Drawing Down the Moon
01. The moon’s face never turns from us. This is because of the strange and remarkable fact that both the moon’s orbit around the earth and the moon’s axial rotation (a moon day) is an identical amount of time, about 29 days. As the moon turns around in its high orbit, its same face remains fixed towards us in mute and perpetual witness.
02. Borges has a poem about a man who writes a poem about the whole universe but forgets to include the moon.
03. Sometimes I forget the moon. Outside at night I become startled as the moon appears huge and cloud-bestrewn on the horizon shining over my shoulder like a dead angel; it has all of the force of uncanny revelation. “Oh my god,” I mutter to myself. “Look at that; what the fuck.”
04. The word lunatic comes from the very old idea that the full moon makes us go crazy: that it draws the unconscious up towards the waking mind, just as the moon draws the tidal surge of the oceans. Le Lune, lunacy, looney bin, looney tunes, the common loon. Science has contested this idea as mere astrology, though a recent study suggests that schizophrenic outbursts increase on full moon nights. It may be that the idea itself, by now a cultural myth, has a force that makes us act out. Or it may be that our body and psyche are timed by the phases of the moon in ways that we do not yet understand. The universe is far stranger than Neil deGrasse Tyson will admit. Why wouldn’t the full moon exert an invisible force on our psyche?
05. Plath: “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime.”
06. 4 billion years ago and following the formation of the moon, a sea of lava flowed over its surface for some 800 million years.
07. Baudrillard regarded the broadcasted moon landing as one the first signs of the simulation. When the world watched the moon landing on live TV in 1969 they were not watching American astronauts set foot on the moon, they were watching television. It no longer matters whether the moon landing really took place or not; we are already deep within the realm of the spectacular.
08. A Sappho fragment: “Tonight I've watched the moon and then the Pleiades go down. The night is now half-gone; youth goes; I am in bed alone.”
09. The moon is drifting away from earth at a rate two inches per year.
10. As Mary Ruefle remarks on Neal Armstrong (now deceased): he touched the moon and became a lunatic. “He lives reclusively in Ohio and does not attend conferences, reunions, celebrations, parades, anniversaries, press events. He does not answer mail from strangers, answer the telephone, open the door. He was however, many years ago, asked how he felt knowing his footprints might remain undisturbed on the lunar surface for centuries. ‘I hope somebody goes up there some day,’ he said, ‘and cleans them up.’”
11. Mary Ruefle likewise notes Buzz Aldrin’s eye-witness account of the lunar landscape: “Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.”
12. One very old witchcraft spell is known as drawing down the moon. Described in Ovid, this is a ritual used by witches to summon the moon down to earth and that would likewise cause all manner of weird shit to happen such as bursting snakes and rivers flowing backwards and oak doors being ripped off their hinges. The summoned moon would secrete a foam onto plants, virus lunarae (moon juice) and this would be collected to make love potions; drawing down the moon was an erotic act. But it carried a high price: the witch who performed this spell had to forfeit either a child or an eye.
13. In contemporary witchcraft the drawing down the moon ritual is performed as a means by which the high priestess channels the spirit of Diana, the Greek goddess who personifies the moon—variously known as the goddess, the triple goddess, or the One—and who then embodies the high priestess; it is a spell by which the moon is made to speak.
