shadow moons
An out-of-cycle interlude to explain the past few months and herald new lunar beginnings.
“Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away.”
— Louise Glück, The Denial of Death
The lunar new year begins in a new moon. This is when the moon is in shadow, hanging pendulous between Earth and the sun. Every year, it feels like there's a period where I, too, disappear from view. Such was the period from April to December last year.
From whose view? Mostly my own. Sometimes, this is a good thing — like being in a moment so intensely that there’s no sense of the overthinking, calculating self left; there is only sensation. An experience so forceful that all your constructs collapse and you're in the thick of reality, living, breathing, feeling — “near to the wild heart of life” — in this mode, I am fluid, uninhibited. I become the flame that Rainer Maria Rilke writes of, going to the limits of my longing, flaring up and making big shadows a god could move in.1 I travelled in this way for a few weeks and, after accidentally living like a hermit for years, started striking up conversations with strangers everyday. There was the woman who sold handmade soap at the market and told me about driving across the border to buy groceries for cheap and eat Shanghainese food. There was the ex-pilot who materialised on the shores of Lake Washington one morning, who schooled me on how to spot a bald eagle nest, blackberries, owls, and a large variety of greenish-yellowish slime, before disappearing into a bush to take a work call on his AirPods at precisely 9am. There was the taverna owner in the mountains of Rhodes who fed us dinner from 10pm until midnight and stayed up chatting until 3am, and his friend who housed us, twice, because she couldn’t in good conscience let us drive off after plying us with ouzo.
Other times, it’s harder. That sense of oneness can go sour.2 When I’m not able to move far enough away from myself to gain the proper perspective on where and who I am, my feet get stuck in the mud and I can’t pull myself up or out. There should be a proper distance between entities, for reflection implies a gap — between individual and other, but also the selves within the individual. The collapse in distance renders me unable to embody anything other than whatever emotion takes me at that point and I become the shadow rather than the flame. And in this shadow life, where I never quite feel opaque enough to reach out and grasp anything with confidence that it won’t slip away, I struggle to paint my existence as vividly as I know I could. I shrink from things; I enter the new year and wake up each morning, vaguely afraid of some unarticulated threat. A ghost who can only haunt herself.
And somehow, at the same time, even though I can’t see me, I feel like I’m trying to catch up to myself. The selves I used to be, and the selves they hoped we would be. If I am lost, it is only because I have strayed in some way. I must shadow who I was in order to make peace with her — and transcend her. Like a simple dance in an endless loop where we take the same steps over and over, hand in hand, never quite sure at any given point who is leading, who is following.
I feel like Peter Pan losing his shadow, except I’m the shadow, not Peter Pan, praying to be sewn to his shoes so we can be reunited, however imperfectly. Hoping to integrate into my self so we can pick up and keep going again, like a Jungian tale told upside down from the perspective of the villain. Except I’m not, I’m just trying my best, like a tired detective in a hardboiled noir — a shadow of myself, pursuing the killer who continues to elude my grasp even as I’m dodging my own chequered past. And as I stare into my shitty diner coffee, I tell myself I just want it to be over and I want to go home, knowing all the while I’d be nothing without the chase.
I’m getting old enough to retread the same ground, to remember how things used to be and to watch many of them come back around again. But what returns is not what went away. And I think this is how it should be, for remaking yourself anew without any regard for who you once were is a doomed enterprise. The trick, however, is not to run in circles, but to move forward by spiralling upwards.
But how can moving forward be a return, unless one is moving in a strict circle, the ending heading towards the beginning? It must be some kind of lunacy to continue starting each new year with the hope that this one will be different. Maybe this is the year the shadow gets absorbed, the year in which Sleeping Beauty wakes up and Pinocchio becomes a real boy. When I was in university, I took a paper on the history of Greek philosophy. It was tediously delivered and tepidly received, which was a shame considering that we were talking about people who thought everything was full of gods,3 but amongst the mountain of reading I did, one line — the only line — that stuck with me was the following excerpt from Aristotle’s De Caelo IV about the principles of motion ruling the heavenly bodies:
The motion of something to its proper place must be supposed to be similar to other sorts of generation and change.
My personal interpretation of it is truly not the one Aristotle intended, and it’s not even strictly correct both in relation to Aristotle’s actual point and, well, science. But what struck me about this translation is the image of a “proper place”, which might be one’s telos (to borrow another Aristotelian idea)4 — the final cause, the end of one’s endeavour — that one can only reach in the context of that circular motion, the journey to and through which is not simply a repetition of what has come before. Rather, like the image of the hero’s journey, typically represented as a circle dipping below the horizon into the underworld and back again, treading the path is “generation and change”. Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Coming back to the starting line, to each new moon, to each new year, one emerges a little more changed, headed a little more in the direction of the truer self — and I am:
Outro
Whenever I listen to Gang of Youths’ “The Deepest of Sighs, The Frankest of Shadows”, I think of tearing at midnight up and down the coast, windows down in the height of summer, barrelling into the shadows and vanquishing them with two headlights — however small, however vanishingly small.
See, I’m not so assured
Nor unusually strong or outstandingly brave
I’m more just fumbling around in the dark for the bulk of my day
When there’s weight that’s in youth and the sum of it’s small
I will stand in the darkness and laugh with my heel on its throat
“Go to the limits of your longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke is a poem that takes the perspective of God creating us and sending us out into this world, telling us to embody him and make shadows he can move in and, above all, to keep going. No feeling is final. I cling to this like a life raft.
John Vervaeke points out that the very processes in our brains that make us adaptively intelligent also make us vulnerable to self-deceptive and self-destructive behaviour. I can’t prove that this is at all relevant to my sense of losing sight of the self leading to an oscillation between feeling enlightened and feeling like a translucent spectre (preferably Victorian), but it’s definitely, to use a term of art, “the vibe”. Making a note here in case it’s worth returning to.
Thales of Miletus, extremely legit guy, first-ish Greek philosopher, one of the Seven Sages, etc.
Telos is ancient Greek for the ultimate end, purpose, or goal of an action or being. In Aristotelian thought, everything has a telos. Knives have a telos. The basil plant I am trying to keep alive has a telos, against all odds. The cockroaches I fling off my balcony have a telos and I really wish it was to not live in my building. Humans have a telos, so I should also have a telos even though most days it doesn’t feel like it.