In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 29 x 44″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1957, the first satellite was launched into orbit around the earth. A gleaming metallic sphere about two feet in diameter with four long antennae, it had the look of a robot daddy longlegs. It weighed a hundred and eighty-four pounds and sped through space at about eighteen thousand miles per hour. After three months and more than fourteen hundred spins around this planet, it reentered earth’s atmosphere, blazing into flames.

This event, positioning something manufactured by human hands into the same realm as moon and sun and stars, was “second in importance to no other,” Hannah Arendt writes. It marked the moment when humankind named the relief that we would one day be able to escape earth’s bounds. Science made real “what men anticipated in dreams.”

In dreams, they anticipated the moon. They anticipated flinging themselves away from the earth up to the glowing pearl in night space. They’d been dreaming this for a long time, who knows how long. The moon, earth’s shadowy white sister, is the ultimate dream object. Even if not dreamed of directly, the moon is dreamtime’s overseer, companion; it’s the quiet warden of the night mind. Lyndon B. Johnson watched the Russian satellite move across the sky and knew: “Second in space is second in everything.” In 1961, John F. Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” And thus, we who are earthbound began “to act as though we were dwellers of the universe,” Arendt writes. Perhaps we always have been, but now we have the tools to see. Read More

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

George Henry, River Landscape by Moonlight, 1887, oil on canvas, 12 x 14 1/2″. Public domain, via Art UK.

bright as the blood / red edge of the moon

August, the year in its ripeness, when the shadows shift and the trees ache with green. It brings the Sturgeon Moon. Sturgeon, ancient bony-plated creature of lakes, rivers, and seas. A fish without scales, a fish without teeth, a fish that’s been swimming the depths of this earth for more than two hundred million years.

A shark-finned rolling pin, dinosaurian, the type of specimen displayed in a case in a museum of natural history, this murk-dweller lives fifty to sixty years and can grow up to twelve feet long. The largest on record was twenty-four feet, the length of more than three queen-size beds head to toe. Though they swim down where it’s dim, they’re also known for flinging their big bodies up out of the water and splashing back down. No one knows why. Joy, I bet. The slap-down sound can be heard up and down rivers. Mississippi, Missouri, Saint Lawrence, Volga, Ural, Danube. So common were sturgeon in the Hudson River in the nineteenth century, they were referred to as “Albany beef.”

They’re not so common now. It takes the females up to twenty years to reach sexual maturity. We’ve befouled their environments. And most of all, we’ve killed too many for their eggs, the caviar, tiny slick black moons. Two hundred years ago, the U.S. produced more caviar than any other country. The eggs became a luxury good for the rich to eat with toast points and sour cream. Briny squirt between the teeth, sturgeon essence popped from its pod—I picture these sad and stately sturgeon queens sliced down their centers, blood rivering on the cutting board, eggs scraped out from inside them, the future heaped on a tiny spoon, slick salt on the side of cocktailed tongue. Read More

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Good Shepherd, 1902–03, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 36 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tootsie Roll Tom showed up at all the Little League games in the town where I grew up. Soccer games, too. He kept Tootsie Rolls in his pockets and in a small canvas satchel he wore on his shoulder. He arrived on his bicycle and kids surrounded him as he pulled the Tootsie Rolls from his pockets and his pouch and placed the candy in their eager palms. He was well loved in the town. In the town there was also a psychiatric hospital, formerly known as an insane asylum. My mom called it the loony bin, and she was not the only one. The rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom lived there. He lived there but was not secured to a bed in a room with bars on the windows; he was allowed to ride his bicycle around the town, and wave at everyone he saw, and give candy to the children who crowded around him like hungry, happy little goslings. He had an open, friendly face. He was not too tall and he wore his socks pulled up. The town honored him with a day named after him, embodying a spirit of warmth, welcome, and generosity that the town fathers and mothers wanted to celebrate. The state shuttered the psychiatric hospital almost two decades ago (where did the patients go?) and a redevelopment project might turn the asylum to condos. The rumor was—I heard it in middle school from one of the older middle schoolers—the rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom was in the institution, if he was, because he had raped his mother.

It’s rumored that emergency rooms and psychiatric wards are more active at the full moon. It’s rumored that crime spikes. It’s rumored that people get a little crazed and don’t know what to do with their bodies. You’ve heard these rumors. From bartenders and nurses and nursery school teachers. Maybe you’ve felt it your very self. I saw a neighbor on the street and asked how she was doing. “It’s the full moon, you know,” she said, “so I feel completely demented.” It made news that a town in England put more cops on patrol on full moons. Sylvia Plath knew: the moon “drags the sea after it like a dark crime.”

Of all months, I suspected July, with its thick sour heat, its stewy dead light, must have the most crime, and the full moon in July, the big Thunder Moon, must be one of the crimiest times of the year. Sticky-thighed July, when walls of heat press in, shortening tempers, contorting perspective, squeezing the pouches that hold the dark urges where pressure builds like a blister until dark ashy oozings seep from apertures otherwise pinched. July is the month that crouches behind a tree in the dark, having soaked for a year in sour milk, all its flesh molded and rotting. It waits for you to pass by the tree then pushes itself against you, its slick, rotting skin on your skin. No knives, no guns, just a stinking all-wrongness and you can’t get the smell off. Read More

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Watercolor illustration from Aurora consurgens, a fifteenth-century alchemical text. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Summer now, and the petals are wet in the morning. The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other. “Civilisations still fight / Over your gender,” writes Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Dew is one of its daughters—or so the Spartan lyric poet Alcman had it in the mid-seventh-century B.C.: “Dew, a child of moon and air / causes the deergrass to grow.”

Cyrano de Bergerac, twenty-three hundred years later, imagined a dew-fueled way of getting to the moon. “I planted myself in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast above me,” he writes in his satirical A Voyage to the Moon, published in 1657. If dew rises to the sky, evaporating into the atmosphere, he reasons, enough ought to take him, too. He lifts off, but “instead of drawing me near the Moon, as I intended, she seem’d to me to be more distant than at my first setting out.” He smashes a few dew vials and drops back to earth. A firework rocket gets him where he wants to go, and on the moon he meets a Spaniard who’d arrived there pulled by birds.

This figure, the space archaeologist Alice Gorman points out, alludes to a text published a few decades before de Bergerac’s work. Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone tells the story of a Spanish soldier who’s pulled to the moon by twenty-five swans. He launches on his lunar adventure at the moment in the year when the birds fly south.

But Godwin didn’t know that south was where the birds went. Sometimes we forget to think of what we know. In the seventeenth century, Europeans had no idea where the birds went in winter. Every year a mystery. One November morning, off they flew, only to drop out of the sky again come spring. In 1684, Charles Morton—a “renegade physicist,” according to Gorman—wrote a pamphlet arguing that storks spent winters on the moon. Read More

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten, 1907, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 43 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

An afternoon at the end of May, I stood on a porch in another state, and the day went staticky and dark. The sky purpled and every blade of grass on the hill was pricked by the electricity in the air, a field of green antennae buzzing with the signal. The purple that took hold: not a soporific lavender but the threatening plum of storm, a night come sudden and gone wrong. Said someone on the porch whose third language was English, “It is an eclipse?” It was not, but it felt like one, or how I imagine one to feel, time getting bent by light, the boundary breaking between day and night, one bleeding into the other, destabilizing in the way that certain incomprehensibilities can be, when the messages the senses bring to the brain outpace the brain’s ability to make sense of them.

Sound went weird as well. In the pond at the bottom of the hill, the peeper frogs, which otherwise started their song at nightfall, were tricked by the sudden dark and began a berserk and feverish peepage. Each night these mud-colored squishers ballooned their throats in seductive celebration, engaged in the springtime pursuit of keeping their creaturehood around. Fertile vernal peeping fever. You could hear messages, words, rhythms in their high-pitched love songs. Peak peak peak. Complete complete complete. Seek seek seek. That afternoon, a thunderstorm moved through, the sun reappeared, and, like that, the frogs returned to their daytime silence.

They saw night where there was none, and made what meaning they could from it. We heard words where there were none, the same way we make a face on the full moon’s surface: a perceptual inclination called pareidolia, in which our minds impose patterns or meaning where they might not exist. You’ve glimpsed a turtle riding a motorcycle in a cloud? Seen a demon in the nubbled texture of your ceiling? Heard syllables sloshing from the dishwasher? Pareidolia. It used to be considered a symptom of psychosis. Now it’s known as just another route to making meaning. “Look at walls splashed with a number of stains,” advised Leonardo da Vinci. “You can see the resemblance to a number of landscapes … vicious battles … lively postures of strange figures.” We can see “monstrous things” and we’re better for it: “by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.” We make sense where there is no sense, out of the half-seen and overheard, out of all the indistinct; the big truths don’t reveal themselves when we look at them directly. Tonight, the full moon is the closest it will be to earth all year, a big fat full supermoon. What will you see on its round white wall? Read More

In her new monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment will be published in advance of the full moon.

Edvard Munch, Måneskinn (Moonlight), 1895, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 43 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

An electric blue dusk in an April eight years ago, and a fat full moon was showing off above the trees. I was away from home and walking to a bar to celebrate something privately, and I paused on my way to watch the moon move, its blond glow shifting bonier as it tracked its path higher into the coppery blue. “Beautiful night,” said the bartender when I took a seat. “Beautiful night, beautiful moon,” I said. He poured my drink and an older gentleman on the stool to my right leaned toward me and asked with a sticky blue cheese voice, “What does a young woman like you think of the full moon?” I laughed. Was he asking me if my womb was throbbing? What does anyone think of the full moon? I told him I didn’t know how to answer that question. I’ve been thinking about it since.

It’s April again, surging month, and the full moon rises tonight. What do you think of the moon? Joyce considers “her luminary reflection … her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage … her arid seas, her silence.” So: light, power, water, beauty, insanity, delinquency, tranquility, inscrutability, silence. It’s a start. The moon reflects back what we aim at it; what we see there tells us as much about ourselves as it does about this chalky pearl two hundred forty thousand miles away, give and take. “Between us / we had seventeen words / to describe the moon,” writes the poet Arundhathi Subramaniam. I wonder what they were. Let’s see how many we can come up with.

Before that, one word. In more than two dozen languages, the words for month and moon are the same. In Croatian, mjesec; Czech, měsíc; Slovak, mesiac. In Filipino, buwan; in Malay, bulan. In Japanese, 月 (tsuki); Hmong, lub hlis; Maori, marama; Igbo, onwa; and Zulu, inyanga. In Romanian, Estonian, Uzbek, and Turkish: lună, kuu, oy, ay. Our timekeeper, our month maker, our definer of cycles, tetherballing around us in 27.32-day spans. I say our as though we own it, as though it belongs to us, attached to where we are by the invisible bands of gravity. It does not belong to us. If anything, we belong to it, subjects to its rhythms, its pull, its power, the night’s one glowing, slow-blinking eye. Across the world, notions of month and moon mingle and mesh in the very language they’re expressed. You cannot talk about one without talking about the other. Read More