Landing On a Dream

It is a coin, a mirror, a plate, a pearl. For the ancient Greeks, it was the goddess Selene. For Emily Dickinson, it was “a Chin of Gold”; for E.E. Cummings, “a fragment of angry candy”; for Nazik Al-Malaika, a pool or an island or a basket of jasmine. Borges suggested that, for Shakespeare, it was less the thing itself than the English word for it, that lingering syllable. Apocryphally, it’s the image Li Bai tried to grasp as he fell drunk into a river and drowned. Mina Loy’s “silver Lucifer / serves / cocaine in cornucopia” somewhere in its valleys, and Ariosto’s knight Astolfo finds there everything ever lost on Earth. Beneath it, Issa’s snail crawls, Coleridge’s icicles quietly shine, and Margaret Wise Brown’s bunny says “Goodnight.”

It glides through the spells and verses of every language. It obsessed Sylvia Plath, who said it was her mother. The Owl and the Pussy-Cat danced by the light of it on their honeymoon—and which anonymous poet coined that word?

Fifty years ago, humans flew up and stood on it.

***

Humans took their worries to the moon. Not just fears for the safety of the crew but also for the sanctity of our myths. Wasn’t Apollo 11 going where only gods such as Apollo had gone before? In a poem published in 1963, as NASA’s lunar program was gearing up, May Swenson wrestled with the idea that the moon—the symbol of night, the theater of dreams—might soon become sadly tangible:

Naked to the earth-beam we will be,
who have arrived to map an apparition,
who walk upon the forehead of a myth.
Can flesh rub with symbol? If our ball
be iron, and not light, our earliest wish
eclipses. Dare we land upon a dream?

This last question can be parsed in two ways: Dare we land upon a dream and sully it with our flaws? Or dare we land upon a dream and thus see its enchanted light turn into ordinary soil beneath our feet?

On the second count, especially, Swenson had reason to worry. Preliminary reports did not indicate a dreamscape. Astronaut Bill Anders, who flew in lunar orbit on Apollo 8, later recalled

After two revolutions of the moon, it became clear that it was kind of boring. On Earth, you have rivers, oceans, continents, highlands and mountains, but the moon looks like one beat-up, sand-blasted ball with hole upon hole. I use the un-poetic description “dirty beach sand”—you can imagine the poets give me hell.

***

On July 21, 1969, the morning after the first moonwalk, the front page of the New York Times featured news coverage of the landing and a poem about the landing. The latter was by Archibald MacLeish, who was working under outrageous pressure. After all the great moon poems in the history of civilization, imagine being assigned to write the moon poem! Now imagine getting that assignment with only days to spare. According to a 1989 reminiscence by Times editor A.M. Rosenthal, that’s exactly how things played out. When Apollo 11 lifted off, Rosenthal’s staff decided to prepare something suitably lofty: “[W]hat the front page of The Times would need when the men landed was a poem.”

The first poet they called turned down the commission. (Rosenthal doesn’t say who it was.) Their next choice was MacLeish, a three-time Pulitzer winner who fulfilled the request promptly. It’s striking enough that a major newsroom reached for poetry in that moment; it’s downright incredible that they kept the poor poet on standby, like some sweating NASA staffer:

The poem was written on the assumption that the astronauts themselves had touched the moon. But the moon walk was taking place at about deadline time. Suppose it was delayed. We would need a poem rewrite, fast.
 
Henry R. Lieberman, then director of science news, was asked to call Mr. MacLeish and tell him to stand by to update the moon poem. After the moon walk, Mr. MacLeish was informed he could stand down; the poem was running in all editions.

The poem, titled “Voyage to the Moon,” is far from MacLeish’s best, but given the harried circumstances, it could have been worse. It gestures toward the history of the moon as an image of “unattainable” desire. It quotes two death-haunted snippets of Shakespeare: “the visiting moon” (from Cleopatra’s speech over Antony’s body) and “the glimpses of the moon” (from Hamlet’s first speech to his father’s ghost). And it pulls off a neat reversal: it ends with the astronauts’ gazing back up at Earth, the new “unattainable,” the new source of “longing,” the figurative new “moon.” Unlike the grieving Cleopatra, who sighs that “there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon,” MacLeish suggests that, from this dramatic new angle, all of Earth is remarkable again:

We stand here in the dusk, the cold, the silence . . .
 
and here, as at the first of time, we lift our heads.
Over us, more beautiful than the moon, a
moon, a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives—perhaps
a meaning to us . . .

MacLeish may have been thinking here of the famous Earthrise photo by Anders, the astronaut who called the moon “boring” but gushed about home: “Here was this gorgeous, colorful, beautiful planet of ours coming up over this ugly lunar horizon.” Still, MacLeish’s description is at least partly the product of imagination. His is the last notable moon poem written without benefit of on-the-ground documentation: film, photos, testimonials that finally turned the myth into a place.

***

The first two onsite witnesses disagreed about what the moon was like. Shortly after venturing out, Neil Armstrong radioed his assessment: “It has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States. It’s different, but it’s very pretty out here.”

When he reached the surface 19 minutes after Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin made his famous remark about “magnificent desolation.” It’s a fine phrase, even a poetic one, but not uplifting. He has repeated versions of it many times since, including in a 2013 interview in which he said, “Neil had an optimistic way of using the word beautiful. But when I looked out, it wasn’t beautiful. It was desolate—totally lifeless.”

What had long served, from a distance, as a symbol of mutability (Romeo and Juliet: “O, swear not by the Moon, th’inconstant moon”; Percy Shelley: “And ever changing, like a joyless eye / That finds no object worth its constancy”) turned out to be, up close, a wasteland of stasis. “No oxygen, no life,” Aldrin recalled in 2016, “just the lunar surface that hasn’t changed for thousands of years—and the blackness of the sky. It was the most desolate thing I could ever think of.” He clarified: the achievement of being there was magnificent; the place itself was bleak as hell.

Aldrin has compared the moon’s glaring soil to “sunlit snow.” Because the moon is smaller than Earth, one can see “the horizon clearly curving away,” as Aldrin noted. That is, you have no illusion of standing on a flat, limitless plane. You know you’re on a small ball surrounded by cavernous darkness. You might see the one blue marble over the horizon, but “there’s no way you can see stars” because of the surface glare. He has called these effects disorienting.

Fifty years ago, he stood, disoriented, in the waterless Sea of Tranquility, on an inanimate object that he perceived as an object, dwarfed by galactic space. He has said he “was impressed.” But in his stoic way, he also seems to have gotten the willies.

***

The moon is a screen for human projections: wishes, longings, fears. To poets, that’s the whole point of the thing. Any poetry lover could assemble a catalog like the one that begins this essay: a private “lunar anthology” that would pinpoint its arranger geographically, temporally, culturally, psychologically.

As it happens, I’m drafting this essay while studying and teaching poetry at the University of Cincinnati. This is where Armstrong taught engineering after leaving NASA in 1971. It’s where he lived for a while as a semi-recluse, dodging media requests. Lately, whenever I glance at the night sky, it occurs to me that the first person to go to the moon wanted, afterward, to be exactly where I am.

***

Armstrong delivered a bit of prose poetry when he planted his famous footprint. Like most poetry, it didn’t come out as intended. “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

That missing word—that perfect slip-up! I’ve loved this part of the story since I was a kid. For years, Armstrong denied that he left out the a, that single, crucial indefinite article. He insisted the transmission had been garbled, and NASA dutifully backed up their hero. Finally, in the 1980s, the hero reportedly admitted, “Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the moon, didn’t I?”

Armstrong landed on an alien world and did the most human thing possible: he screwed up. But I’ve always wondered if his slip was Freudian. Did he confess what he truly felt? Did he look out at that abrupt horizon, that gargantuan void, and feel that his species—“man”—was really a puny thing taking a puny step? (Of course, no astronaut would say man or mankind now. The gendered terms sound as dated as the act of planting a flag. Sometimes a misstep in a poem signals a flaw in the conception.)

In her essay “Poetry and the Moon,” Mary Ruefle writes that Armstrong later said of his lunar footprints, “I hope somebody goes up there someday and cleans them up.”

***

We took our politics to the moon. We took our problems.

Ruefle’s essay quotes various writers’ almost universally grim responses to the first moonwalk. Her main source is fellow poet Edward Lense, who asserts that, in “the public consensus of both poets and non-poets during the summer of 1969,” Apollo 11 had “ruin[ed] the moon as an image for poetry.” (I think of Keats grumbling that Isaac Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours.”)

Ruefle and Lense cite jaded lines by Robert Lowell and others, but where Lense views these as evidence that poets have sealed themselves in darkness—the darkness of anti-rationalism, technophobia, and cultural nostalgia—Ruefle serenely counters that they’ve adjusted perfectly well, thank you. “I don’t think the moon has lost any of her presence.”

Without choosing sides between Ruefle or Lense, I want to add to their gallery of citations because the literary backlash against the Apollo missions was revealing on several fronts. It wasn’t always about mourning a myth; often it was about spotlighting earthly concerns from which the “space race” seemed remote. The year after the first landing, spoken-word legend Gil Scott-Heron released his debut album, which featured the track “Whitey on the Moon”:

A rat done bit my sister Nell
With Whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And Whitey’s on the moon
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But Whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While Whitey’s on the moon

Nikki Giovanni sounded a variation on this theme in 1972, in a foreword to the poetry anthology Black Spirits: “People are going to the moon and it’s a good joke, but wouldn’t it be cool if some little Black country in the heart of Mother Africa could send some Black man up there?”

This line of criticism had deep roots in the prior decade. In Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (2017), Neil M. Maher recounts that, during the mid-1960s, Black Americans “held sit-ins, marches, boycotts and demonstrations against such space technology, along with its high price tag, for distracting the nation from poverty and from a variety of environmental problems affecting inner cities.” Malcolm X derided the “white man’s” space program in his autobiography, and Martin Luther King Jr. caustically told Congress in 1966, “[I]n a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon,with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slums on earth with their intensified congestion, decay, and turbulence.” Ralph Abernathy, King’s collaborator and colleague, held a widely covered protest at Cape Canaveral (then known as Cape Kennedy) just before the Apollo 11 launch.

In other words, NASA-wary poets faulted the government for spending more on symbolism than on citizens. They were less interested in Cold War dominance than in the War on Poverty that President Johnson promised in 1964—and that James Baldwin pronounced a sham four years later. (Esquire: “How would you improve it?” Baldwin: “By beginning it.”) They didn’t want night’s “throne” to become, as Robert Hayden put it in “Full Moon” (1962), an “arms base” or “the white hope of communications men.” These poets were breathing their political atmosphere, drawing on the civil rights, feminist, and anti-war struggles that now seem—to many children and grandchildren of Aquarius—the great American achievement of the 1960s.

That’s not to say every poet got everything right. For W.H. Auden, the first moonwalk was a chance to mock conventional masculinity, but he didn’t quite jettison cliché himself. In “Moon Landing,” from 1969, he writes:

It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
    it would not have occurred to women
    to think worth while, made possible only

 

 

because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
    hurrah the deed, although the motives
    that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.

 

It’s easy, 50 years on, to see the reductiveness of crediting “our sex” and the left-handedness of the compliment to “women” in general. The public now knows more about the women once written out of the Apollo story, from mathematician Katherine Johnson (of Hidden Figures fame) to computer scientist Margaret Hamilton to aspiring female astronauts effectively barred from flights. This was the era in which John Glenn—for whose mission Johnson calculated trajectories—deemed it natural that “the men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes.” Auden’s poem tries to rise above that era but doesn’t achieve escape velocity.

However, it does suggest a way to deal with the loss of moon-myth: denial. Or, rather, compartmentalization. Auden credits the landing to science, the military, “the von Brauns and their ilk,” and the “apparatniks” who make “the usual squalid mess called History.” The moon itself—its power, its meaning—he reserves for artists. Auden acknowledges the factual event on the literal rock, but he adds that “my Moon” is still “Unsmudged, thank God.”

***

We took our stuff to the moon, and we left it there.

Items Apollo 11 discarded on the surface: hammer, tongs, blanket, overshoes, tripod, camera, lifeline, food bags, human waste bags, movie magazines, armrests, boots. Aldrin left a mission patch in honor of the Apollo 1 crew, who had died in a launch test in 1967. Legend has it that Armstrong left a bracelet in honor of his daughter, Karen, who had died of a brain tumor at age two.

They left a silicon disc etched with goodwill messages from world leaders, including Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet-president of Senegal—arguably the first major literary figure ever to send a piece of writing to the heavens.

They also left a plaque inscribed with their names and that of Richard Nixon, a gold replica of an olive branch, and a flag that toppled in the liftoff blast.

***

“Witness the last time we were one” declares the recent Apollo 11 documentary. John F. Kennedy’s 1961 call to national action may have galvanized the moon missions, but the landings themselves were bounded by the Nixon era. The first occurred during Nixon’s freshman year in office and the last during the year of the Watergate break-in.

What did the American flag mean to “mankind” in 1969? The world had just witnessed the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, race riots in cities across the US, police brutality at the Democratic Convention in Chicago: the whole cultural breakdown of 1968 on top of years of carnage in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the new American president was a bigot and a criminal. He had won election in part by sabotaging Washington-Hanoi peace talks, an act his predecessor privately called treason. Behind the scenes, he fumed about Mỹ Lai: not the massacre but the publicity surrounding it, which he blamed on Jewish reporters.

A few weeks after Armstrong and Aldrin raised their flag, Jimi Hendrix played his psychedelic, drippingly sarcastic “Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock.

If the flag survived the rocket blast, it must have bleached and crumbled in the sun.

***

In his memoir Carrying the Fire (1974), the third Apollo 11 crewman, Michael Collins, recalls the flight away from what he wonderfully calls the “lurain”—the terrain of the moon.

[The moon] seems like a cheery place, not the scary one I first saw two days ago, but cheerier yet is the notion that we are leaving it. I have absolutely no desire to come back.

He didn’t go back; since 1972, no one has. Despite his comment above, Collins finds this anticlimax disheartening:

The pity of it is that so far the view from 100,000 miles has been the exclusive property of a handful of test pilots, rather than the world leaders who need this new perspective, or the poets who might communicate it to them.

“This new perspective,” Collins suggests, includes humble gratitude for planet Earth and sober recognition of its fragility. He quotes T.S. Eliot’s lines from Four Quartets about returning home to “know the place for the first time.” The adventure itself, though, he frames as more prose than poetry, more intense technical challenge than revelation. Here’s how he describes his thoughts after an in-flight chat with Nixon:

My God, I never thought of all this bringing peace and tranquillity to anyone. As far as I am concerned, this voyage is fraught with hazards ... and that is about as far as I have gotten in my thinking. Peace and tranquillity indeed; I wish I had time to digest that, and decide in my own mind whether it’s true or not; in the meantime, I am proprietor of this orbiting men’s room and there are other demands on my time.

Still, he enthuses about some aspects of the journey, including his solo flight over the dark side of the moon:

If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side ... and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully—not as fear or loneliness—but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation.

His account—with its mix of solitude, joy, and wonder—captures as well as any 20th-century document what Romantic poets used to call the sublime. It reminds me of young Wordsworth roaming his lakes and groves and hillsides (“the surface of the universal earth”), except that grown-up Wordsworth, even at the height of nostalgia, acknowledged that fear was part of the thrill.

***

We took time to the moon: recorded, human time. The first Apollo plaque announced

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
July 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

The Gregorian calendar makes time seem cozy. Its reference point (anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord”) is a fairly recent, if much debated, earthly event. But the moon, for all we know, experienced no major events between its formation and our arrival. If NASA had used a lunar-centric dating system, “A.F.” (after formation),” the plaque might have read

July 4500000000, A.F.

That dizzying line of zeroes suits a place with no history beyond the geologic.

But lunar history is growing more eventful. This year, China’s space agency became the first to land a craft on the far side. The Japanese government has partnered with Toyota to land a lunar vehicle by the end of the next decade. NASA has vowed to send an empty capsule around the moon next year—a prelude to crewed landings—even as US poverty rates soar. Meanwhile, a new space race has ignited among billionaires hoping to sell private flights. One company plans to take fashion and media mogul Yusaku Maezawa for a spin in lunar orbit, accompanied by artists from around the world. Michael Collins may yet get his wish about poets flying up to see the view.

Recently an Israeli team launched a craft containing a digital archive of 30 million pages, including children’s drawings and the whole of Wikipedia. The lander crashed on impact, but a second attempt is already in the works. Soon the moon will have more culture than Earth did for nearly all its history.

***

Fifty years ago, humans flew up and stood on the moon. They sought glory or peace or knowledge or a mix of all three. What they found, Ruefle suggests, is “a vision,” albeit one with trace elements of disillusion.

They took the flag of a nation to a world without tribes or sects. They landed in one of Robert Frost’s “desert places.” They stepped out in the hush.

The glare was disorienting. The camera was rolling. Armstrong muffed his line. They were awkward but valiant players, shadows in the theater of dreams.

In the “Event of Moon Disaster,” as the quietly shelved Nixon speech had it, they were to be eulogized as sailors lost at sea—commended to “the deepest of the deep.” But they stood safe. Found their moon legs.

They bent to collect rocks: a childlike, serious task. Their successors arrived armed with nervous levity—golf balls to hit, carts to drive around, songs to sing—but Neil and Buzz largely stuck to business and stuck close to the craft. Back home, as government employees, they filled out travel voucher reimbursement claims (Aldrin’s was $33.31) and customs forms for the rocks.

The politics shifted. Public interest waned. “Mankind” took a sheepish step back, closed the hatch, retreated. For a time, the moon seemed a period artifact, like bell-bottoms.

Now a new period, a new phase, begins. Our projection will soon be literal: we’ll launch our whole identity as a species into those cratered valleys. We’ll send envoys from around the globe, send archives that could help us—in the event of Earth disaster—recover everything we’ve lost. We’ll litter the lurain till it no longer reminds us of death.

We will fly up again, land on the dream again, reshape its contours. But nothing can erase that first arrival, when three small sailors took human awe and boredom and dread, our bureaucracy and biases and bodily functions, to a land that had no feature we could see ourselves in—a world of “beach sand” under darkness relieved only by the distant light of home. If they went seeking poetry, they found it.