On Moonlight

At the beginning of my sojourn in the place where I went to escape, I would be plunged into darkness a few times each night. This is not a metaphor. The power cuts were frequent. These disruptions unnerved me, until the night when the electricity went out and the room I was in was suddenly flooded by selenic light. I gasped at the lush, large moon and the illumination it poured through uncurtained windows. The floors and the scant furniture shone, as I must have too when I stepped into a beam. I stood there admiring the perfect circle of that moon, luminous and spellbinding, for a while, and when the artificial lights came back on, I was startled by their brightness. That time, it was their return, not their disappearance, that had jolted me from my trance.

I begin writing this on the day of a blood moon eclipse. It cannot be seen where I am, in the South of India, when the occultation is in hours of bright daylight. It happens out of sight, like so much that moves and affects us. Blood moons are total lunar eclipses, and are so identified because when the celestial body merges completely into Earth’s umbra, it takes on an incarnadine appearance, slight or vivid to the human eye depending on other climatic conditions and our own geographical locations. I am far from anywhere where this obscuration can be sighted, yet I feel it, in my moods and in my dreams. Then, blood moon and moon blood cross-orbit; the eclipse’s alias becomes literal for me. A menstrual period that I thought had ended reactivates when I see tree branches being amputated very close to my home. Any desecration of foliage shatters me. I experience grief and anger when I witness it, even as I try to resign myself to life’s inevitabilities and nature’s own vicissitudes.

In 1688, the house of Mizuta Masahide, a young samurai and a student of the poet Basho, was destroyed in a fire. After this event, he composed one of the most memorable and widely-known Japanese haikus, often succinctly transcreated as: “Barn’s burnt down ‐‐ now I can see the moon.”

I don’t think of this verse as a brightsiding about devastation. I abhor toxic positivity. Give me shadow, give me ashen glow, give me umbra and give me shielding. Instead, I revisit those words because to me they mean this: after everything, after anything, nature will prevail.

Something in me is always vigilant, and this is no easy way to live. My caution is a learned, earned fear, one that is at best peripheral, but also perpetual. Still, no one is truly fearless (courageous, yes—but that is despite, not sans). The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had a terror of moonlight falling on him as he slept. He acquired this as a child from an elderly woman named La Vechia Giovanna, according to James Atlee in Nocturne: A Journey In Search Of Moonlight. She had taught him that “the planet was a powerful and sometimes malevolent force, its light not so much an illumination but a dangerously potent force of change.”

But the moon is not a planet, only a satellite of our own—a small heavenly body that pairs with us, bound by a magnetic loyalty. It is minor, certainly, but it has always been read as a harbinger, a divinatory object, something imbued with influence, or at the very, very least a confidante on nights when one wakes alone and there is no one there, except a shard or a sphere of moon, glimpsed through parting clouds. There is lore about werewolves, who are empowered by moonlight, and vampires, who are diminished by it, and a range of global superstitions about moonlight as healer, as maddener or as omen. It is believed that water and crystals can be charged by moonlight. It is known that the phases of the moon, which is to say, the amount of visible moonlight, impacts the ocean waves, creating spring tides and neap tides. Farmers’ almanacs recommend various agricultural practices based on moon phases through the seasons, and it is from these that a clutch of intriguing names for full moons through the year come from, especially those originating in Celtic and Native American cultures (“Harvest Moon”, “Flower Moon”, “Sturgeon Moon”). This is not the moon’s only timekeeping use: menstrual cycles can often be charted by the moon, and perhaps for this reason the moon has widely been regarded as feminine. Sidereal astrology centres the moon, which changes zodiac signs every two and a half days.

But the moon is not ours to keep, even if we keep count by it. Lunar loyalty is a matter of sentiment; in truth, the moon is distancing herself from us. Through a process called lunar recession, also known as tidal dissipation, the moon drifts away from Earth at a rate of 1.5 inches each year, and Earth’s rotation also decelerates. In her poem Facts About The Moon, Dorianne Laux writes:

“I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.”

I wonder if Mussolini knew that the moon is moving away from the Earth, and if that consoled him, even as it breaks Laux’s heart or mine—though all of this is emotive conjecture. By the time the moon disappears from sight, all of us will be gone. Humankind too, probably. As for the Earth herself, rotating ever slower each year, perhaps life will still blossom here—or perhaps only the memory of it.

There was a relationship about which I would like to forget everything, except the sight of a golden perigee moon, dazzling through the windshield in an auto rickshaw ride on the way to our first date at a dive bar I had chosen. It loomed low and so large in the twilight sky that for a few moments we did not even recognize what it was. I have never seen a moon quite like that since, although I continue to look for one. On that rooftop near the seaside, the moon rose in the beyond, getting smaller but no less bright as it ascended. I knew even on that night that this person would come to wound me, but I gravitated towards my fate. Moth towards moonlight. We drank, and we marvelled at that orb, its brilliance, and the reflective glittering on the waves of the Bay of Bengal beneath it. I had loved intoxicants in that phase of my life, and then no longer. I have loved the moon in every phase, of hers and of my own, and in every place. Crescents console me, and I turn inwards at new moons, although it cannot be denied that the ripeness of a full moon has dominion on my heart. Other loves and nested lives-within-lives come and go.

About a decade ago, a popular list of “untranslatable” words made the rounds online, with each one actually perfectly understandable when described in a line. These words were from languages other than English, and among them was the Swedish “mangata”, meaning “the road-like reflection of moonlight on water”. Other languages succinctly illustrate this particular experience of beauty too. Turkish, for instance, has two: “yakamoz”, which means “moonlight shining in water”, as well as  “gümüş servi”, which means the same thing but is also the term for “silver cypress tree”. The part-Yorta Yorta artist Nirrimi Firebrace says that is what her first name means; I could not corroborate this, but this is likely to be because indigenous languages are rarely accorded value or accessible documentation.

As it turns out, “mangata” is not untranslatable into English at all, where two words already exist to limn it: the graceful “moonglade”, and the slightly eerie “moonwake”, with its connotations of the funereal, which is what sailors are believed to have called it, likening it to a ship’s wake .

I invented a word once: moon-coxswained, to describe those like me: selenocentric, sensitive, who abide by secret calendars, who bloom or overwinter by light and dark. The ‘stitious ones, as a friend said (“We don’t always have to be super, just ‘stitious”). I have used it now and then, in writing. I do not know which I would like more: to be known as its coiner, or to have it enter the vocabulary without trace, like something that dissolves into water.

Years ago, but not so long ago, I imagined that I would have a daughter whom I would name after the moonlight, in my mother tongue. Now, that name belongs only to my Wi-Fi connection, and to a character in a book of mine about a lagoon of alleged mermaids, where mysterious sounds emerge under the gravid moon. Maybe that is enough. The moon, more than any other, knows what she means to me.