Mr Kennedy Raped The Moon

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 planning 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 claws and

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 hands.

Who is the Moon’s mother, I asked. No one 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 early1970s 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 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,

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, 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.