day 5: feb 23
Day Five
February 23, 2023
seven days dreaming the dark of a new moon
From director Todd Douglas Miller (Dinosaur 13) comes a cinematic event fifty years in the making. Crafted from a newly discovered trove of 65mm footage, and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, Apollo 11 takes us straight to the heart of NASA’s most celebrated mission—the one that first put men on the moon, and forever made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin into household names. Immersed in the perspectives of the astronauts, the team in Mission Control, and the millions of spectators on the ground, we vividly experience those momentous days and hours in 1969 when humankind took a giant leap into the future.Show less
day five, february 23, 2023
Watching the film, Apollo 11 culled together from footage - not one talking head in the whole story.
The adventure, the voyage out out out. edited together with such a sense of rhythm, pacing.
Just men on the moon.
struck by the lack of women except as wives and children.
curiously thought of these lines that I wrote last year that I feel mark the beginning of a new play. They go:
why do europeans kill indians
why did they come from so far away just to end up killing their curiosity?
but I also love the idea of journey, far away, a grand adventure
that they came and the journey over the sea
kidnapped
kidnapped with only what I wore that day
and the days of muscles aching
with work and the smell of salt
brine
and the endless battering wind
and the sea inside
the boats outside
I read kidnapped
as the girl i once was
and i always wanted to go off to sea
i still do…
under the crescent moon which has appeared from the darkness, under two very bright stars below the moon whose names I am guessing are jupiter and mars, with news that arrived in a letter today that says I have been given leave to study one more year in Spain, under the moon and the stars, with the memory of the letter received, I walked back home after flamenco class, feeling all the stories unraveling on a page and grateful for my health and ability to tell them. This fifth day of writing the dark of the new moon. Something happens when you give yourself the freedom to discover.
as an artist, as a person, I want to be just myself, inexplicable especially to myself.
How it matters to give every moment its due, i mean it matters to be, to dissolve into the flow, and the mystery. Oh that. That’s what came as well after watching the film.
How can all the universe exist for one species on one planet, a species that does not know the darkness from which they come and into which they go?
Imagine the silence of the expanse, the stillness of the fine grained sand on the moon, the footsteps that not one speck of wind will erase. nothing moves on the moon except the men when they land and name rocks after their wives and speak speeches written for them.
But I herald the first step. I am humbled at the whole enterprise. I marvel at the men who made it possible. I was with them every step of the way. Their matter of factness, their jokes, their family feeling…all the science, the math that went into the journey, the fire, the metal, the machines docking and undocking. how everything agreed with each other, how everyone agreed.
night sky, new moon, stars I cannot name but are bright and clear even with the lights of the city,
and the promise of all the stories unraveling, unspooling, the alchemy of words, putting words to a page, creating.
…returning to Urusla Le Guin and the Language of the Night…
“We like to think that we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
PS: There’ll be a lag time of a few hours between your posting and the words appearing in the comments.
