Country is criss-crossed by trails, above and below ground. It’s easy to forget that, when you’re bathed in moonlight. You’re here now, and that’s enough. But give him a name, and then you and the Moon are tangled up in trails, because you have a name too, featured on an arbitrary array of signposts in the network of your country.
If the existence of a vagabond may be defined by work or lifestyle which precludes or undermines membership of a social group, most of us, as we ponder the upcoming Christmas/Summer holidays, the mechanisms of a multicultural defence against the coronavirus, and the economic and political dynamics of sustainable air-conditioning and climate change, call our social status into question too. It is not just identity politics which signposts us as vagabonds.
Be aware of what you want from him, because while the absence of machismo in the Vagabond may be pleasant to play with, the love will pour out of him if you so much as caress his foot. Dolls go through adolescence too. That his independence and unconcern for opinion are skin-deep confirms the kinship he craves. Better that you keep your tenderness for your own man.
Is the Sun in Woke and the Moon in Cancel, or the other way around?
What does it matter? Both are projections, esoteric and binary caricatures of place and time.
How individualized perspective subverts the existence of both the woke and the cancelled is demonstrated by the confusion wreaked upon the subjectivity and possible agency of Sun and Moon by Signs and Angles in astrology.
Is it unreasonable for the Moon to do his shadow work independently of a cacophony of competing psychological models?
Not only must the Vagabond accept rising and setting simultaneously, but the very possibility of a personal trajectory is undermined by local prejudice: he sets in a quadrant he did not aim for, and over his shoulder his journey’s embarkation has disappeared like the contents of a dream. It seems he is doomed to wander as a ghost among the contiguities of human horizons.
Lest it be forgotten in the contestation of identity that no place on Earth is the centre of the universe, bear in mind that the Vagabond is as entitled as anyone else to reclaim his perspective. The universal tendency to characterise the drifter fancifully as the bagman, the bogeyman or Black Pete, whether shadowed by superficiality or unruliness, should teach us to look to our own infamy!
Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
„Ich schlief, ich schlief—,
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—
Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
Tief ist ihr Weh—,
Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit
will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!“
O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
“I was asleep—
From a deep dream I woke and swear:—
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity.” Zarathustra’s Roundelay, Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra.
This, believe it or not, is no laughing matter. Homo sapiens sapiens has assumed responsibility for the weather. It had to happen. At least 50 kya they anticipated night sky configurations of the Milky Way Galaxy conducive to initiatory ceremonies—or did they?—and buried their dead in the Underworld. At least 5 kya their familiarity with the seasons was able to relate Sun position, seasons and phases of the Moon. At least 500 ya they were able to time their affairs independently of the weather or Sun and Moon position; in fact Sun and Moon were forced to obey their mathematical formulae. Now anyone who doubts the power of Homo sapiens sapiens to bend inevitable change to static comfort parameters is called ‘denialist’ and ostracized. Is it any wonder that the birds on the wire cock one eye at Homo sapiens sapiens as it hurtles past on its ‘freeways’ towards its occupation of creating eternal life for its celebrated traders of inequality and elite rapists of country and planet?
However, doubt is not on the calendar because of climate change and the questionable benefits of capitalism and its derivative, consumerism. No, doubt enters the equation at this time of the Homo sapiens sapiens year because the Sun has already entered the great River of Woe, the Acheron, and nobody, least of all the celebrants of whichever solstice it might be, or the children who must learn real gratitude for whatever disappointment a guy in a red suit and false beard leaves them before he disappears into whatever parents do during the day, has ever been confident, notwithstanding the living testament of 2,500 generations of ancestral stars, that beyond its other bank is not death, species death, heat death, or a merely temporary annuity paid by the actuaries of finitude. The opposite of woe is not happiness, but forgetting, because woe is not unhappiness, but the rational apprehension of finitude in eternity, or in time itself and nothingness, which come and go in quantum micro- and macro-transparencies, the experience of which is the very definition of country, and for that matter, Homo sapiens sapiens itself.
Sidereal zodiacs are personal things. Various of those divided into twelve equal parts place their boundaries where they coincided with the seasons at some time in the past, or originating at Spica, or at intervals placing important stars in the middle of their Constellations. My zodiac, the so-called Breamlea Zodiac, conforms to three basic rules: boundaries wherever possible must accord with observation; boundaries must to all intents and purposes be defined in a static frame of reference; and boundaries must follow lines of Right Ascension, so that alignments of constellations and stars beyond the zodiac fan out from the Celestial Equator anchored by observation’s left and right, square to the meridian. Accordingly, Iota 1 Scorpii is the hinge of my zodiac—it moves 0.00026° south along its hour circle every 100 years, in galactic coordinates about 13 arcseconds in longitude and 7 arcseconds in latitude in 2000 years—at 0° Sgr, and “Yabby” is the easternmost bright star of one of the sky’s most dramatic and familiar asterisms.
Everything in the sky moves, hourly, daily and yearly, Sun and planets, stars and galaxies. Unlike equinoxes, solstices and ayanamsas, and the inclination of Earth’s Equator to the plane of the Milky Way, the intersections of Ecliptic and Galactic Equator have barely moved in the celestial background of the Zodiac throughout recorded time, so the Milky Way naturally presents another static frame of reference. Woe, the Gate of God, and Forgetting, the Gate of Man, are powerful pivots of sidereal astrology, where Moon and planets cross the great river of stars which still, in dark skies, wheels overhead as awesomely as it has done for as long as there have been eyes to see it, and independently of comparatively rapid seasonal and climatic change. Seasons and their Signs move across the heavens; constellations and other asterisms mill around in situ.
I live just down the road from Wurdi Youang. I discovered country 5000 years ago, when the angle between galactic poles and me was 90°, and I marvelled at the ‘me’ my ancestors were showing me as they assembled in a straight line over my head, inviting me to stretch one arm to one end and the the other to the opposite end, and not only was the Emu standing in my skin and language speaking where it always has on my west side, but straight in front of me where I clapped was the noon hour, the law, everything, including me, as it just is and always was across the laval plain east of the Anakies and south of The Divide, and I knew that directly behind me was a circlet of thousands of years of clockwise-cycling song and dance and ceremony, casting upon the law a shadow of eternal joy.
Something about you tells me we knew each other! You don’t remember either? Well, isn’t that just the way it goes? Perhaps we were lovers, and walked together, or shared a fire, a creation story or a common ancestor. Perhaps, on different sides of a world, we caused the same calamity, or escaped it. Regardless, I believe I admired you, and I bear you and your ignorance of my grave no ill will, as I have no intention to tend yours. Is that true, or is it just another leaf of the Elm I have forgotten?
Scavengers are very smart birds, the vagabond says to himself, noticing an anomalous crow on the beach. A different kind of smart from migratory birds. He remembers a science bulletin years ago which described how some scavenger species was herding migrating birds to their death among North American skyscrapers. How would you know that, he muses, remembering the spectacle of seagulls in the updraft of the incandescent spire of the Melbourne Arts Centre wheeling in turn to swoop on insects with the studied delight of dancers. Nobody else had believed that. And the London crow, or raven or whatever, which dropped nuts onto a pedestrian crossing for the traffic to crush, and then hopped out to retrieve them when the light turned red. And the Perth restaurant which put its sumptuous garbage bins in a peculiar place only he knew, from tracking compactor trucks.
Just one thing, he rehearses, sloshing in a sudden flat phosphorescent sigh. It may be my only opportunity to say, that ‘being there’ means only to be attentive; ‘being there for someone’ does not mean to feel compassion, or help someone to deal with their problems, but to attend to someone, to enjoy someone. That alone is ‘presence’ and ‘loving-kindness’. I know I should keep my trap shut, he mutters, but it feels like something which has never been said, the ancestor of common-sense, the moist soil of a Garden of Eden … and another thing …
We’re all vagabonds, in our pursuit of a journey of indeterminate duration and destination. This is especially so for those knights errant who pursue love, or good, or truth. The destination is never reached. Evasion of someone else’s idea of these gives us direction, but brings us no closer to ours. And what happens when there is nobody left to evade? One by one our accusers face the gallows.
What is a vagabond doing on Eighty Mile Beach near midnight? Easy to imagine how he got there: dysfunction, rejection, confusion, rectitude, dissociation, addiction. But where on Earth is he heading? Towards Broome it appears, where–unless I’m mistaken–he started school in 1954. But he’s gazing lugubriously at the Moon, which is headed over the Indian Ocean, the other way. Familiar with the night sky from decades of sleeping out and a thousand municipal libraries, he may be walking towards a particular star, which might explain his continual veering towards the ocean, or is he drunk? We’ll never know; neither will the crow.
Perhaps he is headed beyond Broome, to the person gazing at the Moon in his direction right now, thinking of him. Thinking what, I wonder, and is she the person he thinks she is? Dulcinea or Aldonza? An acquaintance’s deserted wife, a schooldays friend, distant family? Haughty teenager promised to the elder he met in gaol who died there of an overdose on her Facebook? His own clever daughter perhaps, willing his connection to mean something? How does he want to be remembered? she might wonder, and well might she, with the most inane question in all of Errantry!
He battled with the Dumbledors, the Hummerhorns, and Honeybees, and won the Golden Honeycomb, and running home on sunny seas, in ship of leaves and gossamer, with blossom for a canopy, he sat and sang, and furbished up, and burnished up his panoply. (Tolkien)
I am haunted by a story written by my father about the Eighty Mile Beach, or rather a man stranded in its sandhills in the pitch dark. My memory has attributed to it the most evocative description I have ever read of the three- or four-dimensional experience of the galaxy in a dark sky, where you can see the vast distances of the solar system with the naked eye, and looking up feels like falling. This was my projection, dispelled by recent rereading: Dad’s character couldn’t see even his body, so lay down and slept until light, as though the stars weren’t there. But my Dad loved the Kimberleys, worked there during my early schooling–a daguerreotype experience of post-colonialism before its infiltration by the concept of ‘self as other’–and as he was dying completed the self-publication of a novel about “black and white love in the Kimberleys”, The Binding Chain. I am still wandering on his beach.
And so is the vagabond I guess, while his eponymous namesake heads out to sea, but I seem to have lost him, and can only see where moonlight slicks upon the heavy fluttering of a large black bird on a mound a long way up the beach.
The Moon, together with the voices of our ancestors in the self we call the world, is doubtless the harbinger of the god who dies and is reborn. Certainly the Vagabond will return tomorrow night and, possibly beyond the lifespan of humanity, repeat the sequence every year: recite a pagan god’s name backwards, S-E-R-A-T-N-A, outsmart seven sisters, quit the manger-cave of the Bull and Aldebaran (the archangel Michael), bathe in the sacred hormones of Saiph, cross the Lethe, sashay in a tutu onto a midsummer night’s dream, wake up in the mind, invent an astrology. It does seem strange that some people can’t love him until they turn him into a woman, but there you are.
Grandchildren, if you come to vacation at the Eighty Mile Beach Luxury Eco Resort, taking advantage of the pre-Christmas off-season rates, make the most of the floodlit sky of the social beach-volleyball, for you’ll soon be migrated to an eighty-storey condominium in Hobart. Broome and Halls Creek will be ghost-towns, and the saga of Eighty Mile Beach will be the improbable tale of a couple of old men, of a woman in the Moon never there, and a soliloquy interrupted, always wrong, long-elided.
Funny how the Full Moon transits in the middle of the night, huh? Funny that the middle of the night is rarely midnight. Funny how the Bull looks like a real bull, and Michael his eye. Funny that Papa talked about such things as though he had actually seen them. Funny about the Seven Sisters and how they had to be tricked into sharing …
The vagabond is homeless, disconnected, a refugee from the world of the therapeutically discriminating intellect. Is he unpacking his “stuff”? Is he on the way to realizing that the enemy of a perfect world is the undeconstructed self? Shall we ask him? Are we bored enough by our pallid Nothingness to inhabit with our self-aggrandizing ‘compassion’ another’s tedious wound? Do we have the temerity to apply our triumphant empathy to the capacity to deal with the shame of eating garbage, being constantly afflicted with diarrhoea and having nowhere to do it but in our pants? Are we ready to deal with the stereotypes he has us cast in?
Now read on.
Does this look like a smiley face to you? You’re sadly deluded. The Moon is a piece of rock without legs, and its ‘head’ is all face. If that doesn’t give him away as a shady type, the one eye confirms he is ‘other’, not to be trusted, potentially evil. Of course, as compassionate people, we have long abandoned physiognomy, but our compassion is anchored to the otherness of the ‘other’. Compassion is part of our identity, and the identity of the ‘other’ is as fixed: indigenous people must remain in traditional culture, disinherited and victimized, and disabled people must remain the recipients of our largesse, defined by their disability. To expect otherwise is racist and elitist, disrespectful of their identity.
The Sign of the constellation Taurus in the southern hemisphere is Sagittarius, the sign of charisma and independence. Re-inhabit your subjectivity and respect the ‘other’ in theirs! Nobody’s identity is fixed, at birth or in an analytical, managerial mind. There is no form which is not empty. There is only time, and the dark art of becoming. And the timelessly true subject of the subject, love.
Part The Second
If you want to justify yourself–tidy yourself at the margins–spare me some change, says the vagabond, the loser, the weirdo. Pause for a dialogue in the daylight world of your power to imagine away my exile. But if you can brave it, meet me in the middle of the night, in the chaos of your fears, the world of my power to make you an infantile irrelevance.
Chapter 1. Saiph
Who is God?
SAMAR KHEL
HANGA ROA
These people on the streets and roads of Afghanistan know the folly of disrespecting a man who will kill you instantly with impunity. If one is uneducated in the nature of offence, as I am, and you too, then one is in mortal danger. One must shroud oneself, maintain an attitude of deference and submit to any indignity. Is it wise to leave questions about God to the Imam to decide? No, it is stupid to voice an opinion. And that is why I will be long gone from the shelter of this moai by dawn. The power of Polynesians is immense, and under the gaze of their ancestors existence itself is an impertinence. Saiph has the laughter which incites a man to be bigger than his grandfather. It is very, very dangerous.
Chapter 2. Butch
Who are you?
BAGNOLI
PUKAPUKA
Why do I sing “O Sole Mio” when all the beautiful people at this beach have their earplugs in? Because this is a dream, and singing a Neapolitan song gives me an aesthetic reason to be dressed in rags. My people forgive my problem with the bottle, and the years I wasted reading the history of the world, because I entertain the tourists. They tell me a woman’s beauty is not so much degraded by wolf-whistles in Italia these days. You can wear these revealing clothes. Is it true? A woman’s beauty in Pukapuka is the secret which keeps us alive. You will all leave and take your secrets with you, and here another cyclone will come.
Chapter 3. Avior
What is life?
SAN ANDRES
PHUKET
You boys are trouble, no? Hahaha! No, just having fun, I know. That’s all I’ve got, and I don’t know when I’ll have more, but you’re welcome! A cricket team, eh? We play baseball where I am from, but last year I was in India. There it is big, I know. Howzat! Hahaha! The world is just a big game of cricket, no? Tampering with the ball! Hahaha! Go over there to vomit, man! Hahaha!
Chapter 4. Regulus
What is death?
RECIFE
MELBOURNE
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” When will the Holocaust be forgotten? When will the Twin Towers be forgotten? For ever and ever. Now get out with me and witness the moment. I am pausing the meter, see?
That you will never see again. The star is the Archangel Raphael. I thought it was him when you started raving about death. Why do you want to talk about death? Is that my “stuff”? No. “I found more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, whose heart is a snare and whose hands are like prison chains.” That’s mine. “Eh quoi! n’est-ce donc que cela? La toile était levée et j’attendais encore.”
“Finally, I got home. It was tantamount to harassment.”
“Well, at least you got to see the Archangel Raphael”
“Not funny.”
“And you might refrain from turning our Christmas party into a conversation about death?”
