The moon was my friend, I said, when I was a boy. I am telling you what I said more than what I believed. What I believe or did believe is of no never mind now. I was a boy. What I said is indicative enough–it does indicate, does serve as a sign of something, even if it does not prove anything. Arguments made from the isolated case are indicative; they also prove nothing. Signs; I am not going to define the word ‘sign.’
I am not going to define friend or friendship.
I used to say that the moon was my friend. I used to say that the moon was a sign for woman, whatever that meant. Men were suns; women, moons? I looked to the moon, I looked at the moon, I watched the moon in some of the ways but in none of the ways too that someone watches a wall, sometimes in a way someone might watch a woman, but not the way a child watched a woman, although, when I was a boy, I might have watched women in some of the ways I later watched them as a man.
The child is the father of the man I remember from my Wordsworth.Some of you might think you remember this from Freud. You’d be wrong in specific; you would be right in sentiment? Freud was a Romantic philosopher as was Hegel and Schopenhauer? I have great ease in saying this; conviction is comforting. Was Freud trying to salvage romanticism as Dante was trying to salvage scholasticism? I am, again, asking.
My dad pointed out the Man in the moon’s face–I did not understand why we thought it was a man’s face–the moon is she, as I have read elsewhere in other pieces similar to this one. I do not care so much what others think about the moon being she in my mind, in my imagination, what I said and thought about the moon being colored by this; not a problem a later girlfriend said, so long as you do not think women are all lunatics because of this.
Yes, the moon is she. The face could have been a woman’s face, I thought. Yes, she; the moon is she; she was Diana, as I recollect having remembered. I understood she was a goddess, the moon was a goddess, how did we anthropomorphize gods and goddesses in the objects of the sun, the moon, the sky, the sea, the earth?
The moon was not he when I was a boy; no, she was she. The moon could only have been she. I used to say: The Moon, she is my friend. All children have imaginary friends; I cannot explain why mine were always one or another extrapolation on mythology—is that what it was?
I used to pray to the moon when I was a boy, and I thought I felt I imagined I had animated myself in love with the moon. I never understood anyone who could split hairs on being in love, or what love was, is, could be, should I used to say, can longer believe. What was love? I did not have the problems others seemed to have in defining it or believing it existed could be had. What was desire, what was sex . . . love. The somersaults we do to avoid taking responsibility for choosing love is quite amazing and disturbing. I know that when I was a young man, an adult, and I had come across Budge’s translation with hieroglyphic text of the Papyrus of Ani, titled, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, I used to go to the ocean shore down the block from my apartment in Rockaway to chant Hymns to Aman Ra. What then should I say about praising the sun, befriending the moon, worshipping sex . . . to fuck or not to fuck was my to be or not.
The desire to fuck was love; I knew it was love; how could it be anything else? How could there be this thing love that was tainted or corrupted by sex—it is the sex that is corrupted by the inability to act on love, no? I knew something was wrong with how we had to make sex something dirty or prurient–fucking Puritans that we were still. I did not have the desire to fuck the moon; I did not want to fuck the sun—that would be weirder to me than wanting to fuck the moon. I did not question my sexuality. What was lunar; what was solar? What was night; what was day? What was thought to be in the provenance of the moon, in the provenance of the sun? Who was the goddess of the moon? Who were the Gods of the sun? What did she represent, this goddess I might have worshipped had I not made her my friend. I could get—what could I get? What could I have?
The desire to fuck is love, must be love, cannot be anything but love. Now love is not only the desire to fuck. This is certain. Love and desire were simple enough to understand for me.
The moon is she, was she, will be she in my vernacular.
The Falling Leaf Review 