25 June 2009
Lunisolar
(Phases of the Moon)
"THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door."
- Alfred Noyes (1880-1958)
Al Noyes has gone out of fashion these days, but in his time he could write a hell of a ballad. He told stories; the one about the Highwayman and the Innkeepers daughter managed to get me through 7th Grade literature at Barnum Junior High School, a period of difficult transition for me, the nation and John Kennedy in particular.
Most of the great ballads and balladeers have left us in the Age of Irony. I mean, how do you construct a ballad about something as weird as your Camelot President being shot down by crazed Texans or Cubans, or whoever it was. There is no closure, as there was for Noyes and the wild young Highwayman and the eternally-waiting Innkeeper’s daughter with the dark red love-knot in her hair.
Fashion went that way, too in the '60s, all irony and the inside joke. Poor Madonna. She was slammed for her ironic statement at the gala evening opening at the MoMA of the Spring Fashion Week Collection. She wore leather boots as tall as the Highwayman’s, with a tiny blue ruffled dress topped with a bizarre headpiece.
She is fifty this year, and I get the sense that the fashionistas are telling her she is too old to be in on the joke anymore. Sad, really, that it has come to this for the most ironic icon ever to emerge from Bay City, Michigan, but that is the cycle of life, isn’t it?
I was reading about that in the comfort of the brown chair. A friend loaned me a marvelous book by Doctor Whitehouse, who specializes in the behavior of the aging human brain. He contends that the aging process is a natural one, different for each of us as our fingerprints. Not inexorable, as we have been conditioned to believe, and certainly not branded with the dreaded diagnosis associated with the one case described by Dr. Alois Alzheimer just over a century ago.
Dr. Whitehouse describes a sort of cycle in the way aging has been treated, particularly by we baby boomers who were coming to full conciseness about the time that John Kennedy was losing his.
First, the Doctor says, a problem is identified. Then the drug companies rush in to find a cure for the problem. Once there are drugs to meet the problem they are prescribed by well-meaning clinicians, and a whole industry becomes based on the existence of a problem that may- or may not- actually have a discrete cause other than the inexorable passing of time, and the individual’s cellular response to it.
The end of the cycle comes with people like Dr. Whitehouse, who deconstruct the process, hoping to start a new dialogue about something as frightening as the clatter of hooves on dark cobblestones.
It was a lot to conceptualize, so I stepped out on the balcony above the pool, where the underwater lights gleamed in the depths like moons at their fullest. The lock was shut tight and the bathers were gone. The blue water had not a ripple but a distinct and unearthly shimmer.
Glancing up to the scudding high clouds, I saw the fingernail of the waning moon gleam sliver-bright above the artificial glow. Not a single drop of irony there in the heavens, not at all.
It is curious that I have arrived this late in life with so little appreciation of the natural world that has spun about with mechanical precision these last several millennia. Maybe it is the Age of Irony, and our efforts to turn the world upside down, living at full tilt in the dark, and ignoring the imperative of the dawn all the way through young adulthood
As you well know, the Moon goes through a cycle of phases approximately every 29.5 days, but naturally there are complicating factors. Our aloof and massive companion orbits the Earth about every 27.3 days, with the relative aspect of the Sun and Earth constantly maneuvering or position as we fly through the larger solar orbit.
It is quite an elegant dance, at least for those who pay attention to it. Like ballads, that has gone out of fashion here in the West. Most cultures used to base their calendars on the lunar cycle, including England; only one remains.
The only widely used purely lunar calendar is the Islamic, or Hijri calendar, which contains twelve lunar months. There is an issue with that, from a pure time-keeping function. Each year, linked to the cycles of the moon, slowly drifts out of sequence with the solar year, eleven days at a time. Thus, the two only return to the same relative position every 33 Islamic years.
Most places use the calendar for religious purposes, but of course in Saudi Arabia, it is the only one used for everything.
The Chinese also had a hybrid calendar termed a “lunisolar” model, and they have been remarkably successful with it. The People's Republic of China will greet its 60th birthday this October with nationwide celebrations, including a grand military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. There will be absolutely no irony permitted.
Traditional Chinese chronology uses the lunar calendar in which the years are designated by combinations of the 12 Heavenly Stems and 10 Earthly Branches. Under this scheme, sixty years completes a lunar “century” and has special significance, unifying the natural world and that of the Party. After all, it was none other than Confucius who noted that “At 60 years, my ear was attuned manifold opinions.” It is an age of wisdom, as much as the evidence of my own ears denies it.
So, this year will mark the beginning of a new lunar century for China, and the continued rule of the dictatorship of the Proletariat. Chairman Mao is aid to have led the Party to victory over the fascist Kuomantang by "fighting on horseback," another auspicious image. And in Chinese tradition, whoever seizes "all under heaven" by "fighting on horseback" naturally aligns the forces of the universe in support of heavenly legitimacy.
My understanding was that the Great helmsman preferred to be carried in a litter, like the old-time emperors, but he was a poet, too, and that should count for something. The dawn of the new Chinese Century, perhaps.
Not a shred of irony in the whole thing, any more than Alfred Noyes had when he described his Highwayman under the silver moon:
“He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.”
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com