Oh, how shall I begin to write about the beauty of broken things?
Let’s try it like this.
Once upon a time, in the great long-ago-and-forever, the great isn’t-then-and-wasn’t-now, the great sigh that exhaled a billion years in a moment, there was a planet named Theia (she had no name, there were no names, nothing would need a name for another 4.5 billion years). She was small and covered with water, a strange thing for a planet in the warm inner sanctum of a young star’s embrace, but that’s because Theia came from much farther away. She’d been born near the outer edge of the system, where cold reigned and the light of the closest star pricked a sickly pale dot in the darkness.
So what was she doing there, in the heart of the action, ambling towards a larger planet at a sensual speed of four kilometres per second? What act of chance sent her on that crash course, that cosmic seduction? How could anyone have known, in a time before there were “ones” to be “any,” that what happened next would not just change history, but in essence help create it?
For now, all that matters is this: Theia is chasing the bigger planet. (This takes millions of years, but it will end in an instant.) She gets closer. She gets closer. She gets closer, and then…
We can calculate what happens next. We can describe. But we can’t imagine what it’s really like. It’s too big for our words, which are limited to human scales of destruction. What do you call something many orders of magnitude greater than a cataclysm?
Look, I’m not saying this is for certain what happened. This is a theory, which is one way of saying it’s a story we tell until another story comes along which explains things better. So far, this is the story most scientists think explains all of this the best.
A common copy editor complaint: to properly name the Moon, you must give it the honour of a capital letter. It is, after all, not a moon, but the Moon; we forget that it’s just one of an infinite collection. There are many moons, but this one is ours, and it’s actually quite special. If we ever spread out across the solar system perhaps we’ll start using one of its other names, such as Luna. For now, its looming presence in our only sky means no such disambiguation is needed.
There’s no way, in just a few paragraphs, to adequately survey the sheer scope of how the Moon has shaped our cultural world. Consider that, of all the heavenly bodies we can see, we tend to form the most personal relationship with the Moon. We all have at least a few precious memories bathed in its light. We’ve all turned to a lover and, with a voice halfway between a gasp and a whisper, implored them to “look at the Moon.” We may spend more time awake with the Sun, but there’s something intimate about our relationship with the Moon that carries through past the dawn.
So it is that the Moon has been the single most common muse of poets and thinkers, painters and musicians. So it is that we’ve held it as a vessel, to be filled with endless myths and superstitions. Sometimes, we were right in how we observe its powers: we knew the Moon controlled the tides long before Sir Isaac Newton could scientifically explain why. More often, we just assigned to it the change-fires of the unknown. We believed it could pull blood from wombs, or transform men into wolves. We believed, and sometimes still do, that it can drive sane people to madness, or control everything from blood loss to the stock market. As we sought to understand the Moon’s influence on our world, we came to describe each of its moods with its own name: there are Black Moons and Blue Moons, Wolf Moons and Supermoons, Blood Moons and Harvest Moons. We made the Moon into a companion.
More than that: we made it into a god.
A god or rather, given how often the Moon has been perceived as female, a goddess. In these stories, handed down across time and oceans, she is Selene, she is Chang’e, she is Hanwi, she is Artemis. Sometimes, she is a companion to the Sun: a sister maybe, or a lover. Regardless of how she ended up in the sky, she is almost always right there in the pantheon, a powerful deity in her own right.
It’s simple, really. She’s so beautiful, we couldn’t help but worship her.
You know what I was going to do? I was going to do the thing I usually do: intersperse this lunar narrative with something closer to home. What’s happening in my head, for instance, or my heart, or whatever body part currently holds life’s hurts and hopes. If you’re really in trouble, that’s the guts; if you’re lucky, the spine.
But I’m not going to write like that, this time.
Truth is, I’m tired of giving confession. What I’d rather do is ask you to sit with me for a moment. Sit, and let’s imagine we are out under the night sky together, enjoying our nosebleed seats to the dance of the heavens. We count the twinkles of stars as far as we are able, and know that in each one we are looking back in time a hundred years, or a million, or more. If we have a very powerful telescope, we can see almost to the birth of the universe. If we close our eyes tight, we can see the end of the world.
When the astronauts of Apollo 11 returned to Earth, they were put into quarantine for 21 days. (Perhaps inspired by current conditions, the filmmakers who made a beautiful 2019 documentary about the mission are now coming out with a short doc about this aspect of its conclusion.) Experts worried the astronauts might bring back some sort of lunar microbe that could wreak havoc on terrestrial life; it wasn’t considered a big risk, but they just didn’t know. After Apollo 14, NASA scuttled the quarantine; by then, they were certain that the Moon was sterile — or, in other words, a lifeless world.
Of all the things the Apollo 11 astronauts did bring back with them — rocks, dust, an immediate upgrade to our spacefaring imaginations — it’s the photographs that have always most caught my attention. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took them using two expensive Hasselblad cameras. They left one of those cameras on the Moon, to lighten the load on the way off the lunar surface. Armstrong later recalled receiving some grief from NASA bean-counters for that decision, which is a delightfully banal postscript to a staggering achievement. Spend $152 billion, in 2020 dollars, on getting to the Moon; bemoan the loss of a few tens of thousands of bucks in getting off it.
The photos the astronauts took — it was mostly Armstrong behind the camera — are haunting. I’ve always loved to look at them, studying the shadows cast by the rocks or the groove of the astronauts’ boot-prints in the lunar regolith. But there’s always been something unsettling about the images, something that didn’t quite make sense to me, no matter how hard I looked at them. Partly, it was that I couldn’t see the same beauty in the lunar vista that Armstrong had mentioned: “It has a stark beauty all its own,” he said, a few minutes after making his one small step. “It's like much of the high desert of the United States. It's different, but it's very pretty out here.”
A few years ago, it finally hit me, the specific thing that was throwing me off about the photos. It was this: subconsciously, when my brain analyzed the images, it had written off the pops of red and blue on the flags of Armstrong and Aldrin’s suits, or the gold of the lunar module’s legs, as a later addition, an intentional colourization. In our world, that’s the most likely explanation for an image in which a vivid but highly localized bit of colour stands out against an otherwise unbroken field of black-and-white.
But in the case of the Moon photos, there is another explanation: my visual language was inadequate to parse what it was seeing. Nothing in the photos had been changed. Nothing had been added. The photos showed the exact same view Armstrong called stark and beautiful. It’s a view that reveals the truth of the Moon and its history, the truth of events we can describe but never truly imagine.
To a dead world, life is a stranger.
To the living, a dead world is beyond comprehension.
Every up-close photo we have of the moon was taken in full, vibrant colour.
“It’s very pretty out here,” Armstrong said, as he looked at a black-and-white world.
Now we arrive at the giant impact. End and beginning.
The crash throws two worlds into chaos. Planets smash, rock melts, lava surges forth. Debris is vaporized and flung into void, a pulverized silicate spew fleeing these tortured bodies and their celestial drama. This violent congress is, all at once, destruction and creation. Obliteration and transformation. Everything has changed, and everything is changing.
Now Theia is us (we are Earth), and Earth is Theia, and both are whole and also torn asunder. Now, the Earth is covered with water, more water than you’d expect this close to the Sun. Soon (within the next billion years or so), molecules in all this water begin to cling together, making a strand, and though they disintegrate they leave instructions to make more of themselves, and this is a powerful innovation. Soon, the Earth will be painted in a riot of colour. The skies will shift from orange to blue as oxygen swaddles the planet. The land will be layered with green growing things. Life will reign.
Also now: in the emptiness around the Earth, something is happening. The debris spins, and it spins, and then it begins to come together, cooling into a solid round mass. Now, this accretion of debris locks its face towards the Earth, watching what unfolds there from a not-too-distant orbit. It will, by its size and its gravity, help stabilize the Earth, making it a more suitable place for life to thrive. It will never know the same luxuries, though. It will never get to be painted in colour. Never get to be covered in water. It will never get to host life, except for that handful of times, about 4.5 billion years later, when men press boots into its powdery skin and report, with the vocabulary of pilots instead of poets, that it’s very pretty out there.
And yet, every human generation will look to the Moon and part our lips in wonder. We will love her, worship her, let her light guide us. She will make soft our voices and make safer our darkness. We will lay pinioned by her gaze on the grass or the sand or the snow, feeling in her glow the great mystery and the tender erotic. And we will hold each other then, trembling in untethered awe, murmuring words of praise to the goddess, never knowing she was just
the broken parts of our own world, so lost
she can do nothing but turn a battered face
and reflect back the sun’s light, so beautiful
in her loneliness we fall to our knees and make
of her a god, to give hope to the night when all
else has grown dark, and faded to grey.
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