“In its mixture of direct physical engagement and
relaxed, aesthetic awareness, the walk serves as an ideal vehicle for the poet
who wishes to evoke the world in both its seductive beauty and its obstinate
solidity.’ (20)
- Roger Gilbert Walks in the World (1991)
“Time was first reckoned by lunations, and every important
ceremony took place at a certain phase of the moon.”
- Robert Graves, Scholar and Poet The Greek Myths (1993)
“Without the Moon there would be no moonbeams, no
month, no lunacy, no Apollo program, less poetry, and a world where every night
was dark and gloomy. Without the Moon it
is also likely that no birds, redwoods, whales, trilobite, or other advanced
life would ever grace the earth.” (243)
- Peter Ward, Geologist Gorgon (2004)
╬
We
had ridden into the eaves of the night, driving to a friend’s house, and from
there the three of us walked up a disused road – crumbling macadam and cinders
– to the familiar gate where we entered the Old Wood of our long friendship. As we arrived at the trailhead, solemn in our
togetherness, the Moon cleared the hills on our eastern horizon, casting its mesmerizing
light over the Wood and touching us – three sojourners, pathing intuitions – illuminating
us in anticipations of adventures yet to be had; possibly – as we always hoped
– that very night!
╬
I have long meditated on the idea that we are Nature having
become aware of itself. Walking has been
one of the primary ways in which I engage with the natural world; encountering and
exploring my specific location on the planet.
Experiencing Nature first-hand reminds me of who I am. Whether I take a brief walk in a Little Wood
or hike woodland trails for hours or days, the experience of the natural world
refreshes my whole being via the engagements to which such walks open up my
earthen ‘soul.’ Nature is the objective ‘other,’ in and though engagement with which
we weave the tapestries of subjective and intersubjective human meaning. Out of experiences in Nature come an earthen
poetics; symbolic, metaphorical, mythical ways of speaking that illuminate our
subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.
I am an avid walker. Venturing
out into the woods and fields, whether alone or in company with others, is a
threshold experience wherein I have the opportunity to leave my normal rounds
behind, slough-off my cultural blinders, and engage with Nature and others –
humans as well as other animals – in a more direct, unimpeded way. It takes practice to leave the world behind you
as you enter into a wooded area – whether an acre or two with paths running
through it or a vaster wilderness – yet in time and with practice it has become
possible to make the transition more or less with ease.
“Out to the Woods!”
Though walking in daylight is perhaps – on some occasions – the
easiest, I yearn to be out in the night, especially when the Moon is up. The nighttime can change almost any natural
scene into a mysterious, potentially wondrous place. Even my backyard, small as it is, can be transformed
by Moonlight into a Stranger Place. After
a hard day at work or play, just standing in the backyard when the Moon is up
is sometimes enough to waeccan me to my more earthen self. Further afield, wooded areas, wildwoods and fields
are also transmuted by the illumination of the Moon’s soft, cold light into
wonderlands and places where fantasy may come to presence in the different
sensory world. Going to the woods on a
Moonlit Night can be a refreshing, transformative and illuminating
experience. Places that are all-too-familiar
to me by daylight – to the point where they almost become a mundane backscape
to a walk – can seem wholly renewed; open and inviting, mysterious landscapes
under the Moon’s sway. These worlds revealed in the Moonlight invite me to
explore them all over again, both on-the-hoof and in my Imagination’s memory! I am drawn into a world that seems ‘transfigured,’
though I have no doubt walked ‘that trail’ or entered into ‘that copse of trees’
numerous times during daytime walks.
I noctambulate whenever I get the chance and wherever an
opportunity presents itself.
I am a Walker in the Night.
Remembrance of night walks – such as the one alluded to at the
head of this blog – inspires and keeps alive in me the sense of what it means to
be out in natural places in Moonlight’s sway; being illuminated—and the kinds
of experiences I have had, alone and with others, on Moonlit nights. I have journaled many experiences had while out-in-the-Moonlight
over the decades; these accounts enabling me – through the memory of imagined
scenes – to meditate on the nature and effects of Moonlight on our human
animals senses, our consciousness and my emerging poetics of the natural world
and our place in it.
I have memories of encounters during night-walks in moonlight,
so vivid as to almost be present to me in my mind’s nemeton. Encounters with animals – bears, deer and
racoons, cats and possums and whistle pigs – encounters with other people,
encounters with imagined existents (e.g., ‘ghosts’) and with projected
memories. I have a vivid memory of sitting
on my grandmother’s porch with my sister and cousins on an early evening of a
long-ago December, entranced by the effect of Moonlight on the enclosed front
yard, the grape arbor at its center and the out-buildings of the farm across
the lane; structures that were quite ordinary by daylight, but which became somehow
‘otherworldly’ via the Moon’s illumination.
I remember lying awake in bed, on innumerable occasions over the years,
with the light of the Moon streaming down through the slats in the window
blinds, bathing me in its grey-blue effects.
I took my first walks in the woods in Moonlight when I was a teenager,
and can recall many strange, uncanny moments during adventures in Imagination’s
sway.
This is not an experience unique to me, for many people
noctambulate! But for me, such memories
are both formative of my poetic mind and transformative in spiritual and
imaginative ways.
What is it about Moonlight that so attracts me and en-trances
my poetic, spiritual and mystical attention?
What is the effect of moonlight on a natural setting? I have long sought satisfactory words to body-the-experience-forth.
Understanding begins with the fact that the Moon’s light is
reflected sunlight. The Moon’s surface
reflects the sun’s light and we receive it on Earth as a cold, soft, diffuse
sort of light that activates the photoreceptors in our eyes in particular ways,
providing just enough illumination to see to a certain degree darkness. This effect of the Moon’s reflected light on
our optical system is different from that of sunlight, which is ‘direct light’
and is experienced as ‘clear’ and ‘warm,’ being communicated to our brains by a
different range of receptors in our eyes.[1]
Our experience of Moonlight is consequent to this fact but
cannot be reduced to it. Our ocular and
our overall sensory system permit experiences that transcend and transform the mere
physical parameters. Whenever I go
walking when the Moon is up and shining, I am transfigured – like the
landscapes in which I amble – by the effect the lunar light has on me. Moonlight’s very peculiar qualities affect
one’s senses in very particular ways which have been described in stories,
poetry and song down across human time.
The experiences people have had in Moonlight and the myths and
superstitions that have grown up around the Moon and its light are all rooted
in our genetics and physiology, in which our psychology is then rooted.
Wherever I walk at night, the Moon’s light makes fascinating
plays on the ground, shining down through leaves and branches, brush and vines,
moving scenes of light and shadow as what they silhouette are moved in the
breeze. That night, as the leaves were
changing into their final mortal forms, the Moonlight was coloring our vision
with shapes and even inspiring imagined images of familiar and more alien
things. Though less diurnal than some of
our mammalian cousins, we are still well-enough night-adapted to see by the
light of the Moon. This experience is
grounded in our genetics. What we
experience – subjectively and intersubjectively – is epiphenomenal to the organic
effect of light on our visual system. It
fosters an engagement with the phenomenon that can be transformative, potentially
transcendental and evermore fantastic!
The limit of our night-vision becomes clear when the night is
pitch-black! Hiking when all visible light
is absent, you can move only by feeling the ground with your feet to keep from
running into things with your arms outstretched, moving them back and forth in
front of you! I’ve been out on nights
like this! Other animals might be able to
see us, but we cannot see them_ much less the trees and other obstacles and
fluctuations in the land in front of us!
Moonlight renders the ordinary ‘extra-ordinary;’ at the very
least transforming it into something strange and uncanny. There is something quieting and almost
enchanting about the quality of the reflected light that shines down upon us
from the ‘lunar realm!’ It is important
to realize that the Moon does not generate its own light, but reflects the
light coming from the Sun. This would seem
to play into the very notion that we can become ‘reflective’ – in our senses –
under the effect of Moonlight.
The way in which moonlight transfigures a woodland scene,
making it ‘soft’ to the senses and seemingly ‘pliable;’ almost ethereal—fascinates
the mystical and poetic mind. The direct
sense-experience of moonlit woodland scenes is of a different quality from the
direct experience of sunlit scenes. To
be in the woods at the end of the day and to remain there; walking with the
senses open—is to experience the transformation of the landscape through which
you are passing. What was ‘familiar’ in
one way in daylight becomes unfamiliar – even uncanny – and then, once our eyes
adjust, becomes ‘familiar’ again. Both
‘landscapes’ are beautiful in their own way; according to their own
being-in-becoming. Our human senses
interact with the landscape in physical ways; bodily, psychological, emotion
and imaginative!
The effect of moonlight on a natural setting seems to be one
of ‘softening,’ as I have often experienced it.
It is not really a ‘defocused’ world, as there is much detail to be seen
in moonlight; though it is different from the detail seen in the same scene by
sunlight. The ‘softening’ creates a
sense of texture that is unique to the moonlit world. All objects in the field of vision – trees,
stones, water and even soil – seem differently textured than they do in
daylight. I often search for words that would
describe this texture adequately!
Perhaps ‘more corrugated’ where tree trunks and some lithic materials
are concerned? Perhaps more ‘plastic’ as
with the of water flowing in a creek or down a culvert. Standing water seems, in certain moonlit
conditions, to have a less ‘reflective’ surface when viewed at a particular angle,
and at times may appear to be ‘solid,’ like glass or ice, as a walking partner
of mine once asserted (though I have never had this experience myself).
This always reminds me of the fact of each person’s experience
of moonlit scenes being different; each noctambulant will have unique ways of
describing what they see and experience.
Out in moonlit woods with friends, we have our own peculiar subjective
experiences and then unique ways of describing the effects of the moonlight on the
natural scenes around us and upon our own consciousness.
No matter how we describe our experiences in moonlight, the
experience itself can sometimes be so arresting as to be disarming. But more often, being out on a night-hike illuminated
by moonlight re-settles me and quiets my senses. Perhaps in part because of the low level of light;
my senses tend toward a kind of ‘rest.’
I often found, when I was a teenager, that being out on a moonlit night
at someone’s camp or in the woods, walking alone or with friends, was one of
the best vehicles for entering into a meditative, and potentially mystical, state. Not everyone I knew experienced this, but for
me it was a profound connection; one that facilitated the development of a
‘lunar spiritual practice.’ Even today,
when I go to bed, if the moon’s light is shining in through my bedroom windows,
I will sit up and meditate before falling asleep, bathed in moonlight.
This mood of being ‘stilled’ also opens into a kind of
‘transcendence’ and is related to one version of the state in which Inspiration
oft arises. Thus, the relationship long
known between the Moon and the Muse! Out
of such hikes in Moonlight come the touchstones for a poetics of the nighttime,
natural darkness and illumination.
Enough for now_
Out to the Woods!
_The
Moon is up and the sky is clearing!
“One function of the
moonlight is to evoke a stillness that suggests transcendence.” (21)
-
Brian Cosgrove “Wordsworth’s Moonlight Poetry and
the Sense of the Uncanny.” Ariel,
1982
[1]
The biochemistry of night vision is complex, and there are many good sources
that discuss it. It has to do with
molecules of a protein that combines photopsin in what are often called the
cones – for color vision – and rhodopsin in cells called rods, which are
activated in low light – such as Moonlight.
It is a fascinating biochemical process.
Explore it as you will. – MW
