humanity has stared at the stars for countless years
wandered around and explored what we would on the ground
bumped into each other, gotten into fights, learned how to hate
all these years striving, and reaching and pulling
and we’ve put ourselves places that would amaze almost every soul
who’s experienced this earth
we’ve seen the bottom of the ocean
been all manner of places
we’ve even sent men to the moon
did you know that the moon tastes like gunpowder
the men who went all said it
how did they know how gunpowder tastes
what does that say about us?
moondust quote:
Moondust. “I wish I could send you some,” says Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. Just a thimbleful scooped fresh off the lunar surface. “It’s amazing stuff.”
Feel it—it’s soft like snow, yet strangely abrasive.
Taste it—”not half bad,” according to Apollo 16 astronaut John Young.
Sniff it—”it smells like spent gunpowder,” says Cernan.
How do you sniff moondust?
Every Apollo astronaut did it. They couldn’t touch their noses to the lunar surface. But, after every moonwalk (or “EVA”), they would tramp the stuff back inside the lander. Moondust was incredibly clingy, sticking to boots, gloves and other exposed surfaces. No matter how hard they tried to brush their suits before re-entering the cabin, some dust (and sometimes a lot of dust) made its way inside.
Once their helmets and gloves were off, the astronauts could feel, smell and even taste the moon.
from here.
February 23rd, 2006 at 9:28 am
Coincidence is bizarre sometimes. I create homeschool lessons for my fourteen year-old sister. Last night I was going through a book on Astronomy and writing down review questions. Imagine my surprise when I learned that moondust smells like gunpowder and here you guys are talking about that very same thing. Wierd.
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:20 pm
I would say that was a synchronicity rather than a coincidence (splitting hairs here).
Did you see the post about the word weird? It means a strange fate or destiny.
Whether you believe in fate or not, I think it is interesting how the subject has become ubiquitous in our language.
Or you could just say that great minds think alike…
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:29 pm
So does that mean that I’m fated to remember that moondust smells like gunpowder because of the synchronicity that made it memorable? Or, as you said, we can just agree that we’re all great-minded and call it good.
February 27th, 2006 at 10:26 am
And why is it that just this morning I, struggling along the long and winding road of individuation just as each of you and everyone else struggles along theirs, read this for the first time?:
“The congealing, benumbing effect of the lunar quality is an extreme form of the capacity of the feminine principle to promote coagulatio [an alchemical term for the state of being cooled, benumbed, or congealed]. Images and urges of a spiritual [i.e., masculine, solar, heat-producing] nature which would prefer to soar unfettered by the earth are obliged by the feminine Eros principle to become related to personal, concrete reality. If the ego is too far removed from such reality it will experience the encounter with the feminine as a paralyzing crash to earth.
“It can be quite helpful to realize that the damaging effects of the dangerous lunar power and the destructive lunar power are, nevertheless, aspects of the Philosopher’s Stone. When one is recuperating from the effects of such an encounter with either of these potencies, it helps in maintaining one’s orientation and perspective to know that what he is suffering from is the stone itself. Anyone who would seek the Philosopher’s Stone is bound, repeatedly, to be a victim of one of its partial aspects. These happenings constitute the alchemical operations which gradually bring about the transformation. But the operations are on ourselves. We experience the calcinatio of the solar fire or the benumbing coagulatio of the lunar power. In the midst of these rigors it is immensely helpful to know that they are part of a larger, meaningful process….
“….It is my impression that those who go farthest in the process of individuation almost always have had some meaningful and indeed, decisive experience of the unconscious in childhood. Jung’s childhood experience [see his autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”] is an excellent example of this. What often seems to happen is that the inadequacies of the childhood environment or the child’s adaptational difficulties, or both, generate a loneliness and dissatisfaction that throw him back on himself. This amounts to an influx of libido [please note that Jung, unlike Freud, used the term libido to mean psychic energy in general] into the unconscious which is thereby activated and proceeds to produce symbols and value-images which help consolidate the child’s threatened individuality. Often secret places or private activities are involved which the child feels are uniquely his and which strengthen his sense of worth in the face of an apparently hostile environment. Such experiences, although not consciously understood or even misunderstood and considered abnormal, leave a sense that one’s personal identity has a transpersonal source of support. They thus may sow the seeds of gratitude and devotion to the source of one’s being which emerge in full consciousness only much later in life.
“The [alchemical] text says this science can be taught only to a few….” (Edward Edinger, “Ego and Archetype”.)
I hope I have been clear enough as to how this might relate to the astronauts and the moondust and to what I experience on this website as a joint process of discovery and mutual support. I should also add as an explanatory note that in Jung’s world view every individual has a masculine and a feminine aspect, and also that the transpersonal source of support referred to is paradoxically called the Self. Is life mysterious, or what??
February 27th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
…and when I felt an urge to proofread my post above, I discovered my typo (read: “slip,” or helpful compensation from the unconscious opposite) in the third paragraph where I typoed “…destructive lunar power…” instead of “…destructive solar power…” The point, of course, is that the “slip” is not helpful unless I become conscious of it and consider what its meaning might be to me in the context of what I was typing. Without an appropriate act of consciousness on my part, my discovered slip is just an irritation.
I often wonder if every irritation and annoyance, large or small, in life is simply an appeal by the collective unconscious for an individual act of adaptive creativity. Another way of saying it is that an irritation may be provided by the collective unconscious (which is, after all, unconscious and therefore dependent upon the conscious individual to do the concrete act of creativity for which the unconscious yearns) as an antithesis in response to a thesis. These two (thesis and antithesis) are required before any synthesis can be created. The synthesis becomes the newly created thesis, and the process continues?
This all came out sounding stilted, but at least I am trying to communicate. Maybe someone else out there can say it better than me?
Was the moondust both an irritant and a treasure? Was the explosion on Apollo 13 both an irritant and a treasure?