{"id":153686,"date":"2021-07-21T12:16:31","date_gmt":"2021-07-21T16:16:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153686"},"modified":"2026-03-16T11:49:45","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T15:49:45","slug":"thunder-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/07\/21\/thunder-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"Thunder Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column\u00a0The Moon in Full<\/a>, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity\u2019s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Good Shepherd<\/em>, 1902\u201303, oil on canvas, 30 1\/4 x 36 1\/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2014I heard it in middle school from one of the older middle schoolers\u2014the rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom was in the institution, if he was, because he had raped his mother.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s rumored that emergency rooms and psychiatric wards are more active<\/em> at the full moon. It\u2019s rumored that crime spikes. It\u2019s rumored that people get a little crazed and don\u2019t know what to do with their bodies. You\u2019ve heard these rumors. From bartenders and nurses and nursery school teachers. Maybe you\u2019ve felt it your very self. I saw a neighbor on the street and asked how she was doing. \u201cIt\u2019s the full moon, you know,\u201d she said, \u201cso I feel completely demented.\u201d It made news that a town in England put more cops on patrol on full moons. Sylvia Plath knew: the moon \u201cdrags the sea after it like a dark crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t get the smell off. <\/p>\n

But I was wrong. There\u2019s no crime spike in July. Different kinds of crimes across seasons, yes: crimes to bodies in summer, crimes to objects in winter. And more dangerous times of day exist: keep your wits with you between 11 P.M.<\/small> and midnight. But July is no safer or more dangerous than any other month. And as for the moon having any impact at all on criminality, on lunacy, on any sort of behavioral erratics: there\u2019s no correlation.<\/p>\n

I sat in the kitchen of my father and stepmother\u2019s house recently and when my stepmother walked into the room I told her that it turns out it\u2019s a myth that the moon effects anything.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot homicide?\u201d she said. She knew the rumors.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo correlation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEmergency room visits?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo correlation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSuicide?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo correlation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMore babies born?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo correlation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cReally?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is what I\u2019m reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

Psychiatrists, scientists, criminologists, in study after study, say the full moon has no bearing on behavior or human biology. They talk of \u201cillusory correlation,\u201d the perception of an association that does not, in fact, exist. You feel a little strange on the full moon? Emotions a little churnier? You\u2019re a little more excitable? Lustier? Sleepless? Altered in a way you can\u2019t quite put words to? It\u2019s argued that you feel all those things at other moments in the month but take note of the full moon because full moons are memorable, and then make a mistaken connection. I hated learning this. One argument suggested that horror movies are part of what\u2019s tricked us into thinking the full moon affects us. But, I want to say, but hang on\u2014couldn\u2019t it be argued that horror movies don\u2019t make us feel spooky about the moon, the full moon makes us feel spooky, so directors represent this shared ancient experience of mystery? Couldn\u2019t that be it? What do I know?<\/p>\n

As I repeated \u201cno correlation\u201d in the kitchen, a child tantrum began to thunder through my mind, a bashing frustration and disappointment. This can\u2019t be right<\/em>, I thought. We go untouched by lunar forces? I want <\/em>there to be correlation, my mind whined. The feeling came from a young place, and it was strong.<\/p>\n

But why? What was it that made me so mad?<\/p>\n

I do not want to be soft-minded or irrational, pursue Dark Aged\u00ad\u2013ignorance, be any sort of woo-woo New Age mush head. I do not know my moon sign. I own a Tarot deck but do not know how to read the cards. I don\u2019t know much about prayer, though I have aimed begging attention at thunderstorms to come, please come, break this heat, rip it open. I believe, in some ferocious kid place, that there\u2019s a lot on this earth and beyond it that we don\u2019t understand. No correlation? Maybe, instead, the more honest: we don\u2019t know, we have not figured a way to measure, or to say. \u201cDo you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?\u201d Bram Stoker asks. \u201cIt is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.\u201d Stephen Jay Gould had a name for this, when scientists interpret an absence of discernible change as no data, leaving significant signals from nature unseen, unreported, ignored. He called it Cordelia\u2019s Dilemma, after the daughter in Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear<\/em>, who, when asked to profess her love for her father, knows there are no words to adequately express certain things, and so stays quiet: \u201cMy love\u2019s more ponderous than my tongue.\u201d Not no love, but no words for it. Not no data, not no correlation. More: we haven\u2019t found a way to quantify, we don\u2019t have the words, there\u2019s information in the silence. As Clarice Lispector says, \u201cTruth is always an interior and inexplicable contact.\u201d<\/p>\n

And to come up against it poses risks. The mystics, visionaries, poets, artists\u2014they press open doors, travel dark tunnels, look into the caves and bring back what they find, and sometimes, as a result, end up secured to a bed in a room with bars on the window. Sebald writes of touring a house that gave him the sense that he had once lived there: \u201cBut thoughts of this kind are dispelled as speedily as they appear. At all events, I did not pursue them in the years that have passed since then, perhaps because it is not possible to pursue them without losing one\u2019s sanity.\u201d Travel certain paths of thought too far, there\u2019s no coming back.<\/p>\n

But some of what we\u2019re talking about exists at a place beyond thought. Our minds are made for detecting patterns, our bodies built to sense when the cords of correlation begin to glow, radiant and pulsing, between one thing and another and another. We look for signals, and it can be a perilous search, to be unhooked from the grounding laws to reach a place carried by much larger forces, out and up to where it\u2019s all just one big glow.<\/p>\n

In another kitchen, not long ago, a friend and I talked of a musician who\u2019d been found dead a few years back.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow\u2019d he die?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

My friend stood by the stove, cooking sausage and red peppers in a screaming hot pan. He turned away from the stove and looked at me hard. \u201cHow\u2019d he die?\u201d he repeated. \u201cHe died of what everyone dies of. He died the way I\u2019m gonna die and the way you\u2019re gonna die. He died of death.\u201d Sausage fat leaped from the pan. \u201cPeople are asking how people died so they can feel safer. Oh, he died of overdose? Oh, he died of his liver exploding? Oh, he died from a mountain lion eating him? So they can feel, that\u2019s not gonna be me. Not you? Well I got bad news. You, too, buster. How\u2019d he die?\u201d he shook his head and turned back to the pan. \u201cHe died of death, just like you will.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lay it on me. Thunder it right into my face.<\/p>\n

Turns out my friend didn\u2019t know how the musician died, so he gave a loud speech instead. But the truth he told was bigger. Some rumors are rumors. Clouds hold no weight. Some correlations are illusory. And sometimes the facts are inadequate.<\/p>\n

We are in the thick of summer now. I place my mind in January and November. But July\u2019s not all bad\u2014I eat peaches, spit cherry pits into my palm, feel luck when I see a shooting star or firefly\u2014and all moons are good moons. July\u2019s seems to have a different texture, not chalk or concrete or glassy pear, but waxy, sweet, like nougat, like taffy. A piece of it placed on your palm, twist the ends to open the wrapper, a quiet glow, a chewy treat, a dark sweetness down your throat, a little like love on your tongue, and with it, the illusion, the precious illusion, that there\u2019s no reason to be scared.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is\u00a0<\/em>Summer Solstice<\/a>. Her previous columns for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily\u00a0are\u00a0Winter Solstice<\/a>,\u00a0Sky Gazing<\/a>,\u00a0Summer Solstice<\/a>,\u00a0Senses of Dawn<\/a>, and\u00a0Novemberance<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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