What if it doesn't
come back? Oh my God! What if the moon doesn't come back?
I'm out alone, in the dark; I'm in the grasslands of the foothills of
the mountains of home. And the moon has disappeared.
A big shadow grew across it until it just went away. Now I've waited
and waited, and creeping dread has come upon me:
What if the moon doesn't come back?
Something like that happened the other time I'd gone to the mountains
for a lunar eclipse, when Junius and I walked along the crest of the
Sandias. We'd found ourselves wonderfully, frightfully alone,
together. We could feel the animals were hiding from us; the trees
and big rocks we so knew well stayed put, of course. But there were
no other people we could hear or see or sense.
We turned our backs on the city glowing a mile down and a mile away
west. We kept our gaze up and to the east, and after awhile he and I
just threw our heads back to bay and howl, waiting with the other
beings around us, and calling out for the return of the light.
I'm surprised when that fear hits me, deep and strange, but it comes
to me almost as suddenly that this was the feeling thousands, millions
of others before me once had. This was the feeling back in those
times before our knowledge took the place of our fright, to leave only
wonder for some, and a passing interest for most, in this happenstance
of the night sky. But not fear, any more. We know better now.
So I decide to try to keep that sense of dread, to let it grow in me
as much as I could let it. I want, if only for a few moments, to be
more like those who'd come and gone before; I want to know as they
had known.
That, I think, is the quest of the historian, of the artist, of the
witness in me. I want to know myself and my own world, but I want to
know others and their worlds as well.
So last night I was surprised when I watched a silent film with
others, and the couple in front of me couldn't stop giggling and
commenting on what we watched together on the screen. It was THE
CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, almost 90 years old now, known as perhaps the
first feature-length horror movie.
I wasn't laughing, though. I'd unconsciously decided I wanted to be
frightened by this movie; I wanted to try to share the feelings and
reactions of those come and gone before me in the past 20th century.
Why is it most of us would rather stay in that place of "modern man"
with our presumed superiority of knowledge and sophistication? I find
it a gift that I can have that "benefit" and still allow myself,
if
only occasionally, to slip back into more atavistic or even primal
ways.
But then again, I go to movies for more than entertainment.
And then again, I believe that fear, like laughter, is a gift. [B]
