The big scheme of things

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
The big scheme of things				March 10, 2007

While I’m not an astronomy freak, I do at times gaze at the stars on a clear winter night, if only to reflect on the fact that we humans are pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

Last Saturday night, however, something quite extraordinary occurred. The moon, whom the Greeks called Selene, was occluded and then eclipsed by the interposition of the earth between her and her brother, Helios, the sun. The color of the moon – and evidently this is not an unnatural occurrence – was a pale red, as though as a result of her deprivation she were bleeding.

What is truly tantalizing about all this is that such events in the universal paradigm are totally predictable, as if the universe itself were on an unwritten fixed schedule from which its grand movements never deviate. Equally impressive is the notion that mere mortals, for all their hubristic anthropocentrism, have absolutely no control over the motions of the spheres or the relatively small planet they inhabit.

The eternality and magnificence of such celestial events immediately call into question our own perceptive abilities, not only insofar as they are or are not able to comprehend universal perfection, but also in terms of our attempts to define our own existence relative to it.

As was their wont, the Greeks and Romans tended to enhance their perception of the universe by reducing its components to their own level and giving them anthropomorphic qualities. So the epic poet Homer tells us, in his hymn to Selene, that “From her head a radiance beams from heaven and embraces earth. The air glows with the light of her golden crown whenever shining Selene bathes her body in the waters of Ocean and drives on her long-maned horses at full speed, in the evening at mid-month.”

Yet, as the radiance of Greek Selene was transformed into the more austere Roman Luna, mortals tended to see a dour side to her fullness. Believing that the moon was a force for ill as well as for good, humans began to attribute madness-inducing proclivities to the full moon, and hence the association of the moon with lunatic behavior or sheer lunacy was solidified.

In a play by Georg Buchner that was later, in 1922, turned into the more famous opera by Alban Berg, the anti-hero, Wozzeck, abused and dehumanized by an army doctor and others having power over him, goes mad and eventually stabs his wife after learning of her affair with a drum-major. In their last conversation, Marie, the wife, notes that the moon has risen. “How red the moon is,” she says. “Like blood-stained steel,” replies Wozzeck as he draws his knife to kill her.

Later, now totally mad and having thrown the bloodied knife into a pond, he declares, “But the moon will betray me; the moon is blood-stained. Is the whole world going to incriminate me?”

Thus for the socialist Buchner and his successor Berg do the powerful exploit the powerless for their own ends, only to abandon them later to the psychic lacerations of an experimentally induced lunacy.

And the celestial bodies take note. Instead of reflecting the rays of the sun, the moon now reflects the red of a blood-stained knife and conspires in the incrimination of a madman.

In Berg, the anthropomorphism of Homer is thus reduced to its bare essentials. For those gone mad, the moon, the sun and the planets are all interpretive of human foibles and quite capable of collusion to the point of human destruction.

Yet, while literature is replete with the awe we humans feel relative to the cycles of nature and the harmony of the universe, the fact is that we ants on the Earth are of little consequence to Selene and her cohorts. We can poison and pollute the Earth to the point of our own destruction or we can blow ourselves to smithereens. We can make sludge of our rivers and streams, we can cut down all our trees and callously deplete to the point of extinction the resources the earth has provided.

Regardless of what means we choose to do ourselves in, the Earth will survive, the moon will continue to wax and wane, and every now and then, as time appoints, Selene will be deprived of the light of her brother Helios by an earthly intervention. Whether we mortals are here to witness all that makes not one whit of difference.

So, the next time you think that the removal of a cross from the Wren Chapel, or a sex show at William & Mary, or gay marriage or the supremacy of one religion over another are earth-shattering issues that require hyper-bloviation and are worthy of incessant prattle, think again.

Before you decide to blow off steam, go out some night, gaze upward and have a chat with the freshly-bathed Selene. If she turns blood red, you’re probably on the wrong track.