Under the Wolf Moon

"Looking a Wolf Moon Right in the Eye" tgw 2008
That Ol' Wolf Moon and the Righteous Blues
I went up on the roof with my camcorder. It was 5:45 am. Long before sunrise. The moonlight was thick and halo-glowing all around me as I stepped out onto the roof, swimming in dreamy moonlight as it was reflected off the black-canvas background of the sky. And the moonlight that followed the already reflected moonlight, that extrawave of moonlight, was reflected off the skyline of Midtown Manhattan that encircled me. And I was all alone in this conclave of moonlit skyscrapers, the Empire State Building god-awesomely lunging up and out at me from over me, wearing an orange-light-bulb-lit crown. And I went across the roof west and the whole expanse of Midtown Manhattan West opened up to me and there it was skidding low in the sky crossing across my southern view, low in the arcing up of the vast darkness lying out from me southwest--and I zoomed in on the orange-flaring Wolf Moon as it lummoxed Wolf Man creepily through the ice-frosty-smoke of the cold morning fog sweeping into town from off New York Harbor. And I filmed the Wolf Moon, the moon at its fullest. And I worshipped my god moon out there in that cold darkness, just the Wolf Man and the old Wolf Moon in harmony. The Wolf Moon, a bisexual moon really. But a virginal sight, too. The Moon is silver and sheds forth its silver tears to be buried in our Earth's rocks. I raise my big silver ring with the malachite rock center and I let it smile back at its fountainhead. And I can feel that Wolf Moon effect my electromagnetic waves, effecting my dance step, my wanting to howl, to sing along with that Ol' Wolf Moon a good happy blues--how it's so good to be alive and wintry frisky in this otherwise antipeaceful mess of a human world. The human world that is choking the life out of its Mother Earth; the human world that is intent on throttling the life out of itself because instinctually it doesn't feel at home with nature! Ocean Archeologists are now saying human life may have begun deep down in the trenches of that mysterious mountain range with peaks up to 15,000-feet high that runs like a quavering belt of massive rocky crags 20,000-feet below the ocean surface around the midsection of the Earth. They believe human life evolved upwards toward the sun from around vents way down there 20,000 feet in the pitch-dark deep, vents these Oceanologists call "Black Smokers"--around which are living creatures who are surviving without sunlight, making sunlight in their bodies out of toxic sulphurous gases thus making some evolutionists brave enough to say life doesn't come from sunlight (life doesn't need sunlight) at all but rather it can survive where it comes from 20,000-feet down in the pitch-dark dominions of the mountain range under the sea! Life, it seems, actually evolves from the hot waters that volcanically shoot up steamily from the Earth's magma core as it shoots its hot waters up out of these black smoking vents, these Black Smokers. Of course this symbolizes how we all emerged from the pits of Hell. Of course, Heaven was toward the distant sunlight that perhaps our earliest undersea eyeless (in Gaza--whewwww, how prophetic!!! Aldous! Aldous!) ancestors instinctively had an urge to sail heavenward toward a distant unseen light that must be up there in world darkness somewhere--that perhaps place of salvation from eternal darkness just safely above eternal Hell fires. What's faith after all? Faith that there is something there somewhere that makes sense, which is all salvation is, sense! Good sense! Not necessarily common sense, though we need that, too, as a foundation, but sense based on knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge that makes our brains like mouse traps. We read a good idea and we've got our brains set and ready to pounce and BAM! our brains don't let sensible knowledge get by them. Our brains rule our emotions....

Soon this vast city will really explode awake. The Wolf Moon currently is sailing off west down at the western tip end of West 31st Street, a straight shot right over the Hudson River into Hoboken, New Jersey, and out over the Jersey Hills, sinking Asiaward off over the Oranges to finally be burnt away by the force of the Star God Sun, the Moon to jump the brink of the horizon and be gone off into the blazing sunlight's takeover of the sky--it happens around 10:30 am. By then the noise will have drowned out any romantic thoughts that the Ol' Wolf Moon may have restored in me. The construction site nextdoor to my building is back to rattling the windows of the neighborhood with their little Caterpillar demon machine that cracks open the skulls of the elder concrete walls surrounding that site left from the 100-year-old structures they demolished there.

Glorious noise. And I'm back in my Admiral Stockdale fuck-hope-there's-only-faith-in-yourself mode. I can take any mental or physical punishment in this state. Like, our great commander in chief, G.W. "Mission Accomplished" Bush, said at that one brave moment when he was trying to scare the shit out of us by saying Al Queda had the capability of attacking New York City with nuclear weapons using drone aircraft piloted over here by remote control, the evil invention of that military genius Saddam Hussein--the military mastermind who locked horns with his Persian enemy, Iran, for 12 years, at what a cost to life and limb, but still this military genius saved enough to get his drone airforce in invincible shape to rain nuclear terror over the USA? (I facetiously wonder who supplied Saddam Hussein with his weapons during that long war he had with those wily Persians? Hummmm. Tough question, right?) So, like G.W. "I'm Am Not a War Criminal" Bush said about that Al Queda-Iraq drone air attack I can say about the noise attack I'm fixing to have to suffer the day long through, "BRING IT ON"--you goddam right, bring it on!

I fade gently off myself off West following in reverie that Ol' Wolf Moon, listening to Roy Harris's Symphony #6, as I do--that's the symphony they call his "Folk Song Symphony" because Roy has filled it full of American folk songs--I just heard "Don't Bury Me on the Lone Prairie" in it--a big chorus and full ork version that rose to lumbering tumbleweed-rolling power against the winds of destruction, the winds that wipe out anything in their way when it's madly wild and insane enough, unless human beings learn how to control it, which they never have, by planting hedge rows and then the right kind of crops, doing the right kind of farming, which they didn't do, and doing the right kind of ranching, also which they didn't do, of course, and of course, and of course. So, they had what they called a "Dust Bowl" out on the Lone Prairie back right after the Great Depression had made a joke of hope, back in time catching my mother and father of guard since they had been Jazz Age kids, he a young stud and she a flapper girl and they were partiers and gay blades--then the Great Depression put an end to that. My dad had to trade his tennis whites and silk shirts in for the blue workshirt and dark blue Levis of a working-class man; and my mother had to put her short skirts away in mothballs and change into her white uniform, put a hairnet over her bobbed hair, put on a pair of flat white workshoes, and go to work at a creamery wrapping sticks of butter at a penny a stick. So, NO, don't bury me on that Lone Prairie, though the only piece of property I own right now is my plot in a certain old cemetery in that town that was once my home, my native land, my "personal country," as my brother called it in one of his books on the Lone Prairie. My brother did want to be buried on the Lone Prairie, and he is buried on one of the loneliest parts of the Lone Prairie, on a rock bluff jutting out over that Lone Prairie, which spreads for 100s of miles out before that rock bluff like an ocean of the driest of bone-dry lands. A vista that will take a living person's breath away, but, I'm sure, is being thoroughly enjoyed by my brother's ghost, which I'm sure wanders all over that vast ancient ranch on which he's buried.

I tire. I'm tumbleweed rolling on off into the day.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

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