Robert Crossley
Romancing the Moon: A Review of Christopher Cokinos’s, Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow.
Early in 1953, when I was seven years old, a Philco cabinet-model television was installed in our small living room. Its back bristled with vacuum tubes that might have glowed in Dr. Zarkov’s lab and the small screen on its front brought images of the puppets on “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie” and welcomed me to the peanut gallery for the antics of Dilly Dally and Flub-a-Dub, the cranky Phineas T. Bluster, and assorted other marionettes on “The Howdy Doody Show.” I also had occasional glimpses into the mysteries of the adult world, watching the new queen of England being crowned in London and wondering at Walter Winchell’s declaration that he would leave a pile of stinkweed under Stalin’s nose when he announced the Russian dictator’s death. And every weekday afternoon at four o’clock a large, sugary-voiced woman presided over “The Kate Smith Hour,” which always concluded with her singing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” On winter afternoons as the light faded outside the window of our rowhouse I was transfixed by the image of the moon on the old Philco. I don’t remember that I ever saw, or at least paid particular attention to, the actual satellite hanging in the Philadelphia sky. It was Kate Smith who gave me my first tawdry, second-hand lunar experience.
I take the liberty of introducing a book review with this reminiscence of a long-ago childhood in homage to Christopher Cokinos’ more sophisticated and thoughtful interweaving of memory and vision, of scientific observation and self-examination in Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow. Ever since his first book in 2000, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, an account of six extinct North American bird species, Cokinos has made himself the master of a form he calls the “personal chronicle.” His new book about the moon links the history of scientific discoveries about the world next door and its history in the human imagination with passages in the author’s life, including his childhood fascination with the night sky, his much later and more passionate engagement with telescopic study of the moon, and, most notably, his reconciliation with his long-estranged father who was in a lingeringly fatal struggle with cancer as Cokinos struggled with the writing of Still as Bright. When he studies the barren and lifeless moon—a premonition of the future of our own planet—as his father lay dying, “entropy becomes personal.”
Cokinos is alert to the durable human romance with the mythos of the moon as a locus for worship, power, superstition, and sentiment, a place about which stories have been told and from which metaphors have been fashioned. “’Once in a blue moon,’ we say. ‘Over the moon,’ we say. We see Moonlight and we speak of lunacy and lunatics. What is metaphor but secular alchemy?” Tuned to the rhythms and implications of language and committed to metaphorical invention, Cokinos schools his readers in the ways in which words shape and dictate understanding—and misunderstanding—about the fluctuating shapes, the disappearances and reappearances of the moon in the night and day sky. With the naked eye and, since Galileo, with the aid of increasingly powerful instruments, what can be discerned, named, and mapped has fueled studies of, obsessions over, and romances with our celestial neighbor. Cokinos writes a vibrant prose that animates scientific concepts and processes in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould and Loren Eiseley, and he gives the history of science the kind of literary coloring of the biologist J. B. S. Haldane who boasted in “How to Write a Popular Scientific Article” (1946) that his recent book on genetics included seven quotations from the Divine Comedy. Like those distinguished popularizers of science, Cokinos knows how to bridge the so-called two cultures, making lunar science speak to and mirror the needs and desires of humanity at large.
But for all his stylistic lyricism and his sympathetic inquiries into our lunar fantasies, Cokinos is devoted to what Kim Stanley Robinson in his great novels of the 1990s, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, called “haecceity”—the thisness of other worlds. There is a wonderful moment when Cokinos uses homely language to describe how it felt when he had the chance to touch a piece of polished rock brought back from one of the Apollo missions to the moon: “as cold and slick as a kitchen counter on a winter morning.” Language here domesticates the exotic while at the same time glomming onto the haecceity of this extraterrestrial object. “Though poetical and nostalgic in its way,” Cokinos writes, “my Moon is largely scientific, empirical, materialist.” Of all the early pre-telescopic visual images of the moon, it is da Vinci’s notebook drawings that Cokinos cherishes the most, because they are based strictly on observations without any religious overtones or symbolism: “the Moon freed of dogma, liberated from the obfuscation of desire. It is the first Moon of science and it is beautiful.”
There is romance in Still as Bright, but it is mostly a romance of facts, however rhapsodically stated. People in various cultural settings and over the span of many centuries have found shapes and patterns in what they could observe of the moon’s surface, and Cokinos is not immune to that kind of imaginative response, though he typically grounds flights of fancy in the factual. He cheerfully admits that poetic and scientific responses to the moon can coexist without contradiction. “When I see [through his ten-inch backyard telescope] the swept-back white stripes fanning out from the crater Proclus, I know they were created by ejecta from the impact that formed the crater, but I see a falcon’s bright wings.” He collects lunar charts and uses mnemonic devices to remember the scientific names for topographical features; he works at becoming a selenographer, learning the moon’s nomenclature “as though I were a Boy Scout earning a badge.” His aspiration is to be, in the words of a nineteenth-century author of popular astronomy, a “citizen scientist.”
Cokinos’ history of the moon often reads like an explorer’s journal, and he cautions himself not to repeat the errors of other explorers who let their mind’s eyes find on the moon exactly what they expected to find. But he never gives up meditative and visionary responses to his scientific observations. He sees “white rays of rock snaking across the surface like a Chihuly sculpture.” “If brutalist architecture had curves,” he decides, “it would look like the southern highlands.” The linear and curved fissures on a crater floor appear like “the hieroglyphic records of a shipwrecked giant.” He uses similes not to evade scientific idiom but to heighten it by making it personal. In the moon as seen through the eyepiece of his telescope Cokinos is always “by yoking place to experience, worlds to meanings, exploring the limits and promises of language.”
Still as Bright succeeds whenever the author measures what he is learning about the moon against what he is learning about himself. Only in chapters 8 and 9—on theories about the origin of the moon and on the mysteries of “transient lunar phenomena”—does Cokinos let his research overwhelm the narrative. There are few traces of autobiography in those chapters, heavy as they are with technical information. He seems here determined to produce every ounce of data from the voluminous articles and reports he has read. Too much information! The journalist’s dictum to “kill your darlings” might have been applied to these quotation-rich chapters where we miss the leavening of scientific history with personal memoir that is the author’s hallmark.
It should be said that when Cokinos inserts himself into the narrative he is no sentimentalist. This is particularly true once the narrative reaches the Space Age. When our species moves from exploring the moon’s surface through a telescope to walking on its surface during the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, the meanings of the moon become more problematic. When the author asks how we got there he comes up against the deeply troubling figure of Werner von Braun. Cokinos had been a schoolboy when Apollo 11 landed astronauts on the moon in the summer of 1969, and like nearly everyone else he was caught up in the dramatic tensions and thrills of the moment. But in his thirties, visiting a space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, he comes upon exhibits that give him an unwelcome but indelible insight: “The Space Age began in darkness.”
What he saw in Kansas were depictions of slave laborers being worked to death in the underground facility where von Braun was developing the V-2 rockets that would be fired on England in the waning months of World War II. Cokinos has the crucial and paradoxical epiphany that the “technological sublime” of 1969’s moon landing was founded on the horrors of Nazi culture, and von Braun had been only too willing to switch allegiances from Germany to the United States, from the creation of the V-2s to the creation of the Saturn Vs that would power the Apollo flights. And von Braun had stated that he had no moral scruples working for Hitler; he just wanted to make rockets. Years later when Cokinos went to Cape Canaveral to get a feel for the landscape in which the moon launches happened he was haunted by what he had learned in the Kansas museum. Nearly all that unsavory history had been scrubbed clean from the official guidebooks and monuments at the Cape. History had been sanitized to preserve a hagiography, but Cokinos knew what price had been paid for the glory of lunar exploration. “We fail the promise of the future if we exterminate the past it contains.”
Cokinos writes this book with the Apollo missions half a century behind us, but with the expectation that humanity will return to the moon in the very near future. The astronauts who formed the crews of the last three Apollo missions in 1971 and 1972 were well-trained in geology, and before they went to the moon they had learned how to read the stories that rocks can tell. But they didn’t know how to tell those stories. The rocks they collected on their moonwalks were rich with details about the moon’s composition and history. The transcripts of the astronauts’ descriptions of what they found are filled with expressions of awe. Everything they found was “beautiful” and “unreal” and “mind-boggling.” There are lots of “wows” and “Look at that.” But Cokinos wants the next generation of astronauts to be trained in poetry as well as geology, with “field training in iambic pentameter.” For him, this is not just a desirable addition to astronaut training but an imperative: we must find ways of speaking about what we see on other worlds that transcend the commonplace and the familiar. “One reason we’ve put the Earth in crisis,” he insists, “is because we use clichés.”
To write this book Cokinos has educated himself in the history of astronomy and in the scientific concepts and taxonomies of selenography and in the technological intricacies of voyaging to the moon. But he also brings the sensibilities of a humanist to this project. “Behind systems are the words that make them. What we say is who we are.” For that reason he wants to shed all those metaphors of conquest, of frontiers, of colonies for the exploration of and possible settlement that is to come on the moon. We need a new vocabulary of adventure. He cites Nikki Giovanni’s metaphors of quiltmaking and his own preference for images drawn from housekeeping and homemaking.
Late in his career H. G. Wells championed an idea he called “Cosmopolis,” a vision of global cooperation and governance that would leave nationalism and all its sins and inequities in the rear-view mirror. Cokinos’ hopeful and challenging vision at the conclusion of Still as Bright–an uncompromising vision of the necessity of compromising ambition with ethics–seems to approximate many of the ideals Wells was imagining in the 1930s. “We might create,” Cokinos wishes, “a commonwealth in which we finally face another great task of civilization: how to sustain a place between abundance and fairness where it is possible to live without regret. Nostalgia for an Edenic past and anticipation of a limitless future are equally false. To be alive—to dwell—is to compromise. Rather than bemoan this fact, we should beautify it.” And we might start that great work, that daunting work, on the moon.
Robert Crossley
Robert Crossley taught literature for 37 years at the University of Massachusetts Boston and served as Chair of the English Department. A two-time recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is the author of the biography Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future; a literary history, Imagining Mars; and most recently, Epic Ambitions in Modern Times: From Paradise Lost to the New Millennium. Recent essays have appeared in a variety of magazines including Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, Raritan, The Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, and Smithsonian Air and Space.