Blue Moon

By Sam Buntz, Staff Columnist

Published on Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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Although I like to devote a minimum of my mental energy to politics, I was pleased to discover that President Barack Obama’s new budget eliminates funding for future moon exploration. I, for reasons I will soon explain, am highly opposed to any and all physical journeys to the moon. I’m also opposed to bombing the moon (which is something NASA did a short time ago in search of water) and otherwise molesting it. I am glad that the moon has returned to its rightful place as a big glowing circle in the sky that controls the tides, and isn’t subject to the prodding fingers of mankind, whose reach always insists on exceeding its grasp.

Don’t think, by any means, that I am opposed to science — far from it. Like anyone, I stand in awe of the latest descriptions of theoretical physics. But I am opposed (if only symbolically) to the needless contamination of a nice, simple thing like the moon with flags and politics that recall the Cold War. When he heard that an Anglo-Saxon had finally “conquered” Mount Everest, the Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki remarked that a Buddhist would not have spoken of “conquering” the mountain, but rather of “befriending” it. Truly, our attitude to the moon is one of conquest. When the moon-landing happened in 1969, we weren’t impressed because we finally stood as close as possible to that fiery orb that had so long marked our minds with poetic intensity, but because we had managed to thoroughly appropriate and de-mystify its territory. The moon, once a poetic symbol — even, a god — has become just another target for petty human endeavor.

Essentially, I think my opposition to visiting the moon rests on the same grounds as John Keats’ famous charge against Isaac Newton, whom he deemed guilty of “unweaving the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.” By leaving our footprints on the moon, bombing it and pestering it in a hundred different ways, we reduce it to nothing more than a stupid old rock — just a big pile of dust hanging out in space.

Scientists argue that they make the moon more interesting by analyzing and quantifying its carbon content or whatever. But this is the only interest the moon generates for a purely mathematical mind — its poetry will always be dimmed by statistics and measurements. I can’t help but feel that Keats’s ideal is somehow more interesting and awe-inspiring: to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” You might say that this sanctions infantilization — but I say that the world has never seemed as enthralling and full of terrible power to me as when I was a small child, when my imagination stood in awe of each object it encountered, unfettered by reason and logic. None of those objects seemed to be wholly external and alien things — they didn’t require me to conquer them and understand the construction of their constituent atoms — but they possessed a vivid strength. Every natural thing, including the moon, worked in friendship and kinship with myself.

I have a certain terrifying flight of imagination that I entertain sometimes: I imagine the remnant of humanity journeying further and further away from our home on some rusty, wheezing spaceship, in search of new planets. But all they find are dead, arid terrain and freezing, empty space — an utterly inhuman void. Think of the earth! We spend so much time frittering away our energy in external pursuits — conquering the moon, conquering an empire, conquering women, riches and fame. But where is the humanity in that? Where is the poetry that made the moon into a god, into the image of a human being like us? We spend so much money and resources conquering outer-space, but how much care have we lavished on exploring our inner-space? Truly that is the final frontier.

In the past, when we wove the moon into the tapestry of our myths, we were engaged in such an inner exploration. We spoke of outer things as though they were secret symbols of our inner selves, of the triumph and tragedy that attend human nature. Mystics and poets routinely journeyed into the heavens in a vehicle that cost them nothing — the human brain — rather than in a billion dollar space shuttle. In the midst of our current economic woes, it seems inevitable that we will need to consider what truly serves our humanity, and what is simply an extravagant waste.