And so the Moon completes another round, and my thoughts are decidedly autumnal! Now is the meaning of a life nearing its end obliterated by the clamour and prodigal blaze of manifest implication–the hunchback Richard, misquoted in the media, as likely said.
The ‘Baby-Boomers’ will leave their over-priced houses to children grown old outbid and waiting, but do allow them a last brief moment to consider their life’s meaning. They’re a bit anxious about it, bless their secular hearts. A hundred definitions of cool have come and gone, a hundred -isms, a thousand icons, a thousand must-reads, and now in the legacy, what still smoulders?
A curious coincidence, this Full Moon conjunction with Uranus. Like many stargazers, I have anticipated this month’s opposition of the seventh planet as a rare opportunity to see it with the naked eye. Not this week. The Moon has seen to that. So what can I ‘see’ behind the Moon’s oppressive charm?
Once again it is Theodore Tasmanian at transit in the Breamlea afternoon, but in the Atacama Desert, Justfriendistan, it is Achernar at Midheaven, the star of hubris, end of the river and like Uranus, invisible to the ancients (for whom the river ended at Acamar). Hubris and charm definitely resonate, but what dimension does ‘contrite interest’ add? We should all know that the Prodigal eventually returns (Luke 15: 11-32). Will the Baby-Boomers return? What does Uranus say?
“Meaning is determined in time, and beyond my realm, but I can say this: there is no system which can be analyzed to elemental constituents; there is no cause which is not a prisoner of such analysis; and every moment is a progenitor of that prison. Most of the misunderstandings which divide and separate people, the antipathy of science to religion, for example, resolve themselves in recognition of the ground of interest, the potentials of care, noise and change.
Care is the root of loving-kindness and responsibility, and the irony of independence, but really it is simply what happens to the world when you pat a dog. It is not culturally determined or directed. It is simply being there, like the flutter of Amazon butterfly wings. Noise is the root of language, science and music: in it lies the meaning of something flapping in the wind, or the phase of rhythms of distant traffic and a blowfly in the baby’s room. It is redundancy’s midwife and the high priest of silence. Change is the root of time, calendars and clocks, but it is born to the motion of a crawling child, dies in the intellect, in structure and determinism, and is constantly refreshed in memory, the mirror and the dream.
You will find your meaning not by parsing the sentence of your time, but by remembering the great tides of interest in which you have swum. Swim on! Death will annihilate your unifying vision, but be joyous in your interest! Love, sing and dream right up until your own death, and leave the meaning of life to its misunderstanding.”
In common with Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star (Venus) who created the humanity we think we know from wounds he inflicted on his earlobes, calves, tongue, and penis, Uranus, the sky god from before time, saw something momentous created from his severed genitals: Aphrodite, otherwise the Roman love goddess Venus, in an ironic twist of comparative mythology.
So something existed before love, something in every moment, before narrative and the search for meaning tied all the moments together and gave them causes, or tried to, and that is interest. What do we deserve? What have we enjoyed? What dictates an imperative to change gender? What does a computerized machine have that a process-worker does not? What does the train-wreck of our time leave behind? What will we take with us? Interest.
The Moon, on the other hand, is barely begun on a new circuit of the Zodiac, which begins by convention in southern hemisphere autumn. Perhaps it is never the wrong time to start again. This is of course a human perspective. No matter how empty of independent reality we recognize things to be, we still order them in systems and structures of the intellect. The global economy is a unity of alienations. The Breamlea Zodiac measures from Sagittarius as well as the equinox in Pisces. The Moon is full when it is directly in line with the Sun and the Earth, and where it transits at solar midnight.
But what does it mean, a Full Moon? How does polarity work under the hood? What would a global astrology come to consist of when naive expectations that the perspective of North America and Europe would assert its superiority over local superstition had been dashed by a combination of rigid barbarian submission to a set of rules for existing upside down and disbelief that prediction was possible at all? An energetic, impatient Sun in October? Twelve seasons in one day, shared on rotation around the globe like the solar terminator? Will the Robot one day volunteer no-fly zones over the ground tracks of Gate-Posts? Or to preserve narrative insanity just terminate me?
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” Omar Khayyám
“What rubbish!” the Skygod echoes at this Gate. And here we have the Moon’s new motivation to keep going around in circles: my prodigal interest in the duality of every perspective, and the potential I live and breathe for a comparative astrology of time. A preview:
Each of these stars forms one part of a gate with another, six steps along on the chart, which is exactly, within 24s of right ascension, opposite it in the sky. Arbitrary definitions notwithstanding, what mindfulness of a unity with who and what is directly beneath our feet can we bring to waking-consciousness? Out of interest?
