The moon: twice a day, 900 balloons are released from the Earth
If there were no moon, our days would be short – between half and a quarter of the length they are now – and our nights would be dark. The Earth’s tilt would change, which would change the seasons. The seas, the oceans, the lakes would not fall flat, but they would be flatter, milder: lower high tides, higher low tides.
This makes me think of the Jorie Graham lines: “And the black ocean shows itself in infinite detail because of the moon. / No matter that all is not lit. Much remains because much remains hidden.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s moon is, “suffused o’er all the sapphire Heaven, / Trees, herbage, snake-like stream, unwrinkled Lake, / Whose very murmur does of it partake.”
Tides and tidal currents mix cold waters with warm ones, which keeps our weather bearable. The moon’s gravity helps stabilise the Earth’s tilt, and without it the Earth’s axis would wobble. Seasons would become chaotic, lasting for years or sometimes vanishing altogether, freezing the planet in time, perhaps.
The moon keeps time and helps us count it. The Venus of Laussel, carved into a rock shelter in Dordogne 25,000 years ago, holds a crescent horn marked with 13 notches: the number of moons in a year, or the number of periods – or both. When your period arrives, you think of the days that came before it: both trusting that you must have known it was coming, and doubting most of the things you felt as it approached.
Do you know how we tell the weather? Every day, twice a day, at 900 places around the world, people release weather balloons: they do this simultaneously, the Earth suddenly hiccuping bubbles, like a drunken cartoon fish, or blown like a dandelion, its parachutes climbing in the wind. But they are not bubbles, they are not seeds: they are solid white, they look like 900 moons and as they rise, they expand, so that for a while they appear from the ground to stay the same size: constant inconstant moons.
When weather balloons burst, they split into whitish stringy bits: it reminds me of an eight-week old pregnancy, which at the moment makes me think of WH Auden, writing of “the Boys” after America’s moon landing: “We were always adroiter / with objects than lives, and more facile / at courage than kindness.”
When you are pregnant, your period stops: everyone knows this. When you are no longer pregnant, it returns: and with it, often, a feeling of a relief. It is a reminder of the person you were before you were a pregnant person, which in some places, is barely a person at all. “If I could give you the moon,” sings Phoebe Bridgers, “I would give you the moon”.
Sometimes it feels as if we dreamed the moon – we turned on to a street and found ourselves at the bottom of a hill, with a giant orange ball about to roll down it. We photographed it, trying to prove that it was real, but in the picture it is only a small light. The moon resists portrayal.
Paul Simon learned this long ago. “If you want to write a song about the moon / Walk along the craters of the afternoon / When the shadows are deep and the light is alien / And gravity leaps like a knife off the pavement,” he sings. “If you want to write a song about the heart / Think about the moon before you start.”
• Helen Sullivan’s first book, Calcium-Magnesium, will be published in Australia in 2023