It is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite.
Slavoj Žižek, SOS Violence
Picture, if you will, the moment of conception. Now imagine
we have taken a scene from PBS Nova’s 1983 documentary,
The Miracle Of Life, and played it in whirring, flickering reverse.
This is a celluloid moment, after all. A spermatozoa is ejected from
the ova, flagellum writhing, worms its way towards an outer dark,
in a supreme moment of unconception.
A little over fifty years ago, America raped the Moon. This was no
unfortunate and clumsy fumbling by a cajoling would-be lover,
the victim browbeaten against her better judgement like Marvell’s
reluctant paramour – Had we but world enough and time/
This coyness, lady, were no crime – a fraught consent caught somewhere
between protest, frailty and acquiescence, but rather a brute and
uncompromising act committed with all the calculation and rage
of any Hollywood psychopath. A gang rape – one of those ugly,
dehumanising affairs where the team – victorious heroes all, like
soldiers in the aftermath of war, are found wanting, but
nevertheless forgiven their excesses. Their victim denigrated,
obfuscated, forgotten, in the collateral frenzy. The act itself
soon glossed over in ticker-tape and ageless glory.
Kennedy was the instigator – his guilt
– even though he was long since dead
through the theatrics of his own political misadventure –
unquestionable.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and
do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard;
because that goal will serve to organise and measure
the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are
willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one
we intend to win, and the others, too.” He declared at Rice University
on 12 September, 1962, before an enraptured crowd,
blind to his malfeasance.
Some seven years later, on July 20 1969, Armstrong, Aldrin, Shepherd –
the quiet guy whose name everyone always forgets,
– cheered on by legions of supporters and enablers, tore
her untouched raiment, latched onto her with insectoid mandibles,
left the ugly corrugations of their boots on her pale skin.
Stopped to joke – to play golf. Penetrated her with probes and flags,
ecstatically took trophies. Left the depleted and abandoned
remnants of their rape to forever besmirch her downturned face.
I was a small child at the time, barely recovered from sickness and
invasive surgery. Nevertheless, in an old redbrick backyard that
smelled of willow and eucalypts, a blanket tied around my neck as
a cape, I hung from the rusting steel rails of a rotary clothesline,
dizzyingly turning, grinning despite the ache in my lungs and side,
dreaming I was somehow part of this extraordinary adventure.
Obla-di, ob-la-da played on a tinpot radio, and Hey Jude,
and Eleanor Rigby.
For unremembered reasons, I fell to the ground, crying, – was
quickly scooped up and consoled in warm, strong mother’s arms.
Who is the Moon’s mother, I asked. None could tell me.
And what was the other thing, that Mr Kennedy so defiantly boasted
that America would win? The war in Vietnam, another rape and
occupation? What did I know? I was a small child, and ill, I saw
and spake as a child, the TV – where I watched such wonders – as
through a glass, darkly, and only understood that the world shook
every day.
Does an admission of fault in such a text as this obviate that fault?
When Kevin Brophy admits in his essay What’re Yer Lookin’ at Yer
Fuckin’ Dog? that his presentation of a conflict with his neighbours
comes from a position of class and racial privilege to which they
literally have no right of reply somehow make his position less
tenuous? In a resolution – no less a rape – he bought the house in which
they lived, used the privilege of property to destroy them.
When Jerry Seinfeld in an episode of his sitcom admits
that his style of obvious observational humour isn’t actually funny,
does that somehow excuse him? what is it then? Watch it without the cues
of uproar and laugh track. I dare you.
All I can say in my defence is, swinging the entirety of my being for impetus,
I held on to the rail in the fierce grip
of a child’s overwhelming imaginings.
Come – we spin on.
The Moon, in her distance, had previously always been
the paramour of poets;
High, high, the summit peak,
Boundless the world to sight!
No one knows I am here,
Lone moon in the freezing stream.
In the stream, where’s the moon?
The moon’s always in the sky.
I write this poem: and yet,
In this poem there is no Zen.
Wrote Han-shan in the 8th century, the poet reflecting on himself.
The poet is the Moon, the Moon is the poet.
Li-Bai, in the same era, is also lost, somewhere between the self
and the Moon.
Wildly singing I waited for the moon to rise;
When my song was over, all my senses had gone.
Bashō at first seems to demystify the Moon, to unveil a merely
physical process;
The moon glows the same:
it is the drifting cloud forms
make it seem to change.
But is there not a reassuring eternity – like the love of a long-together couple,
in her weary glow?
When you’re caught between the Moon and New York City – as
Christopher Cross sang at Newman’s party, despite Newman’s efforts his
love for Elaine all unrequited. As I said before – lacking the cues –
more tragedy, than comedy.
The Moon in return also loved poets – in the ancient Greek myths,
recorded by Sappho, and by Apollonius of Rhodes, and others,
Selene of the Moon burned with love for dreaming Endymion, and
with spells chased the conniving and vengeful Medea away.
Carol P Christ in the early 1970s described in Why Women Need
The Goddess, a newfound affiliation to ancient symbols and rites
by women, as a way of finding and celebrating, in themselves,
through the Moon, the Goddess.
Was this spiritual burgeoning a poetic response in the face of the
brute, the exploitational, the masculine braggadocio, bursting the
bounds of earth in an endeavour couched in terms of discovery, of
progress, of conquest, of technological, of military, economic and
national superiority, of manifest destiny – the same narratives by
which nations had motivated and justified invasion, occupation,
colonisation since the advent of modernity?
Writing in Feminist Theology in 2016, Christ gives a new
definition of patriarchy- “a system of male dominance, rooted in
the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious
symbols, in which men dominate women through the control
of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs,
and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and
are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit
resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.”
The religion in this assault, the symbols it presents, is not solely
that of the cross. It is the flag, the stars,
the stern, creased brow of Abraham Lincoln, Kennedy’s schoolboy smile.
Trump’s buffoonish pompadour. The phallus of the Washington Monument,
the red glare of the rockets and missiles themselves. The endorphin
fuelled loving cross-haired aerial omniscience of remotely
controlled drones on our miraculous screens. The autoejecting phallus
of the mushroom cloud. The intimate but impersonal enclosure of a gunsight’s
claustrophobic point-of-view. The Twin Towers in all their glorious
Humpty Dumpty fall, demanding an indiscriminate vengeance, on our
screens in sacred repetition.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson – in a century when pictures
were still predominantly still, divides time into the objective and subjective,
the first the ordinary realm of clocks and schedules, the second
a matter of duration that, in the way our percept systems
layer memory to construct the real, creates a kind flicker. Gilles Deleuze
finds in Bergson’s flicker that the real has become – rather than palpable,
objective, framed, trammelled – cinematic.
Thus, nothing can be inanimate. Rather like the Taoists, the
primitivist, the moon worshippers, the poets, an animism imbues all,
with spirit, with meaning. Jacques Lacan finds that meaning
is always something other than its appearance. The symbol is
eternally displaced. Objects, symbols, the real itself thus becomes
inane; emptied of meaning, a Lacanian signifier that always
displaces itself.
We are left in an inane universe, an animate but inane real, where
meaning is only ever temporary, temporal, held in tenuous context.
Think of Archimedes, not using the Moon as a fulcrum to lever
away the Earth, but in his bathtub, finding the water curiously
rising to the exact volume of the self; that human shaped object.
Calculated, emptied, reduced to a cubic measure. The curves,
by blunt numbers, excised, chiseled away. Eureka! We have found
the essential void in the shape of a man, and vice versa.
In the Moon’s still emptiness, amongst the boot prints and debris of
man’s rapine, there is a US flag, proud, motionless, erect and
witheringly flying. How it does so in vacuum, with neither breath
nor meaning to uphold it, is by means of a simple trick. It is held
rigid by wires. Without that hidden understructure, it would fall,
limp, emasculated, meaningless.
Jean Baudrillard, in America, finds the Moon landing
an unsurprising cumulation, an event “pre-programmed into
the course of science and progress.” Rather than invigorating
the millenarian dream of conquering space, exhausting it. Culminating
only in an “autistic performance, a pure, empty form,”
emblematised in the slogan, the boast, (perhaps the confession), styled
after the the perpetrator’s, the advertiser’s creed
—“I did it!”
Where I live, in a rundown satellite town, there is delinquent
graffito crudely incised in the rough cement footpath. At first
glance, a rocket, at second, a semi-flaccid penis, some wriggling
lines indicating some kind of matter lazily ejecting out. I imagine,
if it was catalogued, archeologized, perhaps signed with a tangled
script more artful than the image itself, it could one day be prised up,
displayed under soft lighting, reverent as moonlight, in a museum or gallery,
as valuable and revered as similar curiosities from ancient Rome
or modern London. Some find such objects an insult. Nevertheless,
such an object of derision can never be as insulting as the eternal
blemish we have left on the Moon.
Of course, more realistically, when the moonscape of vacant lots
and debris is cleared, and, if not gentrified, at least, exploited by
developers, in rented storage units, and cookie cutter legoland housing,
I expect the offending footpath will be torn up,
destroyed, even recycled; to make the locale more palatable
to potential residents, replaced with a pristine, landscaped surface.
Now billionaires eject themselves into space, cloaked in symbols
devoid of any worthwhile meaning, taking rape and conquest with them,
a new terra nullius, a new Vietnam, meaning displaced, limp
flags upheld by wire, their renewed effort to ravage the Moon
somehow justifying their continued rape of the Earth.
And while I imagine, in the flicker of the real, myself spinning around,
cape flying, feet dragging furrows, perhaps in mischief,
perhaps in delinquent mistake, Helter Skelter on the radio,
kicking over that prop flag, here now I suspect the ravagers and empty men
will preserve and worship that site of invasion
for an eternity to come.
