Red Clay Brought Forth

My dog likes looking at the sky with me, but he doesn’t like doing it quietly.

As I write this, last night, it’s the blood moon, a lunar eclipse. As I write this, last night, the full moon is losing itself to the shadow of the Earth. We’re sitting in chairs in the backyard at midnight, and my dog is pacing, aware that something odd is happening in the sky. He’s protecting us; he’s on duty. He has as hard of a time not-working as I do.

This afternoon, I wrote most of an essay for you about criminality, about surveillance. I might even finish it soon, but last night as I write this, I came out to let my dog pee and saw our mother the moon turning amber. I’d rather write about her.

Everything the moon does, she does less dramatically than the sun. The sun gives us heat and light and life; the moon gives us the tides. The sun controls almost everything, but the moon provides an ebb and flow to the waters and the patient white noise that helps us sleep. The sun burns any who dare to gaze upon it, even when the moon cuts across its face, but you can look right at the lunar eclipse. You can look right at a blood moon; you can see her pale face washed in ochre.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen total solar eclipses twice in my life and I’ve never felt half so much like I was looking upon the face of god. If I could, I would become a chaser. I would look upon the burning ring of totality every year. I would stare at god.

The moon is something else. If the sun is a god, the moon is the mirror that lets us see it.

My dog, the one who wants to watch the moon last night as I write this and wag his tail, who wants to bark at midnight, overwhelmed by the strangeness of the sky… I named him Rintrah after a character from William Blake’s mythology (or theology, I suppose). Rintrah is the personification of the just rage of the prophet, and he’ll run through the yard, scanning the sky like the elder gods might ride down from the heavens to consume us and only his unbroken attention can hold them at bay.

For all I know, he’s right.

More likely, he was just bred to keep birds of prey away from chickens, and it has strange knock-on effects in an era of planes, of satellites, of fucking Starlink.

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air,
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Once meek, and in a perilous path
The just man kept his course along
The Vale of Death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted,
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth

I can’t pretend like I understand everything that William Blake means in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I tend to like my writing simpler, more to the point; yet here I am turning back to this poem on a regular basis.

Here I am, watching the white moon turn red, thinking how red clay is brought forth on bleached bones, on how death brings us life.

The moon turns red during the eclipse for the same reason sunset is red: the light of the sun passes through the atmosphere sideways. The blood moon is our own sunset projected something like 239,000 miles through space.

In a lot of the media I’ve consumed, you cannot look upon the face of a god and escape unscathed. You might die, you might go mad, you might go blind.

This potential downside of meeting the raw truth of the universe isn’t something we can easily test for ourselves, of course. You’d have to find a god to look upon one, and if we knew where to find one of those, our whole society would look a hell of a lot different.

But of course gods cannot be seen. Divinity (with whatever metaphor you prefer for it—Truth, the Universe, God, gods, the Infinite, you’ve got your pick) is exactly the thing that you cannot see, the thing that you cannot know except through faith. Divinty is exactly the thing that is too much for our own comprehension. It’s like thinking about death. We will never know what it entails, yet we must patiently spend our lives preparing to meet it.

We can only see divinity where it is not. We can only see where it has left its mark. The only way to gaze upon the divine is to mark its influence and its absence. Like a Star Trek crew looking for a cloaked bird of prey, we look for the shimmer in the stars. Like a hunter following quarry, we look for tracks.

That is to say, we don’t look at the light, we look at its reflection.

We don’t look at the sun. We look at the moon.

Or bark at it, I suppose.