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The Lunar Sympathizers
- University of Wisconsin Press
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55 i. This long-standing notion has nothing to do with taking pity on the Moon, nor does the Moon itself commiserate, exactly, with the sorry likes of us. Believers take it to mean that moonlight never fails to deliver some cosmic dispensation—a portion of luck, more or less, depending on what antic phase the Moon’s going through that night. Historically, the idea’s always had legs, although it’s never been attractive science. Call it one of those as above, so below axioms of magical thinking, but without the annoying arithmetic that astrologers seem to insist on. Greco-Roman heavyweights talked up this influential Moon: Hesiod and Horace—poets, to be sure—but also Pliny the Elder, who’d been around the block. And even Old Man Aristotle sometimes lost himself in lunar thought until he got so moonlight-hearted that he was scarcely more than a shadow of his level-headed self somewhere on the moonlit ground below. So if living things truly do flourish in the light of a waxing Moon, then surely there’s no more fortuitous time for planting the fields, making wine, fatting cattle, or talking a shy, loving partner in bed The Lunar Sympathizers In my opinion, lunar sympathy’s a fact. It’s huge. And do you know what they teach school kids instead? That we brought 842 pounds of Moon rocks back to Earth. —manager, Ethereal Valley Café and Research Center 56 through more of the 101 known positions than anybody’s ever assumed in a single night. Until it’s hard to say whose radiant skin is whose. When the Moon is on the wane, however, save what little strength is left to harvest, to dry out, to cure what needs curing. These are not the days to make anything but suddenly the quietest love in the world. And the less said about the overblown full Moon, the better. Although some still cling to an ancient belief that the Moon doesn’t get more benevolent than this, that’s far from the current consensus. Go ahead and ask the cops and paramedics, the nightshift ER nurses, the circuit-court judge the next morning. Ask the woman in your life, if you have one. Or the cashier at Safeway, if you must. Yes, the full Moon made Lon Chaney famous overnight, but that’s what made him unbankable in any other cinematic light. The new Moon might as well be no Moon at all: next-to-invisible, not quite coming or going, it doesn’t have the faintest clue to offer in the way of either blessing or misfortune. Those dark days and nights we’re on our own, armed with nothing but the only luck we’ve known from birth. And there’s not much else really to do but wait for whatever we still could have coming, for all the good that waiting’s done so far. Especially for anyone whose luck it was to be born in the first place under this same empty Moon. Which might as well be no luck, not even tough luck, at all. ii. As long as we remember that, strictly on the level of particle and wave, the Moon’s unloading only borrowed light. It has none of its own to shed on our decidedly mundane proceedings. [3.93.59.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:33 GMT) 57 The Sun’s behind this somewhere, as usual, determined to keep us going any way it can—although some small measure of that light was actually ours on Earth to start with, and it’s only a matter of time and space before it comes back to us: we’ll put our waning faith in anything that makes us feel just a little bigger, better than we are. Because no matter how unlikely, we’d love nothing more than to see some change in even the smallest part of ourselves, a few molecules positively preening, rearranging themselves in the mirror of the Moon’s unabashed transformation. We want back that prehistoric dimly imagined connection, wishing at very least for a phantom leg to stand on. And we can’t believe it isn’t there, even though the Moon’s regeneration every month is not the magic it used to be mistaken for. What occurs instead like celestial clockwork is no less astronomical for that. And by asking at the same time for so much and not nearly enough, we keep...