In Moon Terms
In Moon Terms:
Otherwise, A Handful Of What I Will Spend The Next Five Years Thinking About
Water jar, full moon, script-under-pillow method. Affirmations, subliminals, starfish position? Do what you can to get what you want. Manifest, manifest, MANIFEST!
In 1969, we put a man on the Moon. You know this story. For the most part, we wanted to beat Russia (at the time the Soviet Union) in the big Space Race at the centre of the Cold War. When the first human feet made contact with the Moon’s surface, I wonder if the soil there recorded the print’s humanity, or its Americanness. Because that’s the thing, right? Thanks to the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, mankind came to understand that the Moon’s lunar regolith—the layer of, essentially, debris and otherwise loose rubble accumulated over the billions of years of the Moon’s existence—was a time capsule. The lack of real atmosphere, wind, or water has thus far prevented any sort of erosion of the Moon’s surface. Even to this day, Neil Armstrong’s one small step for mankind is in perfect condition. Now imagine this: right now, a rover on the Moon. Its robo-arm is creaking but that part you can’t hear; it’s a vacuum of silence out there. When it touches the dirt, though, you’ll feel it. The tiniest bit of friction is enough for solid-borne vibration, so that if the rover were sentient, it would think it was hearing something bone deep. The Moon confirms the rover is real. Clank, rub, the arm collects a sample—specifically, it collects a sample of Neil Armstrong’s bootprint. In my fantasy, the machine ambles and slogs back over to the ship it came from and taps out a bit of the moondust onto the moondust-analysing pad of a computer. The computer screen glitches and blinks; it’s thinking heavy. A final flash: “AMERICAN FOOTPRINT.”
But, how does it know? How do they ever know?
DID YOU KNOW:
The etymology of the word lunacy traces back to medieval beliefs about the Moon’s ability to induce madness. Underpinning a part of this notion was the idea that the brain was the “moistest” organ and was thus influenced by the phases of the moon, like tidal waves. It was also posited that full moons caused an overabundance of nocturnal dew to form, which would then have been soaked up by our “moistest” organ and led to an “unnatural” amount of moisture in the brain. Because the brain is in command of human behaviour, thinkers like Pliny the Elder and Aristotle were of the conviction that the moon was a particularly strong inciter of mania.
Several months ago, I attended a poet’s open reading and Q&A session. Franny Choi’s. I asked her, “Do you ever write about the same thing over and over? Like, do you ever find yourself thematically repetitive, and if so, what do you do to remedy this?”
I suppose I should have expected her response. It was something along the lines of: “Yes, I do, and that’s what I’ve done for the last ten years of my life and what I’ll continue to do for the next ten.” Which, of course, makes sense. The way she put it, most people think and write or do or speak about the same four Big Things for the majority of their life. It’s a fairly simple existence.
On the other hand, my father would argue that one misquoted Einstein saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”
Sometimes, I wonder if I’m an alien sprung from the Dark Side of the Moon, sent to Earth as an infant, raised by a pair of humans who look, for the most part, like me. Individuality complex much? But listen. If I’m wrong, then don’t we all have a mild case of lunacy? I mean, at least for that part of our lives where we keep doing things we shouldn’t, hoping things will change. Examples for kids my age: sneaking out of our houses despite getting caught, cracking bad jokes hoping one will land, going back to the same incompatible people on lonely nights and thinking maybe this time, we’ll get it right.
That’s why a part of me believes in the psychological powers of the Moon. In many of my strongest memories, it perches in the backdrop inconspicuously. Kind of like that guy in all the thriller movies who the police realise at the 90 minute mark is coincidentally smoking a cigarette or reading a newspaper or birdwatching in the background of every crime scene moments before tragedy strikes. Like some sort of supercharger, when things happen under the Moon, I seem to recall them with an unnatural alacrity and precision that doesn’t come so easily in other instances.
In one memory, snow is falling in slow motion. There are eastern white pines where I lived (or: where I left), and maybe their needles roosted tens of feet above me have something to do with the snow’s feathery descent. On a three-sided bench in the middle of the circular lawn that features as my neighbourhood’s communal front yard, there is an iced-over pile of snow that I’m standing on top of and digging my booted toes into, twisting this way and that. Time moves strangely right now, in that even the breaths I take flow in sluggishly, and my body is still laggingly, indolently warm (it hasn’t caught up to the below freezing temperatures despite my threadbare sweatshirt and pyjama pants), and someone is speaking at me, but their words seem to be traveling through spacetime—Tina, Tina…Tina! You are…are my…—so really, it is no surprise how lucid the individual crystal legs in each snowflake are to my eyes, swishing down the lazy current. Now it is one thing to know the idea of a snowflake, the overall points and creases; it is another to see the perfect symmetry in real time, face to face with you, something so unerring and intricate it is a miracle it has, thus far, not been affected by human hands. When I’ve followed this one flake down to the point where it’s no longer necessary for my neck to arch upwards to watch it, time freezes entirely. Even the fog of my exhale stops just short of the flake, one tendril just this close to vaporising it, but unable to of course, and I can see the flake most clearly now that it is, on some plane, parallel to the full Moon in the back. That silent killer, that marionettist. The sphere of the Moon illuminates the very center of the flake so that I can see it start melting, one microscopic dewdrop forming on the ice of the flake itself. On my forearm, something pricks me—it’s a pine needle delivered from a tree that shivered just enough to rid itself of one thorn—and time unfreezes, recalibrates to its average speed. My exhale slays the snowflake and the pine needle catches under my boot when I lift to readjust my stance. The sole comes down, the needle: crushed.
…my favourite person. I love you, you know that?
In hindsight, I don’t know if I was asking Choi for advice about writing specifically. When the same things keep looping in your brain, is it life or lunacy?
At some point in the pandemic, when almost every smartphone owner from the ages of ten to twenty was chronically online, I had reached a face of social media with complete faith in the spiritual (and not the religious kind). Fandoms for various fictional universes had also reached their zenith, the most prominent of which was arguably the Harry Potter community. Potterheads particularly bought into this idea of reality shifting, in which you could travel across planes of parallel worlds and insert yourself into another life, one written entirely by you. It was, apparently, different from lucid dreaming in that you could actually control what you were doing. No blurry figures, gibberish writing, unwieldy jumping of scenes. A whole life. They said that if you could think of it, you could shift to it.
A few methods: the Raven (you lie in the starfish position as you go to bed, imagine graphically specific moments of the life you desire—perhaps Draco Malfoy holding the door open for you and centring his icy, piercing gaze (swoon) on your unblemished face and perfectly ringleted hair—and count backwards from one hundred until you awaken in your DR [designated reality]), the Alice in Wonderland (in which you visualise running after a person from your designated reality and follow them down a “rabbit hole” until you arrive in a room filled with objects from your DR, eventually falling asleep and awakening where you so desire), and, of course, the Pillow Method. This strategy required the most preparatory work out of the beginner styles; the shiftee would have to write down, essentially, a script of the life they wanted to live in their DR and then place it under their pillow before bed, counting down from one hundred as in the Raven Method. What the script looked like could vary; some people wrote entire storylines for themselves and placed addendums that anything written could be changed by their parallel selves once they shifted, while others wrote simple “I Am” manifestations (I am a witch, I am a fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, I am blonde, I am beautiful, I am powerful) to massage the subconscious into astral projecting to their perfect reality.
By some accounts, there was an extra step that could be taken to enhance the effect of the Pillow Method. If you placed your script under a clear container of water and set it in a space where the rays of a full Moon could penetrate the water, then drank the container within twenty-four hours, some supernatural property of the moonlit water could aid with your shifting endeavours. This was a procedure that allegedly helped not only with shifting, but also with general manifestation. I am a straight A student. I am grateful to the universe. I am admitted into *insert school of choice*. I am grateful to the universe. I graduate class president. I am grateful to the universe. Boy, did I stay hydrated.
In the few months or so that my tweenage self believed in reality shifting, I practiced the Pillow Method most often. If there was a full Moon, I would check over and revise my script in the afternoon (it featured Tom Riddle as my main love interest; yes, canonically, he becomes Voldemort, but sue me! I could change him, obviously), and at night, I’d grab an old Voss bottle, fill it to the brim, and place it by the middle pane of my bay window with my square-folded script underneath. I refused to fill the bottle any sooner, for fear that other forms of light would contaminate the water before the Moon could get to it. Eventually, with no luck shifting despite attempting almost every night, I began creating sheets of affirmations once a month and continuing my moon water manifestations anyways.
The closest I ever came to seeing a different reality, perhaps a future one, was a full Moon in May. I had already been admitted to my dream school, preparing to leave suburban California for what I imagined would be New England Hogwarts in just four months. On this night, I imagined a high school career with a steady upwards trajectory—head of every law-adjacent club, editor in chief of the school paper, a loving boyfriend by year two, a wide circle of friends, a prettier face. I envisioned a straight shot to Mars, with a stop by the Oval Office and maybe Yale or Princeton first. As I drifted, the spotty shapes that swarm your brain when straining into the darkness began to cluster into forms resembling a high-bridged nose here, a set of mouths miming wordless murmurs there, a pair of eyes. Soft. Blue, maybe. Or brown, or green, maybe hazel. I fall asleep chasing the rainbow.
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