The Moon

catalog

Well-known member
Perhaps we need another thread for eclipses, but for now I'll put this here. Just cos I've finished reading it.

Genet, from 'Prisoner of Love'

"Eclipse is a word full of meaning. In addition to the sun, which is even more evident when eclipsed by the moon, every event, man or image eclipsed by something or someone else emerges regenerated; however brief their disappearance, they emerge cleaner and brighter than before..."

There's loads more, all very poetic. He's got some good lines.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Love that word.

Was listening to the audiobook of Cosmic Trigger by R.A.W. recently and he was talking about how the ancient Mexicans would do their peyote ceremonies on a full moon. He didn't go into why, but I'm adding it here anyway.
 

catalog

Well-known member
steve moore, who was a sort of mentor to alan moore, wrote a book called somnium, which sounds pretty good - short excerpt here https://thequietus.com/articles/07629-steve-moore-interview-somnium

and it turns out that he was involved in alan moore's decision to become a magician and was the guy who showed him the image of glycon, the snake god, which became Moore's personal God.

His (steve's) personal God turns out to be Selene, the Moon goddess...

This is why their (still incomplete, possibly never gonna happen book, cos Steve Moore has unfortunately died) book about magic was gonna be called 'the moon and serpent bumper guide to magic' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_and_Serpent_Bumper_Book_of_Magic
 

catalog

Well-known member
I think this has alredy mentioned this but another reason we like it much is that we can look at it. You cant look at the sun.

And there is also something about the colour around it. Blue as a colour tends to have the effect of being ‘cold’ and makes things feel far away. Red is hot, makes things close. So in the daytime, the sky is all far away and unreachable.

But somehow at night, the bright moon lights the sky and brings it close to us. And blue moons and all that. Like when your out alone in the night and theres just the moon.
 

sufi

lala
who didnt see these SPECTACULAR NEW images of the sun's surface?
1440.jpg
they look like a nasty eczema
the sun isnt really that popular any more - you can't stay out in it or you get irradiated with cancer, it's burning up the planet etc

i think there's probably a fair few judgements involved in how that image is filtered and balanced etc as it's output from the byzantine apparatus that captured it, so it should be seen as quite a subjective portrait
the video is even more unpleasant

============================

the lovely moon on the other hand... so serene
 

luka

Well-known member
Moon Poem
JH Prynne

The night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady

so that the culmination
will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness.

Since I must hold to the gradual in
this, as no revolution but a slow change
like the image of snow. The challenge is
not a moral excitement, but the expanse,

the continuing patience
dilating into forms so
much more than compact.

I would probably not even choose to inhabit the
wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge
of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into
the level ceremony of diffusion. The quiet

suggests that the act taken
extends so much further, there
is this insurgence of form:
we are more pliant than the mercantile notion
of choice will determine-we go in this way
on and on and the unceasing image of hope
is our place in the world. We live there and now

at night I recognise the signs
of this, the calm is a
modesty about conduct in

the most ethical sense. We disperse into the ether
as waves, we slant down into a precluded notion
of choice which becomes the unlearned habit of
wish: where we live, as we more often are than

we know. If we expand
into this wide personal vacancy
we could become the extent

of all the wishes that are now too far beyond
us. A community of wish, as the steppe
on which the extension would sprinkle out
the ethic density, the compact modern home.

The consequence of this
pastoral desire is prolonged
as our condition, but

I know there is more than the mere wish to
wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses
beyond this and will never end: these are songs
to the night under no affliction, knowing that

the wish is gift to the
spirit, is where we may
dwell as we would

go over and over within the life of the heart
and the grace which is open to both east and west.
These are psalms for the harp and the shining

stone: the negligence and still passion of night.

~ from White Stones (1969)
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
It's actually maggots and occurs when the cheese over ripens. While forbidden to eat and illegal to sell, it remains a delicacy on the Italian island of Sardinia.
 
Top