I hold a coin that belonged to my grandfather, an aerospace engineer, that depicts the American flag planted on the moon, slightly off center, with a space-suited Buzz Aldrin next to it. Across from him, the leg of the Lunar Module barely pokes into the frame. Text embossed on the back says that it contains metal from spacecrafts Columbia and Eagle.
The year after the metal in the coin went to the moon, Gil Scott-Heron recorded a performance of “Whitey on the Moon” for his album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox:
I can’t pay no doctor bills
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still
(while Whitey’s on the moon)1
A photograph made in 1969 with a Hasselblad camera mounted on an Apollo 12 spacesuit shows the shadows of a spidery silver tripod reaching towards a nearby moonrock, like black wires trying to plug themselves in.2 A bot made by Darius Kazemi posts these photographs to Twitter from the Project Apollo Archive.
The Man in the Moon is a dancer with curly hair in a poem written by a nineteen-year-old Karl Marx. He showers the earth with the light of his sadness and then bops along:
Da schlägt der Mondmann seinen Tanz,
Da schüttelt er die Glieder.3
A shiny piece of fabric has fallen to the surface. The treadprints of a Lunar Roving Vehicle cross the right side of the frame.4
Guy Davenport on the “taste for stone” in Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers”:
Hades, for instance, was stone, as was the dead moon. The firm Greek sense that stone does not grow distinguished it radically from things that do. And yet it was of mineral substance that everything is made: an organism was an interpenetration of matter and spirit.5
A boot print is visible at the bottom edge, where the photographer, Charlie Duke, must have stepped forward, put something down, stepped back, and angled the Hasselblad camera attached to his spacesuit towards the lunar surface. The object, askew in the moondust in a plastic sleeve glowing where it catches the light, is a wallet-sized family photo.6
1 Gil Scott-Heron, “Whitey on the Moon,” track 9 on Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, Flying Dutchman/RCA, 1970.
2 https://twitter.com/moonshotbot/status/1338520393326284814
3 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Werke, Schriften, Briefe (Frankfurt a. Main: Marx-Engels-Archiv), vol. 1, part 1, p. 31.
4 https://twitter.com/moonshotbot/status/1238320145296171013
5 Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (1981; Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 97–98.
6 https://twitter.com/moonshotbot/status/1353921881506680832