, a day or an hour, but suffice to say, nobody likes to think of themselves as going around in circles, regardless of how many others are employed by our need to do so: ‘Shut up, or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor!'”
“Linear narrative has come to bestow on its proponents many seductive advantages, such as property and common law, historical grievance and the justification of war and terrorist reprisal, but above all, narrative has sacralized the hippocampus as the altar of knowledge and expertise. Narrative is primarily responsible for the curse of our age, identity, and our horror of the mental illness we define as dementia, its collapse.”
“Time tries to heal too. The moment is oppressed by memory. The future cannot come into being until versions of the past are forgotten. Snippets of music from the past, golden oldies, are private property anchoring their celebrant in the past, to the extent of encouraging regret for the passing of the moment. Ultimately, not only must private property be abolished, but also the wellsprings of avarice and envy, the human spirit. Any amount of educational experiment is welcome in place of the abolition of flesh and blood. Since rationality is the invasion of the moment by the past, children must be taught to cease any effort to understand.”
“Think about this, think about that. What belief are you pushing, Healer? What is wrong with you anyway? It’s your job to fix things, but you never! Your altruism consists of dog whistling the fools who think people like you are somebody. Actually, your compassion is pitiless. Hello? Wake up to yourself! There’s no time left for you to understand the darkness in which we feel less alone, to let the stars in, and acknowledge the Moon as the poor healer who killed himself in your waiting room!”
She has licence for hyperbole, dear soul, after what she’s been through. And the Moon does seem to be seeking a different way to heal. The heat has quite gone out of his competition with the Sun. Indeed, the deities of each are withered on dead placentas, their genders archived where salvation doesn’t shine. Humanity is its own body within a body now. Long live the Earth in the Zodiac of Moon Country! We don’t know enough of our planet’s companionship! Earth’s terrors are reduced at Moon distance to a human fingerwidth at arm’s length, and the disjunct of Sign and Constellation is healed in the absence of seasons. The geographical location of the overhead Moon is the centre of the planet’s disc at lunar zenith, during lunar daylight and terrestrial night between First and Third Quarters, lunar night and terrestrial daylight between Third and First, and equal in geographical latitude and sidereal time to the Moon’s declination and right ascension. Precise calculation of Earth’s position is one of the most difficult problems facing lunar mathematicians, but ‘among those stars right above us’ will do for now, until a fully-fledged astrology evolves.
“Let me in,” cries a voice in the stone-age bicameral mind, in the Pacific Ocean 460 kilometres off Colima in Mexico. Didn’t a mysterious stranger get hauled out of this sea once? In fact, there is nobody in the Healer’s consulting room but someone closer to the head of the queue, an old man aimlessly brushing sand from the hieroglyphs he occasionally unearths under the plaque of his wandering. With bewildered effort he can remain vertical, this encrusted column sinking into the sea in line with the others where once there may have been a causeway.
“I saw a hole in the Man, deep like a hunger he will never fill. It is what makes him sad and what makes him want. He will go on taking and taking, until one day the World will say, ‘I am no more and I have nothing left to give.'” Apocalypto, Mel Gibson, 2006.
We believe in progress, don’t we? How quaint. Of course, it is the human spirit, universal mind, which progresses, not capitalism, materialism or technology. The ‘world’ may be going to climatic hell in a handbasket unless it becomes a ‘community’ sustaining our habitats rather than exploiting them. But how inclusive is the ‘we’ listening to Greta? If ‘we’ belong to ‘the broader community’, it is either with a subconscious, bodily sense of belonging to a universal family with a common ancestor who had neither eyes nor sex, or by virtue of a religious belief in salvation, an egoistic faith that we will leave the world, no less, a better place when we go, by engaging in a lifelong addiction to the mental illness of self-improvement. What it is that mental illness saves us from lurks in the underworld and is unspecified. Death? Climate change? Ridicule? Ostracism? Other people? Until push comes to shove, we all agree that the reason we are here is to participate in human flourishing, and we do so participate, and yet our judgment that our neighbour’s progress is not fast or far enough casts doubt on the whole project, whether we crossed the Atlantic under sail or by Concorde. After all, ‘Flourishing’ is every weed’s middle name, is it not?
«If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there, is there any sound?»
«My dear fellow, you don’t need to tell me. It is obvious from your agonized cycles of inspiration and disillusionment that you see your mission as bringing the world together. You may well be able to represent unperceived existence or the sound of one hand clapping, but a less flattering mirror might reflect just another snake-oil salesman peddling to binary extremists the myth of community.»
«How you enjoy being unkind when you enter the Southern Hemisphere! I don’t blame you for the seasons, so don’t blame me for antipathy and self-doubt. You have seen as well as I the erosion and disappearance on Earth of tradition, the replacement of integrity by diversity and the surrender of autonomy and sovereignty to specialists and experts. Alas, gone are the days when I could fill a lover’s heart. Romantic love has become an elitist joke, and emotional intelligence has demoted affinity to habit.»
«Yes, I have seen. Very few people are aware of you these days, and the reverence I once enjoyed has also disappeared. But as an ebb scrambling in stones is woven by the ocean, human knowledge holds but a candle to me, and the immensity of the darkness of our four-billion year invisibility is framed by eyes which have forgotten the miracle of light. Not a day goes past without a media reference to community as a thing, however community is no more than a momentary ebb of galactic time you land in as a child and believe to be whole and timeless until you experience and understand its delusions, conflicts and grievances as your life’s work.»
«We’re all in this together. This Spring month is the hardest one, when emotions emerging from hibernation are dragged screaming behind overriding evolutionary imperatives. The spectre of a life less ordinary stirs in our hormones in Spring. Winter’s day of reckoning has arrived. Perhaps climate change is only one face of the programmable futility of loving and being loved. Was this era ordained in the evolution of the eye? You never know, the headlines might one day read, “President of Earth Distracted During Her Election Campaign Interview by the Miracle of Being Alive.”»
«We are indeed in this together. I am already halfway through my life: nothing stays the same forever. Howsoever the community wills itself to be enslaved, by Instagram influencers, law courts and other despots, parliaments, corporations, mainstream media or gurus, it doesn’t matter in the end. Earth seems to be divided between those who think life is too tough, and those who think they are just tough enough. For those with eyes to see, twas ever thus: see the other first in order to grab a meal, or become someone else’s. I wonder in which sector of the Milky Way “Soul”, humanity’s death star (there’s no ‘u’ in ‘Sol’), will settle, and who or what will ever see it, and where. Are your ancestors concentrated in one or the other, Woe or Forgetting? Does your family have a plot? Is there a high premium? Or do you look up, and out, and beyond, and just trust? Or not look?»
“Cy-git un chevalier courtois
Du souverain sujet fidèle
Et qui toujours sut à la fois
Servir sa patrie et sa belle.” L’épitaphe sur le cénotaphe de François de Rochechouart.
“There’s a lot to be said for brevity.” Mad Magazine, Issue #502 – 01/2010, Wikiquote.
The Monk got into attaching to the female as a boy. Little did he realize as he gave himself to the caresses and chaste kisses of older girls that as he modelled his gender on theirs, as his feelings and emotions satisfied themselves with intuition and softness and resonance, they were modelling theirs on his, or what they perceived of it beneath their caresses, to the extent of synchronising ovulation with his tender boyish blush, and castrating him to erase the semen stains testifying to their spoor on his woodpile. Perhaps when the Monk responds to the Sun’s “All men are bastards” with “You get that on these big jobs” the transpiration of gender fluidity and the respiration of cultural stability enter the market.
It does take a while to accept that a birth tree can be seen as a source of firewood or an impediment to progress, but of course it is undesirable to freeze to death or graduate to design a 6-lane freeway which does not sacrifice a bit of bush, now that the equipment is at our disposal to deal with the big ones. Furthermore, the number of people who know what has happened to the place of their parents’ birth would be infinitesimally small, and I say that as a callow youth in my memory awaiting the birth in 1968 of my first child, banished to the corridor of what is now Melbourne Central shopping complex. How does a woman bear witness who drives past the place where her grandmother gave birth to her mother and it’s a traffic island? Who knows? No man, probably. You get that on these big woodpiles.
But I digress. One cannot be too discursive when one is limited to a few paragraphs, and there are several important things to explain. First of all, there is some confusion over who is bullying whom, but the ranks have been shuffled somewhat for next year, and the Monk is actually relieved to be moved out of perfectionism by the Zealot. What difference does it make? Let the Zealot overcome the narcissistic design of the Drone’s redundancy. The Peasant will go back to aggression where he belongs, and perhaps it will be good to leave 2019 behind as a year of inauthentic pretence that ‘They’ were ‘You’. The Monk will relinquish his connection with Yvonne, Les Sablonnières and the unobtainable, and trudge past the Circlet of Pisces on a pilgrimage to nowhere like the rest of us, every nineteen years threading the eye of a needle without shank or stitch. I cherish the thought that his recalcitrant belle will dematerialize, along with the head and tail of the dragon, and the contestation of victimhood will die uninhabited.
The next thing is the question resonating all the way through 2019: who is ‘The Man’? Frankly, the Moon is becoming tired of this male metaphor. Of course it is logical that a Moon recovering from a Drone’s bad relationship withdraw for a while, but it is as logical for the Monk to draw re-inspiration from a female Sun in Leo as it was for him to design his gender on the woodpile. Are Trump, Johnson and Xi unequivocally male, and even if they are, is their gender more than populism’s rhetorical flourish? How can Full Moons represent gender dysphoria when the majority who imprint on the Moon do not live gender on a spectrum? Is the Moon no more than a scam, the seduction and control of suckers by a Creator in drag irritated by our reluctant recognition? “We have a special connection, and you can inhabit it by being proud of the attributes for which I diminish you by their diminishment of me.” The proliferation of scammers and the question they raise about secrecy—”Why did it take me so long to see it?”—haunt my experience of the ‘disintegration of humanity’: the Hong Kong insurrection, the destruction of Amazon forests, the danger of sailing the Strait of Hormuz, the genocide in West Papua, the collapse of world order, the counterfeit legitimacy of British democracy, the corruption of the free market, and the mesh of vapour-trails imprinting the desire to be anywhere else.
Which beholder would label the Monk’s withdrawal from the gender wars as abuse? Which appellate judge? Which not? Which woman will shoulder her suspicion of beauty, her hunger for childhood, her fear of her own manhood, and of the power to be someone other than herself, in order to rule the theft of country and her own sovereignty? Alas, the Monk ventures, beyond the biology of gender and the landscape of country, more woman than man, more dingo than pawprint, more tide than rock, none of you. And yet … he continues to be imprisoned in the month, his E Lucevan Le Stelle powerless to delay a single day, his rising and setting, mere accidents of the directions of traffic flow, the time-limit of his appearance in the exercise yard of the Gaia Penitentiary.
The soul, the spirit, the essence, what is it? There’s a good chance you were taught to look for it within. The Circlet of Pisces, the event horizon of childhood delusion, is as good a place as any to start, but when you realize that the whole world is within, you begin to lose the distinction between what is inside and what is outside. It’s all chemistry, isn’t it, really? Country, yes, and emptiness, and the subjective. But it is in the essence of astrology that we find the key to the Monk’s immunity to naturalism, our rootedness in the objective. The essence of astrology, the utility of its birthing-place, is the emptiness of identity, the transparency of perspective, the underworld of the underworld: like the ancestral galactic gyrations of solitude fossilised by the Miserere of Hell, like a divine command reverberating in the lost domain of an Egyptian tomb, and like the memory of a childhood caress, regardless of its perversity.
“Let any man lay the map of Australia before him, and regard the blank upon its surface, and then let me ask him if it would not be an honourable achievement to be the first to place foot at its centre. Men of undoubted perseverance and energy in vain had tried to work their way to that distant and shrouded spot.” Charles Sturt.
”Just before our love got lost you said I am as constant as a northern star and I said, Constantly in the darkness Where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar.” Joni Mitchell, “A Case Of You“, Blue.
“Understanding the past as a place crisscrossed by the tracks of numerous people and creatures is crucial if we are ever to glimpse futures beyond blank spaces.” Samia Khatun, Australianama (p. 105), OUP, Kindle Edition.
Sometimes it seems that life is expanding faster and faster into nothing, and sometimes simultaneously it seems like the view from the panorama lounge in the last carriage of the super-fast transcontinental. It is probably true to say that polarities unite rather than divide us, when we are aware of them. We can tolerate in one room the multiplicity of interpretations of time because each is experienced by us all at some hour. As we emerge from winter such thoughts arise because spring is activating the dormant, and complex stories are beginning to ensnare us in an understorey of bewildering urgencies. That’s Leo, and there will always be one in the bar. Just because the possum is invisible, don’t imagine that’s rain falling on your bicycle helmet.
In my short life I have been mad with lust, mad with doubt and anxiety, mad with grief, and at its end I may well be mad with death. Madness is an experiment with being, a quest of subjectivity, like Chinese nationalism, the survival of indigenous cultures and the entire history of Western Civilization, and I hear its voices loud and clear, as the universe saying, in any language available, “I am.” Say it yourself and it rings hollow. Finitude laps around it like a rising tide, and the whole of philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology cannot convincingly clothe the emperor. However, if you venture into solitude, extending your awareness to the vast panorama of the property which has disclosed itself to you, and you imagine it in your absence, say it then and those two words will be thunderously true, as true as the call Abraham heard to sacrifice his son, as true as the sacredness of a birth-tree.
Is it too mystical to suggest that each of us is not only the universe but everyone in it saying, “I am”? It was not disclosed to the early explorers that the heart of the land downunder had been pierced countless times in the 60,000 years of human habitation—call it property—prior to European arrival, but Sturt was nevertheless giving voice to the universe in the quote above. You can leave “I am” to the experts, and most of us do, and how democracy works is through the regular information of our experts by our voices, but we should recognize that most of the time voices are just noise: talking shit, putting a not-too-fine point on it. Chinese nationalists or no, we seem in equal numbers to be loud exploiters or exploited. However, in the category of legatee we must never fall silent, sharing with dead people, animals and plants, social and other institutions, even the weather and the universe itself, a primal voice: we are the Subjective.
Is it ironic that the voice makes noise? “Make them both confess,” as Joni said. (“The Priest”, Ladies Of TheCanyon, 1970.) Subjectivity was everywhere in 1970, in case you were not present. One man’s memory just got a prelate objectified and destroyed by popular consent to the voice of outrage. I have always wondered about the permanent injury caused by, and the apparently universal horror of questioning the damage of, the loving touch of someone of the same gender. Perhaps “I am” might be less noisy, or nosy (no ‘I’), if we weren’t commuting for hours a day, blinded by speed to the country beyond road or rail, digging our gardens in subdivision fill and submitting to evening barbecues bathed in artificial light, never venturing from the raft we have earned on the ocean of other voices.
Reality is emergent; disclosure is its enjoyment in time, gossip its narrative; the world is a subject. Whether you can identify with the tree as a physical shape, a system of responses or a set of materials, whether you regard your Self as a work in triumphant or shameful progress, a victim of circumstances or an impediment to enlightenment, the world enjoys you, because you confirm it. You may be an accident, though a probable one, but you will never happen again! Once upon a time, there was no accidence, coincidence, synchronicity or probability: there is now because the world which enjoys you invented them and you confirmed them by giving them back as passion, spontaneity, free will and unpredictability. Are you present, in this auditorium screening your History?
Oops, oh dear, you seem to be absent in me: I am your Thou; I and Thou are the subject of creation, the disclosure of the I of the universe. Whether I was a wave, a fish or a seawall, my time is near, but it will remain absent in yours, and absence in the universe has lasted forever, as disclosure will always have it. Disclosure is a two-way street connecting presence and absence, but across town with all those traffic lights it can seem interminable. If you have not already done so, you must imagine in the charts above the absence of the Earth you are standing on and looking through. In such exercise I sprout wings to join voice with the glorious equanimity of the grey butcherbird apparently confronting its finitude with its vigorous resistance to objectivity punctuated by the mournful refrain, “I am”, outside my window where our tracks intersect.
“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!
“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.
