Aquarius-Stellium 7

II

The age of Pisces is coming to an end. We feel it deep inside. A world is dying. Perhaps it’s already dead. Its God is dead. Its gods are gone. Its heroes never lived. It was all built on the sand. We see that now. We’re left with nothing to believe in but cold calculation. But in matters of value we’ve lost our power to speak.

Faced with such a joke sneering is all that’s left.

There’s nothing in this world to believe in. The ideals of this dying age have melted into an abyss. Desperate to be filled, grasping at the faintest puffs of hope, flailing, pathetic. It strives endlessly and collapses into nothing immediately. The abyss in the heart of us all writhes in pointless agony.

This is the longing for the divine made hopeless in this dying age.

And it’s become the background noise of our lives. It follows us everywhere. A dull repetitive hum, almost forgotten in its ubiquity. It becomes the pollution in the air we breath. Until we follow the council of the dying: “the deep is only a distraction.” The abyss too is a joke. To worry about it is pointless because it’s a lost cause. No matter how much it might itch, we don’t have the reach to scratch it. Just ignore it. It’s the last shadow of the divine, appearing through its absence, and it’s a joke. “Knock knock” says the age. “Who’s there?” “Existential Dread!” “I think I’ve heard that one before,” you reply with a role of your eyes. Is is always left unfinished?

Yup. In our post-modern lap of luxury reality is a fading dream.

Never knowing hunger we kill ourselves. And we slaughter others. We wage wars for the sole purpose of suppressing new forms of life. We rape and consume our dying planet. And in our depths we feel hollow.

What emptiness. What a wasteland. Nothing but wealth and power. Greed and cruelty as sharp as desert wind. An age of flesh-less machine logic. An empty repetition of the same dry formula until the sun mercifully dies. Until ecological collapse leaves us mercifully extinct. Devoid of everything human. Everything divine.

How much longer can we wait in this limbo?

Let the age die. Kill it. Throw its body in the dumpster where it belongs. Only give us something new.

But where is the new? How do we find it?

The priests of the old gods tell us we are lost. They tell us to repent. To return to the path of an ancient faith. Whichever faith it might be. Anything already established. Anything but this abyss. Anything but what has yet to come. As if the abyss were not pregnant.

But just what waits to be born in this abyss of this dying world?

Do we shuffle through the streets like the walking dead? Have our souls shriveled to husks of rotting fruit? What flies circle our dying aspirations? Greed and pettiness and the hatred of all that is other than the self? Will maggots burst from our putrid flesh? A triumphant rebirth of sacred cruelty? Of human sacrifice? Humanity torn to shreds in the white fangs of industrial slaughter?

Where’s the alternative?

Now the future is nothing but an image and a copy of the past. A copy of a mirage. Perhaps in the past it was possible to imagine a future. But no more. Now the past plays on permanent repeat. And the future never comes. The future’s now the disjointed stillborn child of countless failed revolutions. Revolutions in art, in politics, in life. We are still haunted by every dream of the past. And yet we cannot dream for ourselves. As if we can only think with the cold logic of our computers.

Are we still even human...?

What a question. Bombastic and ridiculous. Playful. A game hiding in its own self-seriousness. Dancing with its shadow. A spectacle. Pitiful and in love with pity.

If I doubt my humanity it is only because I am human.

This doubt expresses only the longing beating in the hearts and stomachs of every one of us. The would-be-tragic fractured perfection in every one of us. The eternal aspiration for spiritual assent. As human beings we are longing itself.

This is the tragic optimism at the base of all our disillusionment.

We long for more. So we can create more. We are dissatisfied because we are still tethered to something divine. Our longing is our taste for divinity, for beauty, for wonder and the inexhaustible. An absence, but a conspicuous absence. The abyss of nihilistic cynicism is the negative image of the New Age. It is a glorious pregnancy. As in its very cynicism it calls for new creation. We should be cynical. Because we deserve better. The Age of Aquarius will be more free and creative than any age of human history. And our nihilistic disdain is nothing but the proof that this new age must come. The ground of its gestation. The impetus for its birth.

The abyss of the dead god is a reminder of what the Age of Pisces forgot. We have never possessed the divine. We have never been whole. We have always been seekers. And what is the abyss but this call to search? For most of age of Pisces we believed that we had found absolute truth. But at its death we finally realize that nothing can eternally exhaust our search for meaning. Because meaning is boundless. Eternal truths can never satisfy. Because they simply don’t capture the depths of divinity. We’re degraded as human beings when we allow ourselves to be satisfied with anything less then the infinite. We degrade ourselves when we allow ourselves to be satisfied at all. We must never stop creating: new gods, new demons, new worlds. Let the flowers of a billion faiths bloom. The afterlife is an infinite canvas. The depth of the soul is an infinite well of paint.

We want no religion that can’t be reborn in a single night!