Moon Mullings

On the suggestion of a friend last night, I watched the PBS documentary Chasing the Moon, released in 2019, already a time-warp away. Nothing more metaphorically and physically integrated into the successive generations of my lifetime than our lunar companion-- sister, confidante,  constant ineluctable celestial shadow. From crib gyms and baby mobiles to nursery rhymes and Good Night Moon, essential to our visual and oral origin-architecture. 

Archival footage from the documentary shows the nostalgic, mostly black-and-white world of my childhood... the deceptively innocent 1950's and the ensuing politicization of the solar system.  I well recall getting herded in elementary school into the concrete basement cafeteria where a mounted old TV set showed us the first manned American space launch-- part of a desperate and sometimes rushed massively costly program in response to the prior Russian 'one-up' success.

The seven initial astronauts were heroes.  As much as I obsessed over my Yankees baseball cards, I knew each of the Mercury men like uncles. I knew their wives' faces, envied their children's proximity... admired their casual humor and calm demeanor in the face of dangerous missions.  Celebrities.  I had just turned nine when I witnessed John Glenn's parade in the city.  As opposed to the Knicks' recent event, real paper tape rained down on a massive crowd twice the size of the security-limited NBA celebration. American flags were omnipresent; it was historic and iconic and yes-- media black-and-white. 

Space exploration was a kind of fantasy fulfillment. Every sighted child on this earth grew up looking at the sky and dreaming about the planets and stars. Our parents bought us primitive telescopes. Actual interaction-- to escape our mortal environment here, seemed impossibly imaginable.  And here we see the original witnesses... with their instamatic cameras and binoculars, watching history in real time with palpable excitement. We, the 21st century TV streamers, we witness the cameos and footage of JFK addressing the nation with young enthusiasm and courage, with ideas and ambition.  And the old acclaimed journalists-- Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, bringing their personal brand of poetry into the language of broadcasting.  We remember their words like secular sermons. Oratory. 

In 1969 I spent a few high-school months in rural Mexico, sponsored by the Experiment in International Living. On July 20 my little village congregated outside a local store which somehow had harnessed antenna technology and a TV set.  I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on a blurry screen walking on what the local Veracruz population called el conejo en la luna.  It seemed, like many things that summer, unreal. I was embarrassed to see the flag planted as though the universal ineluctable was being staked as American.  

It always baffled me that exploration of landscapes and monuments which pre-existed man by millennia were 'staked'.  Why was discovery processed as possession?  All of these real estate sales and transfers... whose land is this anyway? Air rights?  Everything parceled out for profit.  It seems wrong.  The moon-- a competitive destination in the space race... what will happen next?  A Trump-site? A lunar Mar-a-Lago?  Does naming the Gulf of Mexico make it so? Is it not just a reference?  $10 from every American pocket, they estimated, back in the 1960's... and somehow it belonged to us.

There it was... my lovely moon-- the small hole in the sky or the goddess and magical orb that followed me from the city to our Cape Cod summer rental, who never left me except for a monthly curtain call, who patiently watched outside my bedroom window while I slept, cried, read books, did homework, painted pictures... who listened in utter silence as we sang or complained or paddled canoes up New England rivers... featured in maybe half of my songs and poems... mentioned or not.  Now a symbol of political dominance, cold-war competition, currency.  The American dream transferred to outer space... 

Deep cut... to reality... to the billion-pixeled technicolored digital version of contemporary television... the omnipresent phone capture, the cheap over-representation and constant barrage of imagery and news... the mistakes and fakeries, the altered and filtered and air-brushed, auto-tuned interruptions and blasts, the biased and unreliable reporting, the world so overly accessible... and a huge catastrophic mess of information that has separated the haves and the have-nots further than ever before. Our deeply ingrained heart-stocked memories now stored primarily in trillion-triplicate on an iPhone cloud.

As a girl, my father would turn on 'the news'.  Yes, it was a thing-- it was reliable and authoritative.  We trusted journalism.  Other countries were not quite as fortunate as we Americans, my father explained.   The truth was not always shared.  And there were secrets-- scandals,  political manipulations.  But gradually as I age we have become America-the-reality-show. Certain days it's the shit-show for sure.  And not only is it the politicized moon, it is the privatized profit-taking industry which bloats the Musks and Trumps of this era.

And yet, my moon-- the very same one that engendered a massive political and industrial movement, she is there for me, over the Harlem Meer with the soundtrack of the geese and ducks and the clouds moving across her face... she is there in her monthly costume changes... her constant and scheduled disappearances and entrances.  

Heavens forbid they should discover a trove of rare-earth metals beneath her face.  The Sea of Tranquility could become another Strait of Hormuz and the world will be warring for ownership. SpaceX and Blue Origin will certainly have an advantage alongside the new American oligarchs and their investors could bloat into trillionaires and beyond. The coming decade will determine the next installment of this documentary and whether we will witness an astronomical space odyssey or political lunacy.  Either way, I will look out of my city window tonight, between the tenement walls and courtyards, and whisper, with hope and love, Goodnight, Moon. 

Odd-i-sea

Recently I got an email from an old friend-- well, we shared a job-- she replaced me and discovered I was the only 'ear' qualified to comprehend the insanity and challenges required by her daily agenda.  So we had a kind of bond.  This was more than thirty years ago.  I remember I introduced her to a man I knew-- she was the kind of woman anyone loved to date-- fun, smart, well-dressed, just edgy enough to appeal across the spectrum.

But suddenly-- well, she'd changed her life, moved across the country, again... approaching 70, blurting out that she'd messed up-- failed to find her calling, maybe-- that perfect relationship that eludes most of us. It was a moment-- and I am privileged to be on the receiving end because I do see how some of us spend decades following tangents, under the illusion that we are 'in the moment', aligned with some karmic rhythm... maybe in love with another fun loser, deciding yes, we can be a back-up dancer at the age of 40, or a master chef, or a fashion designer.  It's all spread out there, when we are young-- the choices, and we are at the edge of a vast river of time that seems utterly infinite, and some of us just want to inhale the scent of water, sense the passage of time-- watch the clouds reshape, the inevitable miracle of sunset... it goes on.

Bob Dylan at 85 mentioned in a recent interview that 'Time stands still while we move.' Not original-- there are  umpteen lyrics going back millennia but he does have a kind of 'authority'.  What he says seems to matter... it percolates and becomes 'word'. Maybe that's what my friend misses-- a certain  lack of impact.

I met a young woman last week who plays bass-- she has a Spector which undoubtedly cost her more than I've ever paid for an instrument... but I mentioned Lou Reed (Spector endorsements by his musicians) and she had absolutely not a clue. Icon-- cornerstone... absolute blank.  Okay.  She's Korean... but still... is it my bad to expect young musicians to have some classic rock referential? 

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey will undoubtedly introduce a whole virgin generation to the classics... the way Oppenheimer maybe reminded us that horrific world destruction is only a button away. I'm not sure I want to see the new film-- I hate watching bloody recreated battles and heroics and super-heroes.  But I'm the minority.  The Charles Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame caused me to vomit up my dinner at the age of 8.  My son grew up seeing movies like Hostel as date-night fare.  

But what do we expect?  We who studied and read and digested historic literature and the sequences of Kings and empires... now see a generation that values the present above all else.  And supposing they are right-- in terms of physics, and the Time-Stands-Still theory, this is it. And we are infinitesimally unimportant in the universe.  Our lifetime is meaningless.

In my early thirties,  I had that cartoon on my refrigerator-- the one with the well-dressed woman looking at her shopping list and captioned 'Oh my God! I forgot to have children!' When I got home from giving birth to my son, I took it down with irony and a tiny sliver of regret.  And it was only the merest quirk of fate that motherhood happened-- an unrehearsed moment, a rogue sperm, etc. 

Conversely, how many times do I beat myself up for a negative scenario-- if only I'd taken a night off, maybe my daughter would have been born healthy... or obsessing over that woman who fell into a manhole.. if only she'd parked inches away?  It goes on.... we move, while the moment sits there.  Daily choreography presents itself so that we encounter random adventures-- me, just a half hour ago, with my bag of yesterday' bagels... and a homeless man, right there outside the store-- his head on a table, outside in the heat and the wildfire-polluted air... people on the sidewalk wearing masks, and there he was-- sweaty and dirty as though he'd been in a fire himself.  The bagels were clean; he was hungry... it was perfect.

I have many friends of all kinds; some torment themselves daily that nothing they've done was ever enough while some seem to gloat and float in a clueless contingency of confidence.  Some are psychologists-- psychiatrists... who have totally abandoned the concept of compassion. They do not see or hear or fathom that they might be missing the machinery of emotion.  Perhaps that makes them professional.  

So to my friend... I am the quintessence of unprofessional, unclaimed, unacknowledged, unrewarded.  I suppose the rhythm of my life is such that I cannot even make an assessment-- negative or positive.  Aside from regrets about my daughter, some missed opportunities surely-- maybe I expected less.  I've also listened to plenty of stories.  They interest me.  I care.  I have learned that the reasons people choose for their trouble or outcome are not always the essential reasons.  So many failed relationships.  I have strings of ex-boyfriends and non-boyfriends.  When one is in a relationship, other men feel 'safe' around us-- they confide, they open.  There are women in this life-- who change men... it could be the way they feel-- their skin, their scent... it is irresistible. Some men discover this too late.  It's sort of a magic thing... it happens. Few possess these women.  The metaphor of Helen... 

I have no clue what Christopher Nolan will do with Homer. But the metaphors always obsess me. I am not sure about Gen X or Y or Z... their frame of reference seems so limited. It used to amuse us that Jay Leno interviewed people on the street whose knowledge of current events was non-existent.  Now this seems epidemic. But does it matter?  Me, an aging old relic with shabby clothes and way too many books... still unable to assess my own existence beyond the simple math of sharing a bagel with a homeless man.