The Moon: lovely to look at but ineffective
Still, today - even in Parliament - there are people who subscribe in all seriousness to the so-called lunar effect. In other words, they believe there's a magical correlation between the Moon and human biology and behaviour. As above - so below, as those with a Hermetic leaning like to say ...
However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.
Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).
So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.
If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".
Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:
"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."
However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.
Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).
So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.
If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".
Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:
"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."
Thus, according to Lawrence, it's the the angry Moon which is responsible for young lovers committing suicide; "they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the Moon is against them: the Moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the Moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication."
To be fair, even Lawrence knows that this sounds like nonsense. He insists, however, that's because we're idiots. If only we opened ourselves up once more to the cosmos, then we'd understand that the Moon is a not just a dead lump of rock with an iron core, but a "globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy" and that there exists "an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the Moon".
Break this relationship, says Lawrence - though I'm not sure how one might do so, anymore than one might counteract the pull of gravity simply by refusing to acknowledge its reality - and the Moon will have her revenge, like a cruel mistress.
The problem is that whilst Lawrence's lunacy sounds harmless enough, Quentin Meillassoux has shown how such correlationism has crept into and corrupted all post-Kantian philosophy making objects conform to mind - something, ironically, that Lawrence loathes and fights against elsewhere in his work.
Ultimately, it's not a question of wanting to disconnect or come out of touch with the universe; rather, it's about acknowledging the latter exists without us ...
See:
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
D. H. Lawrence Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008).
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990).
Even if Dr Alexander's eloquently damning polemic were not provocation for provocation's sake, I'd still personally be darkly delighted to count myself among the lunatic fringe apparently peopled by Lawrence, Paglia, unspecified poets, auteurs and madmen/women. They're the kind of myth-making mavericks I'd certainly want to invite to my dinner parties. Who, hypocrite reader, would you rather have a look at the stars with - Sylvia Plath (who, according to her mother Aurelia, told the latter 'the moon was a fat woman once' at the age of three) or Roger Scruton? In a real sense, of course, we're all moon children, parasitic as we are on the light of the sun.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, the 'hard science' (in this most mercifully unphallic of domains) is in any case equivocal at the very least. For example, a Rhode Island Hospital study on cardiological clinical outcomes published in the wonderfully titled Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery journal concluded that both post-clinical death and hospital stays after heart surgery (especially to correct 'acute aortic dissection') tended to be 'greatly reduced' during the moon's waning cycle, according to Dr Frank Selke. If your bag is more forensic psychology/criminality, an article that appeared in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) by Thakur and Sharma (1984) reported on a significantly enhanced level of crime on Full Moon days in three towns, leading the authors to hypothesise that 'human tidal waves' caused by the gravitational force of the moon was a plausible explanatory factor. Unfortunately, when soul is dissevered from body (or science from myth), you pays your money and takes your choice – the carcinogenic horror of solar brightness or the Sea of Tranquillity.
It clearly makes far more intuitive sense to turn the issue on its head - if, as we know, the moon's gravity can move something as vast as an ocean, it would be perverse to fantasise it could have no effect on our small and frangible human bodies. But, more philosophically, there's also something relentlessly questionable about the tired binary opposition of 'open' and 'closed' bodies of water asserted by Dr Alexander. As Nick Land brilliantly argued at Warwick University in the 1990s, human bodies are only apparently separate (or 'closed') structures at a certain level of magnification. The body is, in reality, continuously semi-open (via our mouths, ears, nasal cavities, penis holes, vulvas, and anuses), but also the multi million pores that populate the body's main organ: the skin. Were it not, love, disease and communication itself would all be impossible, and we'd all be living like autists, psychotics and sad, solitary sacks. At a libidinal/material, and hence psychic level, and as the Buddhists have understood for millennia, there are probably no such things as bodies. Humanity is one collective cosmic contagion and we are as much smitten and written by moonbeams, sunspots and stardust, as acne, alcohol and the derivative cult of rationality. (Thank Hecate for that!)
PS Readers more sympathetically disposed to the moon-faced minority are recommended to check out Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle's iconic work on lunacy, femininity and menses, The Wise Wound (Marion Boyars Publishers, reprinted 2005).
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