The Moon: A random History (part 3)

The Man in the Moon
In Norse mythology, the moon is carried through the sky in a chariot piloted by Máni, brother to Sol, the female personification of the sun. Máni is also responsible for the waxing and waning of the moon. 
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I could not find any sound references that connected the Norse Máni to the Man in the Moon. Most Man in the Moon mythologies are about a man banished to the moon for some transgression or other. Most frequently, breaking the Sabbath by collecting firewood. The other night I stared at the almost-full moon and looked hard for the old man with a bag of kindling on his back. I couldn’t make him out. Instead, I saw what I usually see as “the Man in the Moon” – a round-faced man with big, owling eyes and a mouth that goes “Oh!” And then the following night, when the moon was completely full, while out for a wonderful moonlight ski with some friends, I noticed the moon’s expression had changed to a somewhat bemused smile. Could this have just been my imagination? Could the angle of light over the Mare Humorum and the Mare Nubium, which according to the moon map is where I see the moon’s “mouth,” have changed so much in one day?

And if the moon is looking down on us, either in shock or in bemusement, what does he see as he floats over us night after night? What crimes and trysts? What lonely souls pining on a river bank somewhere? What beauty? 

In “City Moon,” by Francisco Aragón, a “huge and simmering” moon becomes the “night’s one eye,” watching over a Madrid night scene in late June. I doubt if this moon purses his lips in a shocked “Oh!” I imagine him more cosmopolitan and amused as he watches the “firm-thighed boys from Lisbon …work Kilometer Zero’s sidewalk…” and the “orange jumpsuits [hop] off trucks to sweep and spray, hosing down those electric streets.”

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NASA public domain images

The Moon Itself

So what is this lump of rock in the sky on which we pin so many myths and stories?

​Slightly more than one quarter the diameter of Earth but only 1.2% of Earth’s mass, the moon is less massive than we imagine but not made of soft cheese, or covered in mushrooms and inhabited by zebra-striped aliens as depicted in Georges Méliès' 1902 film "A trip to the Moon."

In fact, its interior structure is similar to Earth’s, including a small molten core. This structure makes the moon ever so slightly elastic. The moon is also relatively large in comparison to Earth, more so than in other planet-moon partnerships in our galaxy. According to the Peterson Field Guide to the Stars and Planets, “the earth and moon essentially form a double-planet system.”

In 2014, a team of NASA scientists were able to use readings from two lunar satellites to actually measure the "lunar body tide." The mutual gravitational pull between the Earth and the moon causes them to be "shaped a little like two eggs with their ends pointing toward one another​." The data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) show a lump, approximately 51 cm in height on the near side of the moon, and a corresponding bulge on the far side.

According to NASA the "position of the bulge actually shifts a few inches over time. Although the same side of the moon constantly faces Earth, because of the tilt and shape of the moon’s orbit, the side facing Earth appears to wobble. From the moon’s viewpoint, Earth doesn’t sit motionless but moves around within a small patch of sky. The bulge responds to Earth’s movements like a dance partner, following wherever the lead goes."

The moon is our dance partner in this big, lonely universe. While the larger Earth may take the lead in this partnership, the smaller moon still has a steadying effect on us. If Earth were to spin alone around the sun, it would wobble erratically on its axis, making a regular procession of seasons, or any kind of stable, life-supporting climate impossible. The moon's gravity has been holding us steady for over 4 billion years. 

To my great delight I actually found a beautiful poem that includes this Earth-moon relationship, and laments how soon the relationship will end:

"Every year the moon inches away from us. In time she’ll swim too far out
to anchor us at our habitual angle to the sun, and that will be the end
of the well-tempered and recursive wildness
                                                             that conceived and suffered us"

In "Red Moon Eclogues" Australian poet Mark Tredinnick contemplates the moon and its relationship to Earth during a lunar eclipse: "I sit on the cold step of the cowshed and watch the world throw its shadow on the moon like a horseblanket..."

The poem ranges from the paradox of modern life: "Debussy plays; trucks flounder past like gods who've lost control of their machines. In between one makes one's life up."

Through our struggle with mortality. He dreams of almost winning an argument with death and just as he's seeing "where my argument must run...my small boy cried and woke me and I went to him and now I'll never know."

To the simple ingredients of everyday beauty: "And this now--
cutgrass at four o’clock—is how
                                                              hope smells. Some days I can see no way out:
the body of the world in entropy. But today I sit among the ruins
of the afternoon, and I cannot see how it can’t all go on forever."

I cry when I read that verse.

In the end the moon makes herself new again and falls "​into all this panoply of hope..."

The new moon started her journey again on the 17th of this month and will be full on Easter Saturday. What better way of starting the season of hope.

NASA public domain images