Friday
As tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I went looking for literature that marked the occasion. A useful New York Times article, written 20 years after the event, surveyed the field and alerted me to the two poems that I share today.
Interestingly, not much was written, leading to the very imaginative headline, “One Small Step for Literature.”
Before looking at what was written at the time, Mallon begins with past works that have imagined landing on the moon. Cyrano de Bergerac’s 17th century Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) imagines the journey as a romp, but the first serious sci-fi treatment was Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865). Verne accurately predicted that the launch would be from Florida and would involve a crew of three. He even got right that something involved in the expedition would be named after Columbus.
Mallon says we might have expected great realistic novelists and lyric poets to preserve and give meaning to the landing. However,
[i]t didn’t turn out that way. The moon landing now stands as one of the most underwritten of historic events. The reasons that important creative writers might have turned their attention to it seem self-evident, but most of them found reasons to avoid it. To consider the paucity of fiction and poetry on the subject is to feel that Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin must have touched down on the moon’s dark side and remained invisible to those who had sent them.
Among the few novels that mention it are John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon. Mallon believes only the last does justice to the event:
”Was the voyage of Apollo 11,” Aquarius [Mailer’s name for himself] wonders, ”the noblest expression of a technological age, or the best evidence of its utter insanity?” He gives no answer, just consistently fresh speculation. Of a Fire on the Moon‘ is a gaudy tumble of humor, philosophy and metaphor: ”Physics is the church, and engineering the most devout sinner.” On earth the space-suited Neil Armstrong looks like ”a newborn cat in its caul,” and his first movements on the moon are ”not unlike the first staggering steps of a just-born calf.” In the midst of thinking big, Mr. Mailer the novelist finds all sorts of opportunities to give the reader of his book of New Journalism plenty of old fictive pleasures. For one moment, when the lunar module, still attached to Columbia, seems to be tugging on its own toward the moon’s surface, the mission even becomes the story of a boy and his pet: ” [Michael] Collins was grinding through the anxiety that the Lem was behaving most peculiarly, not unlike a dog on a leash who keeps leaning in the direction of a new and fascinating scent.”
Mr. Mailer’s self-absorption in the presence of the epochal (”He too wanted to go up in the bird”) proves not annoying, but just what’s necessary to measure the event. Aquarius, to his surprise, undergoes ”a loss of ego” during his witness, and the Norman Mailer who shines through Of a Fire on the Moon has a charm and generosity that he has never conveyed as successfully before or since. His oddball book was the only one worthy of the occasion.
Poets, less concerned with outer space than with the earth’s cataclysmic events (the Vietnam War, the protest movement, the rise of black militancy, Richard Nixon), also had little to say. Two exceptions were Auden, who voiced traditional Romantic worries about science demythologizing nature, and Archibald MacLeish, who writes a thoroughly Romantic poem.
Auden is put off by the nationalistic jingoism that accompanied the mission. After all, it was the culmination of a Cold War space race where the two nations (as he puts it) huddled in gangs.
He also sees the accomplishment as more about technology than heroic humans, one that was inevitable “from the moment the first flint was flaked.” “We were always adoiter/with objects than lives, and more facile/ at courage than kindness,” he observes.
Moon Landing
It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
it would not have occurred to women
to think worth while, made possible only
because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
hurrah the deed, although the motives
that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich [human].
A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse [portend]? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness: from the moment
the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam’s,
still don’t fit us exactly, modern
only in this – our lack of decorum.
Homer’s heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
was excused the insult of having
his valor covered by television.
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed: give me a watered
lively garden, remote from blatherers
about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
on August mornings I can count the morning
glories, where to die has a meaning,
and no engine can shift my perspective.
Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
still visits my Austrian several
with His old detachment, and the old warnings
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
For Auden, the moon is a desert and the “blatherers about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk” have desert mentalities. “Give me a lively garden,” he says, and then insists that his own Moon remains “unsmudged” in his imagination. The “Old Man” Auden mentions is, I assume, the Old Man in the Moon, and while I don’t understand “my Austrian several,” I get what he means about Irreverence being “a greater oaf than Superstition.” It’s a version of Wordsworth’s complaint in “The world is too much with us” that by “buying and spending we lay waste our powers.” Wordsworth would rather have a superstitious pagan world:
Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
In using the word “Apparatniks,” a word that blends Soviet party “apparatchik” with the word “apparatus,” Auden sees the lunar landing as the work of soulless engineers obsessed with gadgets rather than poetic adventurers. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit,” Shelley sings to a poetical skylark, and Auden implies that we can’t rely on astronauts to sing celestial chords. That’s why he calls for artists, chefs and saints to ring in the new age.
Mallon, somewhat justifiably, dismisses Auden as a grump, accusing him of missing much of the moon landing’s poetry, not to mention the adventure involved. For instance, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin has less than a minute’s worth of fuel when they finally found a safe place to land, and they were far from soulless technocrats. Auden wants Homeric heroes, but maybe he needs to change his definition of hero. We now know from movies like Hidden Figures that sometimes there are invisible heroes who never get recognized. Who says that women wouldn’t have considered such adventures to be worthwhile?
To be fair to Auden, I remember that television did in fact make the lunar landing seem rather technocratic. It was only later that we got the full inside story.
But enough from a detractor. In a poem that a Romantic poet could have written, MacLeish turns Auden’s argument on its head. Rather than demythologizing the moon, the moon landing has remythologized the earth.
MacLeish’s reasoning goes as follows. The moon he notes, has always been a mysterious “presence among us,” a “dazzle of silver in our leaves and on our waters silver.” Now imagine being an astronaut standing upon the moon’s beaches and looking up at the earth. Suddenly that orb also becomes
a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives–perhaps
a meaning to us…
If we don’t find as much poetry in the earth as we do in the moon, then the failure is ours. The moon landing’s dramatic shift of perspective reminds us where we should really be looking for meaning.
Voyage to the Moon
Presence among us,
wanderer in the skies,
dazzle of silver in our leaves and on our
waters silver,
O
silver evasion in our farthest thought–
“the visiting moon” . . . “the glimpses of the moon” . . .
and we have touched you!
From the first of time,
before the first of time, before the
first men tasted time, we thought of you.
You were a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives–perhaps
a meaning to us…
Now
our hands have touched you in your depth of night.
Three days and three nights we journeyed,
steered by farthest stars, climbed outward,
crossed the invisible tide-rip where the floating dust
falls one way or the other in the void between,
followed that other down, encountered
cold, faced death–unfathomable emptiness . . .
Then, the fourth day evening, we descended,
made fast, set foot at dawn upon your beaches,
sifted between our fingers your cold sand.
We stand here in the dusk, the cold, the silence . . .
and here, as at the first of time, we lift our heads.
Over us, more beautiful than the moon, a
moon, a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives–perhaps
a meaning to us . . .
O, a meaning!
over us on these silent beaches the bright earth,
presence among us.
Mallon points out that MacLeish is right about astronaut Collins steering the craft by the stars: apparently he used a sextant rather than the ship’s navigational computers. And what a wonderful way to describe the journey, moving from a gravitational field where the dust falls one way to one where it falls the other—and following that dust through “unfathomable emptiness” to where
we descended,
made fast, set foot at dawn upon your beaches,
sifted between our fingers your cold sand.
MacLeish frames the arrival in terms of other great landings, perhaps getting us to think of the Columbus moment or the Mayflower moment. Perhaps more than Armstrong’s carefully rehearsed speech, the sentence that should most resonate with us is him announcing, “The Eagle has landed.”
MacLeish is right: a new meaning entered our lives that day.
