Chart the Moon
| Phase 1: New Moon |
Phase 2: Waxing Crescent. |
Phase 3: First Quarter Half Moon. |
Phase 4: Waxing Gibbous. |
Phase 5: Full Moon. |
Phase 6: Waning Gibbous. |
Phase 7: Last Quarter Half Moon. |
Phase 8: Waning Crescent. |
Phase 0: No Moon |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I complain to my husband about the difficulty of writing this, how I'm unable to identify the ritual my mother and I perform whenever we argue. How I can't ever seem to nail down specifics. How only the feeling of being angry, of being guilty, stays withme. He asks, "Have you talked to your mom about it?" I reply, "No. She would would just say something like, 'Did I abuse you as a child? Was I a bad mother?'" "It sounds like you already know the ritual," he replied. | I sit down and light a candle to write this. I draw a card from the tarot deck. I turn on classical music and I try to let things flow through me. Eight of Cups: abandonment. I know this just from the picture, before I look up the meaning. I decide to write inside the phases of the moon, although it's not all that domestic, the moon. I begin to write in the space titled: "Phase 5: Full Moon." I stop. I look up the meaning of the card: abandonment. | I try to write ritually but all that occurs is a jumping about. I'm uncomfortable in this space, placed in the center column. I jump out. | For weeks I've been talking to Wes about memory storage for computers, trying to understand how the brain works by trying to understand those machines. They are modeled after us, a simplified version, Wes once said, "Or—maybe… less elegant." He explains that sometimes there are hidden files in the nonvolatile memory; that sometimes we need a key. And sometimes there's a backdoor. And someone like a hacker would try to exploit the algorithm that encrypts the data, because there are too many possibilities to go through all the permutations. | You stand with your back to me, the moon at your face. Your face is shadowed; I can make out a blotted profile, but no emotion. Are you leaving me behind, mom? Now that I am grown, are we done arguing? Or is that me out there, face shadowed, not looking back, and leaving you? | I am trying my own permutations now, trying to find my own key, or the backdoor. 1's and 0's in a number of possibilities. "But there needs to be a seed," Wes says. "Even if the pattern is random, it's still a pattern, and you still have to give it something to start with, the first input into your number generator algorithm," he says. "If you know what the seeding was, you can build a backdoor." I'm searching for seeds, something to start with. I wonder what it means that nothing grew out of my buried manuscript except for worms. | I move to this section next because it's also in the center and I'm uncomfortable here, so I want to get it over with. I think it's easier as an immigrant's daughter to view from the outside. To write on the edges. Being in the center feels fake. Nothing revolves around me, and nothing should be anchored by me either. | I try my hand at waning. I like the idea of waning. Of the sliver that's left, that will disappear soon. The energy that is fading, almost faded, almost gone into darkness. It will be a few more weeks before the moon looks like this again. The shadow across its face, registering empty cups, strewn here and there. It is easier to leave. To strike out again upon something new. You know, when the moon is a crescent, it's really just that the earth is playing as a shadow puppet upon its face. | And so I begin again, in the center. If there is no anchor here, how can I begin? I sit in the center and feel uncomfortable. I resolve to stay with it for as long as I can. I want to leave as soon as I'm in it. A tingling sensation at the base of my spine grips at the tension in my back. The center is crowded. It is full of people. White males. They look at me oddly as I settle in. They know as well as I that the center is a foreign place for me, that it is not a place for brown girls. I sit close to their bare feet and I can feel that they want to pull away, but they do not. Instead, we sit together in the center. |
| Dear Moon Rabbit, During the full moon, you make rice cakes; during the new moon, do you bound across the sky? It was just Chuseok and I somewhat celebrated the Harvest Moon but I have no ancestors buried here and so cannot take offerings to graves. I thought about taking something to Jen's grave, the friend who died in high school, the one I regretted not being a better friend to—but I wondered if a gesture like that would offend. Moon Rabbit, in the new moon does the smoke follow you as you hop from star to star? Is it the trail that brings you home? | There is a problem, I've learned, with my episodic memory around these fights with my mother. I can remember the feeling, the emotion (perhaps my amygdala found that important); I can remember the anger surging in my body, the wave cresting in my chest, and as it crashes down its fingers pull the sand in long lines of guilt. I leave the grains under my fingernails and in my limbic system but the words fly from my head. "For some reason your thinking brain didn't think that information was important," my husband says. |
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Notes
Phase 2: Waxing Crescent
"The word most associated with this card is 'abandonment.' The eight cups are behind the figure, which represents the emotional investment given previously. Just as this card shows, you now turn your back on the situation and walk away from it, as it no longer fulfills you. Therefore, it shows abandoning something through disappointment. It must be remembered that the act of walking away from the situation is a choice." -Gilded Tarot deck by Ciro Marchetti. Text interpretation by Josephine Ellershaw.
Phase 4: Waxing Gibbous and Phase 6: Waning Gibbous
Paraphrase and quotations from interview with Wesley Graba, 9/22/13.
Phase 5: Full Moon (second version)
Most of the information from this section is from previous research for a previous project; I refreshed my memory with Wikipedia and About.com articles.
Phase 1: New Moon (second version)
1. In Korean folklore (as well as other culture's folklore), there is the story of a rabbit who lives in the moon and makes rice cakes (in China, he makes the elixir of life to keep the gods immortal). "Legend says there once was a village where a rabbit, a fox, and a monkey resided. The three devoted themselves to Buddhism and spent much time in its study and practice. One day, the Emperor of the Heavens looked upon them and to test their faith, told them to bring him something to eat. The three set off to fulfill his wish. Consequently, the fox returned with fish, the monkey with fruit, and the rabbit, who could do nothing but gather grass, lit a fire with it and jumped in, offering his own self. His commitment earned the approval of the Emperor and he was placed in the moon as its guardian, with 'smoke' surrounding him as a reminder of his endeavor." (The Korea Blog, article by Suzy Chung)
2. Chuseok is Korean Thanksgiving, celebrated during the autumnal equinox, the "Harvest Moon." You visit your ancestral hometown and visit the ancestral gravesite with your family. You leave food offerings and clean the site, pulling weeds and sweeping. In this way, you honor your ancestors (usually you do about four generations back). Then you have a feast, play games, and dance the Ganggangsullae, which is a folk dance performed under the full moon the night of Chuseok. [End Page 115]
Sarah Richards Graba is a writer, teacher, editor, and artist. She had lived in Colorado her whole life, though her DNA comes from all over the world. She has been published for creative work, critical theory, book reviews, and interviews in Morning/Mourning, Bombay Gin, Something on Paper, Semicolon, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Naropa University for writing, research, and literature for writers, and multicultural foundations for future therapists. As a member of collective.aporia, an international arts collective, she organizes online writing and arts workshops for the global artist community.
