Moon Lore

How thin is the moment between imagination and reality?

Next year humanity is apparently heading back to the Moon, and this time there will be a woman going too. Good. Let’s face it, ever since those first dusty steps in the 1960s the Moon has been a major league boys club. Male, pale, and stale (cheese). The Moon became so male and starchy in fact that by the end of the manned lunar missions in the 1970s they were even playing golf up there and driving across the surface in an oversized golf buggy.

Ever since Buzz and Neil landed and discovered that there were no mysteries, nothing remarkable hidden behind those endless piles of rock, the whole thing has been on the dull side. The Moon was a lot more interesting before men got there and ruined it, just like they do most things.

                                     ———

It is interesting to note that the Moon is full of craters and that “cratur” is the Irish word for “creature”. In Victorian times, Georgian times, Edwardian times… Jesus times, it was only logical to look up towards the Moon and assume that there was life hidden up there somewhere. The Moon offered a blank canvas for the imagination to run riot, and the wackiest characters from the days of yore certainly didn’t hold back when it came to speculation.

When the astronomer, Sir John Herschel, sometime in the early 1800s, took a giant telescope down to the Cape of Good Hope to observe the Moon (and holiday there, I assume), back home, in London, rumour and gossip started to spread that Herschel had “discovered sheep, oxen and flying men on the Moon.”  While, Sir Paul Neil, another romantic from way back when, announced that he had spotted an elephant on the lunar surface, only to later find there was a mouse trapped in his telescope.

Some people even claimed to have visited the Moon hundreds of years before rockets became reality. Dr Frances Goodwin of Hereford in the year 1600 wrote, for example, an account of a journey he made to the (possibly imaginary, or possibly Portuguese) island of El Pico under the pseudonym Domingo Gonsales, from where he claimed to have travelled up to the Moon on a wooden bosun’s chair carried by wild swans. He was a doctor. Perhaps he was on some good drugs.

There is too, apparently, in the archive of the British Museum an anonymous letter entitled “Selenographica” or News from the World of The Moon to the Lunatics of This World, by Lucas Lunanimus of Lumenberge. In the note the author explains how he tied himself to the tail of a giant kite with the help of some willing (possibly drunk) friends and set sail, on the 1st of April, 1886, a day deemed particularly suitable for such adventures.

How disappointed all these characters would have been. Domingo Gonsales, Lucas Lumenberge, Paul Neil and his trapped mouse, to discover that there was nothing up there on the Moon at all. Just darkness and rocks, and a view of the Earth slowly turning away.

                                      ———

The distance between imagination and reality can be travelled in milliseconds. There were the moments before someone walked on the Moon, when that well of moon lore imagination still existed, and the moments after, when reality shut the dreaming down like health inspectors visiting a bohemian restaurant. Just like there was a day before 9/11, when everything in New York seemed like a Nora Ephron romance and Starbucks was still cool, and there was a day after. The world changed. The innocence was gone.

It’s not always a bad change, of course.

There is a day before and a day after listening to your first Beatles song. Then your own personal world changes. The world inside of your head. A day before and day after your first Mahler symphony. Your first de Kooning painting. Your first William Blake poem. Your first Virginia Woolf novel. Your first Diane Keaton movie. Where to start? Where to stop?

There can be an old you and a new you on a daily basis. A day when you thought that creatures on the Moon existed, and the day after you learned there was nothing there but cold rocks and a black sky. A day when you didn’t have the answer to an existential question. A matter of life or love. And a day when the solution suddenly occurs to you. There’s no going back at that point. You’ve learnt something. You’ve changed. Even if it's only by an infinitesimal amount. The old you is as dead as moon lore and the new you is now.