Lunatic Reflections

I was out one night, half napping and looking at the sky. The wind was blowing strongly out of the south east, a genuine cooling breeze in that time of year when underlying humidity is always present and ready to put sweat marks under your armpits. Taking a lunch break in the middle of the night gives one the opportunity to stretch out in places that might look more peculiar by day and one also has the agreeable possibility of just staring at the sky and enjoying the view, uninterrupted by the noise and chaos of all those annoying day time activities .

These shots of a pretty much full moon stretched the capabilities of my little Nikon, but the silver disc threw off enough light to show the clouds scudding by, and the deep dark blackness beyond the little satellite a quarter million miles up in the sky.

I was put in mind of the movie I mentioned here recently, Criss Cross, set in Key West during the lunar landing in July 1969. I was 12 years old at the time, and visiting a friend in remotest Assam Province in India. I was running fast and loose on a tea plantation overlooked by China on one side and Burma to the other. It was a remote and fascinating place, a colonial outpost of order and productivity in a world that had forgotten the Raj, a little pink Empire on the banks of the Brahmaputra River in the shadow of the Himalayan mountains. Remote enough that I never did get to see the "giant leap for mankind." It was years before I got to see film of the first human step on the moon, and that hot July night I huddled around a shortwave receiver listening to the commentary on the crackling radio while staring up at the silver moon and wondering what my world was coming to. Not much it turned out. When my month was up I was flown back to Europe where video cassettes hadn't yet been invented and I never did get to see the first moon walkers that year, or for years to come.

I look at the moon and I think about the flags, the rovers, the bits and pieces left behind, sitting there as stranded as the hulk of the Titanic under the Atlantic Ocean. But there, on the moon, left behind by human beings. I remember when Apollo 8 took off for the first circuit of the dark side of the moon, the astronaut Borman's son reportedly asked his dad to bring him back a piece of cheese. It was one of those quotations that make the newspapers (the Internet wasn't invented yet) and reminded us, with no great subtlety that we don't really harbor romantic notions about the moon, not in the Age of Science.I like the full moon better than the new moon phases, the silver light bathing the countryside, the stark shadows and the two dimensional flattening effect of the light, I like that better than the pitch darkness of the new moon. When I was out traveling by sailboat the nights of no moon were made magical by the absolute blanket of stars visible in an unpolluted sky. However the full moon nights on the ocean created the effect of a journey across a sea of quicksilver. Plus you had a chance to see where you were going, which was nice. Nowadays I live in a firmly anchored house and lacking street lights I still get to see the stars from my deck and from my bed I can look out of the window and see the salt ponds glistening under the full moon.I suppose it has to go without saying that I prefer to watch the moon's phases from the comfort of countryside that enjoys temperatures well above freezing. I know some people find magic in the glitter of moon light on snow flakes, but I absent myself from that group. I was recently in the mountains and saw stars shining unwaveringly through the rarefied air at one and a half miles above sea level. The air was cold on my skin and though my wife insisted I couldn't see my breath I was pretty sure I should be able to. I saw a black sky much more like the night sky in the keys than I would ever have imagined.

I have traveled a great deal and it never ceases to amaze me that the moon is the same everywhere. That's not a revelation but its something I think about when I'm "wasting time" staring at it. It was as full over Sydney as it was over Key West, and will be again, in perfect synch. The moon has also had similar qualities awarded to it over time. The Romans attributed the power of madness to luna, such that the moon bred lunatics. Tidal movements are influenced by the moon as are moods most particularly those of women whose mysterious cycles men managed to figure out worked on the 28 day cycle of the lunar month. Which naturally leads the cruel to attribute lunacy to women as a matter of course. Men are sturdy, reliable and predictable as the masculine sun. Which might come as a surprise to the officers breaking up the rash of fights on Duval between men when the moon is full.

In my strictly rational world people are not influenced by the cycles of celestial spheres, irrational behavior is strictly coincidence. Of course that might force one to wonder why I would spend all this time photographing the moon on a whim and pondering why the moon is; lunacy is as lunacy does. Until next month no more moon talk.

And no. I couldn't figure out any way to get the Bonneville into the pictures.