Oh, wow, look at the moon

Last night I kept waking up every hour or so. This isn't so uncommon, but wakefulness seemed more stubborn than I could account for, even with all the things to keep you up at night, these nights.

Finally, I thought, "is it the moon?" That big rock is also, after all, a thing that keeps you up at night.

I got up and stumped downstairs to peer out the skylights. I couldn't see any eye look back through either lens, but this three A.M. was certainly weirdly bright.

"Clouds," I thought. "Overcast." But I kept peering. Brightness in the southwest. It could be.

"I'm not going to go outside at three A.M. just to look at the moon, am I?" I asked aloud, and hearing it, replied, "of course I am." And did.

This was one of those moons that reminds you that even before electric light there were nights you could navigate in a silvery dimness, both alluring and quite serviceable, not like night at all, but some third phase of lived time, distinct from sleep or waking.

Not large, not even looking perfectly full -- a little pared-down, a little squeezed -- this moon cast a clear silvery light that cut out its own shadows from the lilac over the door, shadows quite distinct from the ones thrown by the neighbors' and the street lights. Shadows like holes cut in delicate foil, one atom thick.

The moon was embedded like a button in a cushion of cloud, and had burnt a bronze ring into the haze, with a rainbow halo around that, showing a wide stripe of greenish patina.

There were other clouds, too, but through the rents the sky was pure, and I counted stars and found Orion. "You here, looming up behind my house so early in the year?" I said.

"It's not so early," he said.

I went quietly out of the gate and across the road. My neighborhood was so familiar -- how can I say it, so still, and yet full of a restless wind teasing and spooking me, everything dormant except for me and the wind.

I watched the clouds thicken in places like milk, gathering to a surface like plaster much painted, and thin in other places until the smooth beautiful night showed.

The street had no inhabitant but me -- no passerby or taxicab, raccoon or black beetle presented itself to make demands on my alertness and attention. Just the wind, elbowing each tree as it passed along the road, making them all shake out their hair. A leaf would drop and scrape along the asphalt, in a quiet so pure that this little movement sounded like an animal approaching, like a threat or at least a risk, but it always was a leaf when I looked, and the ghost of a threat went on by me, tumbling.

I went back inside and I think it's true that I slept until some more sensible hour of the morning.

I don't know when this became a moon journal. It's one of the few things that seems indisputable, I suppose.

These are funny old loyalties. I never became an astronomer or even learnt very many constellations; instead I developed a parasocial relationship with Orion and left it at that. Still, I feel this loyalty, this duty to observe astronomical events, to accumulate them, as though the accrued images were in themselves a kind of science, or as though the moon were glad of a witness.

{rf}

Notes

1. The title here comes from an ancient Doonesbury (Doonesbury!) cartoon in which someone translates Blake into Californian: "The moon, like a flower in heaven's high bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night” translates to "Oh, wow, look at the moon."

Wait, I found the actual comic here. It's from May 1979. As a child I would devour Doonesbury collections. I loved them.


2. Imagine setting a big rock spinning around a planet to pull the tides and then also having it shake cut-foil shadows out over the stoop. The attention to detail. The whimsy and munificence.