Everyone Likes to Watch

I've been a little scarce in the push to get everything ready for my fly-away date --September 6 .

But must take a moment for these pictures. In one, Indian holy men, sadhus, peer through smoked lenses while Rahu eats the sun during the recent solar eclipse of an earlier post. Lots of Americans know the other picture. It has come to be seen, nostalgically, as an image of delight in new media and mindless submission to popular culture in the allegedly primitive 1950s: These viewers go toward the light -- the movies, our artificial sun and moon -- in their 3D glasses.

There's an Italo Calvino story, "The Daughters of the Moon," a magical realist allegory for our time--or not, depending on how you like to think about these things. Its first paragraph is a presumably real excerpt from a science article and lays down the conceit of the story.

Deprived, as it was, of a covering of air to act as a protective shield, the moon found itself exposed right from the start to a continual bombardment of meteorites and to the corrosive action of the sun’s rays. According to Thomas Gold, of Cornell University, the rocks on the moon’s surface were reduced to powder through constant attrition from meteorite particles. According to Gerard Kuiper, of the University of Chicago, the escape of gases from the moon’s magma may have given the satellite a light, porous consistency, like that of a pumice stone.

This in its own way is a fable of cultural collision. The collidee, the moon, is worn down and softened into a lighteness of being that bears, patiently, the traces of its traumatic encounter with the collider (in my wild reach for fabulist parallels, the fire and dazzle of India.)

It's a different fable from the one about being reborn as a whole new person. You might say both are true stories. I like this one better.