How Does the Moon See Itself?

In March 2024, I spent six days on a lunar mission with three other artists. During those days we wrote, danced, sewed, photographed, and sang, exploring how artmaking might play a vital role in ventures beyond our home planet. Our Moon lived partly in the imagination and partly in the Arizona desert, in an analog lunar environment at the iconic Biosphere 2. Our mission, however, was no less real. We went to demonstrate that artists ask the kinds of questions that lead to deeper insights, stronger ethics, and greater care for the Earth—from the local to the global and beyond, to care for the Moon.

I returned from my lunar mission with notes, photographs, and memories, not just in my mind but in my body, of life inside our small, pressurized, hermetically sealed home. From these fragments, I began to write haibun, a poetic form from Japan that pairs a short segment of prose with a concluding haiku. Haibun historically have been used for travel writing, providing room in a short poem for narrative, reflection, and the crystallized, evocative image expressed in haiku—just what was needed for the strange mix of the everyday (cooking and cleaning) and the extraordinary (simulated moonwalks) we experienced during our days on the Moon.

Deep in this project to write about my time on the Moon, the question at the heart of the Moon Bound book—how does the Moon see the Earth?—landed on my desk. I had spent months by that point remembering myself back into our lunar base and out onto the Moon’s surface through photographs from the Apollo missions and animated views from the Moon’s south pole, where our mission took place. Standing on the rim of Shackleton Crater, our imagined lunar home, the Earth rises up into view now and again, occasionally eclipsing the sun that circles low, just above the horizon. Into the dark night of space, here comes the Earth, spinning blue and white, brown and green, here and gone and back again.

False starts, I wrote in my notebook, naming the Moon as Earth sees it and has cataloged it. I had written From Shackleton and stopped, aware that this early twentieth century British explorer’s name applied to a surface feature of the Moon underscored my Earth-bound viewpoint. My attempts to answer the question, “how does the Moon see the Earth,” amounted to, “how might a human on the Moon see the Earth?”

In 1958, as the Space Race took off, American poet May Swenson posed a related question: how might landing a human on the Moon damage our capacity for wonder? In her poem “Landing on the Moon,” Swenson recalls the Moon as unreachable mystery, a “pit of riddles,” “a lead mirror.” To travel to the Moon on a scientific mission is to “map an apparition,” to “walk upon the forehead of a myth.” At the poem’s end, she asks, “Dare we land upon a dream?” Dare we approach what was once enigma and run the risk of pulling it to pieces in our attempt to understand it?

Archibald MacLeish, another American poet, sees a very different outcome in his poem “Voyage to the Moon,” first published on the front page of the New York Times the day after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July 1969. MacLeish’s poem begins with a mystical vision of the Moon seen in Earth’s skies: “a longing past the reach of longing, / a light beyond our lights, our lives—perhaps / a meaning to us—O, a meaning!” By the poem’s end, the heroic travelers have reached their goal, and there, a new vision greets them:

I have imagined standing on the surface of the Moon looking up, all of life on Earth a wonder there in the sky above me. My imagining aims for fidelity through facts like the shape of the horizon, the angle of the sun, the motion of the Earth as seen from the Moon at various points. Yet for all that effort I am still not answering the question of how the Moon sees the Earth—and a priori, how the Moon sees itself.

The Moon to itself is not a dream or a meaning, however much I love these descriptions from May Swenson and Archibald MacLeish. American poet Robert Hayden, in his 1977 poem “Astronauts,” gets me closest to understanding when he calls the Moon’s surface “the calcined stillness / of once Absolute Otherwhere.” To see something or someone as Other can lead to terrible misperception, devaluing, and destruction. Conversely, it can lead to clearer vision and deep respect, to understanding something on its own terms. To consider the Moon as “Absolute Otherwhere” prompts me to lay aside my prior understandings and emotional responses, to remove the language of actor and action that is so much of human life.

As we explore the Moon with both human and robotic voyagers, it will become, bit by bit, less Absolute Otherwhere. I don’t see this as a negative—deep knowledge is part of love and does not preclude wonder. As this tiny book journeys to the Moon and creeps along the lunar surface on a rover’s back, I hope my haibun might be a reminder that the Moon deserves our respect and should call forth our awe. Our Moon, our companion through the ages, an Otherwhere and also a home.