The Moon - "No Surprises" by Radiohead

[The entire song is a beautiful, hopeful illusion barely masking a cold, unfriendly reality. And yet in the darkness, hope is incredibly valuable for its own sake, however delusional it may seem.]

A heart that's full up like a landfill,
a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won't heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don't, they don't speak for us.
I'll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon monoxide,

with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
Silence, silence.

This is my final fit,
my final bellyache

with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please.

Such a pretty house
and such a pretty garden.

No alarms and no surprises (get me outta here),
no alarms and no surprises (get me outta here),
no alarms and no surprises, please.

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Aesop's Fables - The Moon

(Click here for large version)

The lessons of The Moon card, like the hard lessons of the nightingale, can only be appreciated in retrospect -- at the actual time of learning we know only loss, uneasiness, and frustration.

This fable seems like it could be merely a dream the laborer was having, an idea reinforced by the accompanying illustration. It makes me think of how many dreams I've awoken from with a profound sense of heartache. Experiences I'd wanted to be real so badly, gifts I'd received, even actual friends I'd made whom I felt profoundly connected to -- all wiped away with the opening of my eyes. One time I found myself crying piteously when I realized I'd spent what felt like days getting to know someone whom I'd never meet again, at least not in this world.

These experiences, however confusing and upsetting, contribute something important to our lives that is difficult to pin down and articulate. They round us out, they inflate our inner worlds to the point where they are barely constrained by reality. Returning to that reality is almost always a let-down, but we return quite changed. Embracing these experiences and wringing meaning from them subtly alters the paths we take in our real lives, uniting our conscious and unconscious minds and inching us forward along the path to self-awareness. When you get there, you'll find plenty of evidence that all your time groping in the darkness and mourning lost dreams was time well-spent.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Moon

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"A Wildlife Preserve For Mysterious Entities..."

This is the third installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine. (Scroll down for large version.)

Not long ago, my sister Leah told me about some of the scary dreams she’d been having about the wash. The conversation was a funny reminder that not everyone’s backyard included this particular topographical feature; in the Southwest, a wash (also known as an arroyo) is basically a dry creek bed, formed by centuries of flash floods running down from the nearby mountains after heavy storms. Some of them just look like smooth, sandy pathways through the rocky desert, but others gouge deep, rocky ravines into the earth.

At the site of my childhood home in Apache Junction, Arizona, this latter type of wash severed my parents’ property into two halves: one navigable by adults and their vehicles, and the other appealing strictly to children and wild animals. All we had to do to escape civilization was run to the place thirty feet beyond the back door where the ground suddenly plunged sixty-five degrees straight down, descending straight into a skin-shredding tangle of palo verde trees and sticky creosote. In a few areas there was no slope at all, just rocky cliffs dropping straight down to the floor, which was 20 feet deep in some places.

My sisters and I colonized the wash, burrowing through the bristling canopy, creating encampments in the small clearings we discovered, playing elaborate games of pretend which no one overhead could see or hear. We were loath to do any yardwork whatsoever, yet we’d cheerfully spend hours in the 115-degree summer heat hauling rocks, clearing branches and digging trenches, intent on creating the perfect theater for our fantasies of adventure and mystery. As we grew more daring, we’d venture further down the subterranean highway that the wash carved between houses, invisibly traveling far beyond our own property. When yet another apocalyptic desert sunset began reddening the surface-world, we'd crawl up out of the pit and back to the safety of the dinner table, picking itchy foxtail seeds out of our socks and suddenly feeling the pain from our bloody scratches for the first time all day.

At night, we avoided the place entirely -- its recesses were completely cut off from the cheery patio lights shining somewhere above the rim, and what appeared cozy and familiar by day became lonely and terrifying in the darkness. It wasn’t just that instinctive childish knowledge that there are things out there in the dark, either. Most desert wildlife is nocturnal; after dark, the territory we’d spent all day terraforming would be reclaimed by rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and hungry coyotes. Scorpions and vinegaroons would scoop out new homes beneath the rocks we’d stacked talismanically against the wild. We could still play in the yard, but it was tricky -- if a basketball bounced past the border and rolled down into the wash, it would remain there till morning.

In my sister’s most recent dream, a ghostly young woman had come up out of the wash. “I used to have nightmares about people and things coming up from the wash, but it's been a bazillion years,” Leah told me. It chilled me to hear this, because I’ve had the same dreams many times. My childish impressions of the place have distorted memories, so that in dreams the wash appears as a vast, primal wilderness. Sometimes it’s a dense jungle that I can flee to and hide in; other times it’s a deadly obstacle course. Either way, at some point it became converted into a wildlife preserve for mysterious entities of all flavors. It’s the portal to that other world, the world beyond reason and safety, the one whose ledge our civilized homestead perches vulnerably upon. Though we grew up there together, it never occurred to me that this place might fill the same niche in my sisters' personal symbolic language that it does in mine.

In a broader symbolic sense, cracks, crevices, lakes, ravines, and underground chambers are all gateways into the unconscious mind. I mentioned to Leah that in our dreams, we find all kinds of creatures and interlopers populating these crossroads -- some friendlier than others -- and interacting with them can reveal thoughts, ideas, or memories that otherwise rarely get to see the light of day. We should see their attempt to “come up out of the wash” (or wherever) to meet us as an interesting, potentially illuminating event, but our fear of the unknown prevents this at all costs, distorting our thoughts and emotions beyond recognition. They cry out to us, but we can’t bear to look.

I also told her that if she ever had the chance, she should go down into the wash herself -- whether in a dream, in meditation, or even in real life -- and see what she encounters there. Take a deliberate journey into the realm of the unconscious with the intent of uncovering a symbolic truth; initiate a psychic ordeal in which you keep partial control. It’s a good way to keep in touch with the parts of your psyche that don’t get to come out and play in the daylight. You can always banish them back into the abyss afterward if you prefer.

Was the ghostly girl who came out of the wash trying to tell Leah something? “I think this was probably the first dream where a girl, or maybe even a female, is what come out of the abyss,” she said, mulling it over. Just as I was about to offer an opinion, she added: “I also dreamed about this crazy baby deer that was attacking things, and he had these crazy teeth that had metal spikes on them… He was scary, but I remember having sympathy for him.”

Leah feels safe attributing this latter character to the hot dog she had for dinner the night before. Me? I can’t help thinking back to those times when our imagined demons were at least half-real. With little effort, I recall the high, gobbling laughter of the coyote pack as it convened somewhere nearby (A hundred yards away? Twenty? Ten?). I think of the palo verde beetle's six-inch wingspan. I think of the limbless hunters gliding out of their stolen burrows, and suddenly I’m not so sure.

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"Moments That Remind Us of Our Own Inner Strangeness"

Two things life and art have in common are that they constantly strive to deliver results that are stranger than anything we can imagine, and that this may be the whole point. Theo Ellsworth never fails to disappoint in this regard, his drawings are like storybook illustrations beamed to us from another solar system. I find most of them are simultaneously chilling and endearing, reminiscent of those dreams that constantly threaten to become nightmares but never really end up crossing the line. I'm a sucker for this stuff, actually -- I picked up Thought Cloud Shrines a while back, and while working on this post I wound up buying this poster (only a few left!), another Ellsworth drawing which evokes the Moon card's allure and ambivalence with eerie accuracy.

If you're entering the sort of phase that this card describes, then you'd better get used to vistas like these. There are many miles of strange road between you and the reassuring light of day, and you are not the only traveler wandering it. Are these others friend or foe? Are they even real? It can be hard to judge in the dark. Your own fears, desires and prejudices build a funhouse around you, coming to life under the inconstant light of the fickle moon. It's a thrilling time, but not a particularly reassuring one.

Like the Hanged Man, this is a necessary trial, a rite of passage. In that earlier card, it was your view of the world that had to change in order for you to evolve; this time, it's your view of yourself that must be challenged and reconciled. This card is often linked to dreams and other unexplained encounters, because these are instances when we are tugged off of the well-worn ruts of identity and reality that we normally cling to -- these are the moments that remind us of our own inner strangeness. If you are a stranger to yourself, how can you expect anyone else to understand you?

Explore, dream, write. Howl into the night. Ask questions you're not sure you want to know the answer to. Eventually the Sun will rise and clear the cobwebs from the dark corners of your awareness, but hopefully by then you'll already be glowing with your own inner light.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Moon

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The Moon - XVIII

1. Deception
2. A slow, toilsome struggle
3. The brink of an important change.

-- David Allen Hulse, The Western Mysteries

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THE MOON

The Moon has been coming up in a lot of readings lately, so I've spent a lot of time groping for a way to express the peculiar and irrational shadow this card casts over an issue. Our own moon acts as a mirror, reflecting slivers of sunlight -- a reminder to nighttime travelers that the sun is still out there somewhere, and will be returning shortly. Except when the moon reflects no light at all, and then we just have to remember on our own.

In the Tarot, the Moon indicates the dark passage we must travel through our unconscious mind in order to emerge as a whole, fully conscious being on the other side. It's a period during which everyday logic fails us; our illusions become more real than the ground under our feet. What once seemed safe now seems threatening, and vice versa. This moon too acts as a mirror, except it is our own distorted face we see in it -- a face which we gradually recognize and accept as we apprehensively travel toward the source of the light.

The mirror pictured above is one that I made. My grandmother lives in rural Montana and sometimes sends me some interesting bones she finds out in nearby fields. I decided to use them to build beautiful artifacts as a bridge between her world and mine here in New York. I mounted a magnifying mirror on the shoulder socket handle, rimming the glass with horse teeth salvaged from an old necklace, which I re-strung with beads and gemstones. I encrusted the back of the mirror with colorful shards of glass and rusted bits of metal from the banks of the East River. I made a matching fan with wine-stained feathers, and when I was done I took photographs to send to my grandmother with a long letter explaining the entire process, which she greatly enjoyed.

And then about a week later I had a friend over, and my guest's sleeve snagged on the mirror as he passed by its shelf. It fell face-down on the floor and broke, a huge crack marring its face, and immediately all the magic and beauty this object had become infused with instantly drained away. It became lifeless. My brain writhed. At that moment, what was important? The work I'd put into it, the fantasies I'd built around it, the actual physical components? My guest felt terrible, so I focused on putting him at ease, trying to remind myself that the mirror had already served its purpose-- but that hollow, senseless feeling took a long time to go away. I still have the mirror, but to this day I can hardly bear to look at it.

If this seems like an oblique way of discussing The Moon's influence, perhaps that's appropriate. Perhaps this Sylvia Plath poem, "The Mirror," will fill in some of the blanks:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike .
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

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