Munar Eclipse (mooner? looner?) [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders, 

I saw the eclipse video here and thought I'd show you what I saw too.

A few nights ago I brought my canon out to shoot the moon get shy. It was baby dentist time (tooth hurty) in the am and I was up anyway. It was beautiful, it didn’t go dark like if the moon is in front of the sun, instead it went reddish as it passed through the shadow of the earth. The only tripod I had was two feet aground and elbows on a barbeque, so there are none that are all too stable. It’s hard not to play with that once you see what the moving moon looks like – alive! - in the preview screen. I put up some more pics on Dear Fonzie.

In our regret we remember that the key to a thing is to get a sense of its humor.  A game player gets to know the joke of a game, the load of its dice, what it likes to give you right after it has given you an extra life. 

There is part of the story where she still doesn’t realize something, but comes to be aware there is something that needs remembering.  I am supposed to remember something big. The problem of my life.  I know what I’m trying to stop forgetting, but I can’t remember it.  Life is a detective story with a pacing problem.  Days scream through long minutes and there are days of long phases even in the midst of change.

Change is arresting, stops us in its tracks. We are not in a rational world, ticking with a clock's tock. We escape by enacting our attention. We look closely at a coffee drop on the desk settling into a nickel-size spill that won’t change again on its own aside from a slow evaporation, draining to the center, retellable only in poetry or time-lapse photography. You’re in your chair. Everything is real. There are planets and equations, there are explanations.  Benadryl works because it is  a vascoconstrictor, inhibiting the vascodialator effects of histamine. Noon is noon. Imagination, the wild mind, doesn’t alter any of it.

Yet noon is not noon everywhere at once. The wild mind alters all of it. You are not at your desk. You are in the coffee drop, just spilled, bouncing in concentric circles, and even now, in the midst of all this action and reaction you are also stopping to fear what is coming, the drying, and also long for it. The endless stillness on the desk top. A slow ascent into the air. A sticky ring adheres to the desk’s surface. The rest will rise into the room, the clouds.  Midday rolls around the planet like phases of the moon. That’s the humor of it. The humor of my catastrophe is forgetting and remembering that I forget. Pecking at remembering as peek-checking at a pocket picture book. Noon is not noon everywhere at once, it rolls around like the phases of the moon.  

What was I saying? I’d like to hire someone else to forgive my trespassers, but not you. You, my friend, have been through quite enough. Have a nice cup of coffee and accept my congratulations on the happy return of the season with you in it, still punching with the rolls. I’ll let Carl Sandberg play us out…

 

Was ever a dream a drum

or a drum a dream?

Can a drummer drum a dream

or a dreamer dream a drum?

The drum in a dream

pounds loud to the dreamer.

Now the moon tonight over Indiana

is a fire-drum of a phantom dreamer.

 

-

Nice, right? Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

 

Love,

Jennifer

ps tree jewelry looks nice on an icy night. new pics of beaded trees also soon on dear fonzie, for all you avid decorative naturists. For all you decorative naturalists, nice ink but put some clothes on, it's cold out there. 

Comments

[Angela]

I just wrote and deleted four starts to this message, trying to get the thanks on paper the best way I could. Oh well. It's just wonderful. Thanks