The moon used to be the most amazing thing until some Americans stood all over it. They took away its magic. One small step was a giant leap backwards. Has anyone been able to look at it the same way since? The moon was a god. Nasa took it into the cells and stripped it naked. I went for a walk at twilight this week and there it was, cold and shivering.
The moon landing was front-page news. I have evidence. A few years ago I found a copy of English newspaper The Daily Express in an antique store and bought it for $5: it was dated Monday, July 21, 1969, and the front-page headline in gigantic caps reads "MAN IS ON THE MOON". It quotes astronaut Buzz Aldrin on what he saw: "It looks like a collection of every variety of shape, angularity, granularity, a collection of just about every kind of rock." All that way and all that time to get there ("Officials at Houston gave the time taken on the flight from earth to the moon as 102 hours, 45 minutes and 42 seconds") to establish the existence of some rocks. A sickle moon, its light on the left of the planet, was low in the twilight sky on my walk.
The moon never really lived up to whatever expectations we had after Apollo 11 touched down. It doesn't really have anything going for it. It doesn't have weather. Nothing lives there. A small spasm of excitement went around the world last year when Nasa's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy confirmed there was water on the moon. But it wasn't much water. Data measured it as roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water trapped in a cubic metre of soil. Nasa reported, "How the water then gets stored raises some intriguing questions. The water could be trapped into tiny beadlike structures in the soil that form out of the high heat created by micrometeorite impacts. Another possibility is that the water could be hidden between grains of lunar soil." Oh so what. I looked up at the sickle moon, as white as snow but without so much as a tiny bead of snow on it.
The moon is the nominal subject of Norman Mailer's outrageous non-fiction book, A Fire On the Moon, published in 1970. Outrageous, because of its artistry, its awfulness, its blather, its transcendence, the good and the bad locked in an often unreadable embrace as he reports on the moon landing as an accredited journalist at the space centres in Houston and Cape Kennedy. The book's actual subject is Norman Mailer, or – as he calls himself in magnificent third-person – Aquarius. It ends with this outrageous passage on staring at a rock brought back from the moon: "She was not two feet away from him, this rock to which he instinctively gave gender as she – and she was gray, gray as everyone had said, gray as a dark cinder and not three inches across nor two
inches high nor two inches for width, just a gray rock with craters the size of a pin and craters the size of a pencil point, and even craters large as a ladybug and rays ran out from the craters, fine white lines, flat as the wrinkles in an old lady's face. And maybe it was the pain of all these months of a marriage ending and a world in suffocation and a society in collapse, maybe it was the constant sore in his heart as the blood pumped through to be cleared of love, but he liked the moon rock, and thought – his vanity finally unquenchable – that she liked him."
