Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 3

The moon is presumed mute—its silence is the silence of death....

The moon is presumed mute—its silence is the silence of death. But when it does speak, it speaks in the language of shadows. You speak this language, too. It was your first language, our shared first language, the language of the dark. When you can’t scream in nightmares, it is the moon caught in your throat, a bright white rolling marble that garbles the voice, makes it choked and animal. Moonlight smells like chalkboard, like snowcloud, like a rock in the dirt. You can skin it with a glimpse, lay its pelt down by the hearth, and wrap yourself in its furred light. No weapons, no blood. A glimpse as it shifts in time; what a thing to witness, the full moon’s monthly resurrection.

The Hunter’s Moon is up, and “The Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review.

Fathers, sons, flight—as far as fathers go, no one would rank...

Fathers, sons, flight—as far as fathers go, no one would rank Daedalus as World’s #1 Dad. Why didn’t he and his son Icarus make their famous flight at night? Moonlight won’t melt wax. But I think Daedalus knew exactly what he was doing. Had they flown by moonlight, we wouldn’t have learned of the consequences of ambition unmatched by ability. And Brueghel would not have painted the shepherds and farmers not seeing Icarus splash into the sea, and Auden would not have written “how everything turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster.”

The Harvest Moon rises tonight and “The Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review.

Four weeks has the month. Four seasons has the year. In...

Four weeks has the month. Four seasons has the year. In chronobiology, circadian rhythms regulate our day-to-day, our twenty-four-hour waking-sleeping cycles. Infradian rhythms guide the longer stretches—hibernation, molting, mating, menstruation. “Everything has become speeded up and overcrowded,” wrote May Sarton in her journal in 1972. “So anything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature is a help.” When you look up and see the moon—as dusty smudge in day or glowing any phase at night—does a brief stillness settle? A momentary slowing? A temporary lull between interior and exterior time?

“The Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review with the Sturgeon Moon in August.

It’s rumored that emergency rooms and psychiatric wards are more...

It’s rumored that emergency rooms and psychiatric wards are more active at the full moon. It’s rumored that crime spikes. It’s rumored that people get a little crazed and don’t know what to do with their bodies. You’ve heard these rumors. From bartenders and nurses and nursery school teachers. Maybe you’ve felt it your very self. I saw a neighbor on the street and asked how she was doing. “It’s the full moon, you know,” she said, “so I feel completely demented.” It made news that a town in England put more cops on patrol on full moons. Sylvia Plath knew: the moon “drags the sea after it like a dark crime.”

The “Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review with the Thunder Moon in July.

Maybe in your life you have pressed your forehead against...

Maybe in your life you have pressed your forehead against another’s forehead. And maybe in that moment, you were not mother or father or child or sister or brother or friend or lover. Maybe in that moment, you were two skulls, two moons, hidden behind a thin cloud of forehead, behind a thin mist of eyelid, two skull moons glowing against each other, skull curve surface touching, eye sockets cratering, and the increasing complexity of truth collecting in the dark and infinite space that pooled in the shadowed place at the backs of your heads. The shadowed half of the moon is where the dream visions collect before they’re sent to the pond to be dreamed and forgotten.

The “Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review with the Strawberry Moon in June.

The future tugs on us, as the moon does, come what may. In a...

The future tugs on us, as the moon does, come what may. In a face, in a shadow, in the overflow of dream life into real life, in all the indistinct places, come what may, come what may, we wander the night gardens of our minds in search of something we can understand. Let’s speak of what we know, and then we’ll see what we hear in the silence.

Flower Moon, supermoon, blood moon. A total lunar eclipse, the closest the moon will be to earth all year, it’s all happening tonight. Read all about it – plus spring fever, pareidolia, and rabbit shadows – in the second installment of my full moon series for The Paris Review.

May: Flower Moon

Here, the ocean wears all its mirrors on its back, they bring...

Here, the ocean wears all its mirrors on its back, they bring the news that comes in the dream, and tonight, the full moon will be reflected and repeated there, millions of moons bouncing back off millions of mirrors. All the old Aprils are in this April, the well-worn egg-shaped orbit swings us back to budding fizz on trees, to hungry suckling tongues, to the blue dusk blush, everything stirring and sticky with renewal. We can’t stare at the sun. It will char our retinas and take our sight. The moon won’t burn, even at its brightest, we can look and look, the way we look at the faces in dreams, which reflect what we bring, with darkness and emptiness behind them. Tonight, step into the milk-blue dim, get softened in the mothlight, and feel the moon pull on all your fluids and juices.

For the Paris Review, I’m writing a 12-part series tied to each month’s full moon. “The Moon in Full” starts today, with the Pink Moon, which rises tonight.

Part One: Pink Moon

[Painting: Edvard Munch, Måneskinn (Moonlight), 1895]

It’s a collaboration, making a spoon. As it...

It’s a collaboration, making a spoon. As it iswith making a vessel out of clay or a sculpture out of steel. To impose yourwill and force, to demand the material do what you want, take the shape youwant, bow to your preconceptions for what it should be—it will notwork this way. A spoon might exist in the end, but something will be missingfrom it, and you will feel that lack in your hand when you stir the soup. Ahumility is required, a willingness, in any moment, to realize, this is movingin a direction I did not anticipate, and the courage to respond to what iscoming into being. To ask and attend, what shape is being asking for, how can I help it be that? This is the way we are elevated by the process and in the process.

Itwas mostly sky there, flat farmland fields, low old houses...

It
was mostly sky there, flat farmland fields, low old houses made of stone, cows,
rows of alfalfa, a bull in the mud with an anvil head and watchful eyes. A
Clydesdale stomped on the farm nextdoor and reminded me of my wish to ride a
centaur. A miscommunication at the bar with the secret door in the bushes along
the path and instead of bringing the check, the bartender brought two more
beers. The beers were strong and made two towns away. At the end of a driveway on a
long flat road, a vending machine sold strawberries only. One cow had stitches
up her middle like a big blinking eye. And when it blinks open? We’re half
beast or more.

Come. Come closer. What now on this longest night? What now as...

Come. Come closer. What now on this longest night? What now as Holly
King surrenders and Oak King takes charge? What now as the wheel of the
year tips to its lightening side? What now in this season of sorrow?
What now as the solstice fire opens a doorway to our secret souls? The
soul is thicker in winter, stretched between mind and body, which are,
we kept getting told, by MDs and mystics alike, the same thing after
all.

What now? Now it’s now it’s now it’s now and we are burning.

Happy Solstice, everyone. The final part of my series on the Winter Solstice for the Paris Review.