what's good : lunar effects

“The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.” ~ Carl Sandburg

Last week I substituted for a teacher friend who had a family emergency, when the moon is almost full. I don’t care that some people insist there is no correlation between moon phases and human actions, because there are plenty of other smart people who have studied connections. And I know what I have experienced - not werewolves, but heightened senses, intense emotions, scattered thoughts, and otherwise inexplicable, erratic behaviors¹. So I’m paying tribute with a hat tip to this glorious, capricious celestial body this week. May she shine kindly on us.

In poetry - two perspectives + bonus art: First, the erudite Wallace Stevens, breaker of all insurance executive/lawyer stereotypes with his uncomplicated yet exquisitely imaginative poems² written at the ends of his desk-bound days in the office. Here is a beautifully poignant example of his typical style - exploring the exterior thing through an interior lens. Moon as mother, quietly watching over.

Lunar Paraphrase by Wallace Stevens

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;
When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,
Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,
Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter
Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;
When over the houses, a golden illusion
Brings back an earlier season of quiet
And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness—

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

---

Now this one from Mina Loy, a contemporary of Stevens; she was a writer as well as artist, inventor, and entrepreneur, considered “a Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, feminist, conceptualist, Modernist, and Postmodernist” during her lifetime. Her look at the moon is strikingly different, beginning with the powerhouse opening stanza; instead of a solemn paraphrase of motherhood, she offers an erotically charged guidebook to the cosmos.

Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous---

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

---Stellectric signs
"Wing shows on Starway"
"Zodiac carrousel"

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams 
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews...
in the museums of the moon

"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes--- 

---

Moons I, 1932, mixed media on board, by Mina Loy. Private collection. Photography by Brad Stanton

---

In music: I feel like this song is a happy marriage of Stevens’ staid poem, an idealized image of the moon (“Walk along the craters of the afternoon/When the shadows are deep and the light is alien”), to Loy’s provocative lust letter (“…the heart will howl like a dog in the moonlight/And the heart can explode like a pistol on a June night”), culminating in this perfect ending that I think both poets could admire:

Think about a photograph
That you really can't remember but you can't erase
Wash your hands in dreams and lightning
Cut off your hair and whatever is frightening

If you want to write a song about a face
If you want to write a song about the human race
…
Write a song about the moon

And through it all, Paul Simon’s gentle voice somehow also precisely blends that unassuming insurance executive/lawyer with the avant-garde artist/inventor. Lunacy? Of course.

“Ask for the moon: you will be surprised how often you get it.” ~ Paulo Coelho

---

1. In myself and other non-adolescents, to be clear.

2. Also, he once got in a fistfight with Hemingway. About poetry. #Hero