Noah will set up a table, a chair, a telescope, and a pad of paper. He will then sit at the table, look into the telescope, and spend some time with the moon (approximately an hour or two). During this time he will think about the moon as an object, as a destination, and as a metaphor. If moved to do so, he will sketch what he sees or write down any thoughts that he may have.
Date: Dec 5, 2008Start Time: 7:00pm
Duration: 1 hour
Location: Campus, nearby Kiki Smith sculpture site
One Comment
In the Moon we understand a lifeless earth. Asteroids and comets collide with the lunar surface and form well-preserved impact craters, about half a million of which found thus far have diameters greater than 1 kilometer. The prevailing hypothesis today is that the Earth–Moon system formed as a result of a tremendous impact 4.5 billion years ago. This supposedly Mars-sized body (labeled “Theia”) is believed to have blasted sufficient material from the proto-Earth into orbit to form the Moon through accretion. To look at the Moon is to acknowledge one’s entrance into composition with it at birth, just as our dying bodies enter into composition with the air, as the beast does with the full Moon, and as the Space Shuttle Challenger crew compartment did with the ocean during its premature return to Earth.
As we hurdle through space on our actively destabilizing terrarium, with our natural satellite in tow, contained in a solar system that we believe to know so well based on retrieved materials, planetary radar, laser altimetry and stereo image analysis, neutron spectrometry, geothermal mapping, assorted spacecraft, and an array of other techniques for measurement, one could almost think that with a telescope we’re simply seeing an image of the Moon – afterall, the Earth-Moon composition involves a synchronous rotation,wherein the Moon keeps nearly the same face turned towards the Earth at all times. Yet where there is close vision (the thought of the utter contingency of a solar-system) and not the measured long-distance vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function: no line separates Earth from space, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermediary. This exteriority of thought, the force that is always external to itself – is not at all another image of thought in opposition to the image inspired by the imperium of truth (mythos) and/or a republic of spirits (logos). This is a problem-thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem, a thought that appeals to a people instead of aspiring to universality.
Again, the utter groundlessness of our existence. “Nature” qua the domain of stabilized reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intrudes with its hubris, callously disrupting its circular motion, is man’s fantasy; nature is already in itself “second nature,” its stability always secondary, an effort to reconcile a “habit” that would restore some balanced system after catastrophic disturbance.
~Andrew Allen Wilson