Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are fallin’
To the sound of the breezes that blow
An’ I’m trying to please to the callin’
Of your heart strings that play soft and low
And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush. – Van Morrison, “Moondance”
The modern disconnect with the natural world which has given rise to neofeminism, “social construction of gender”, the militant “animal rights” movement and many other bizarre beliefs and practices is completely alien to me. When one lives in the country surrounded by plants and animals it is impossible to reduce the calendar to an official fiction, to pretend that shifting clocks changes the time, to imagine that sex-based characteristics and sexual behaviors are instilled by socialization rather than arising naturally as they do in every other animal, or to believe that things like predatory male sexuality, prostitution, sexual dominance and submission and the physical or behavioral characteristics to which people are attracted derive from “patriarchy” rather than evolution and neurochemistry, and can be eliminated by laws and giving little boys dolls to play with (as discussed in my column of one year ago today). And once one spends even a short time each day watching dogs, cats, livestock and wildlife it is no longer possible to comfort oneself with the ridiculous idea that humans are a kind of angelic being totally and completely separate from all other forms of biological life, or to adhere to the naïve notion that it is either possible or desirable to completely eliminate from the human world what the “enlightenment police” glibly refer to as “cruelty” (a concept which bears about as much resemblance to actual cruelty as a teddy bear has to a grizzly).
It’s not as easy for the inhabitants of New Orleans to isolate themselves from Nature as it is for the inhabitants of most large cities; it is probably the greenest of all American cities, and the total percentage of ground covered with concrete there is very low indeed. The living Earth beneath the city does not accept her bondage lightly, and constantly expresses her displeasure by undermining houses, creating holes in the roadways, and introducing water into every place which is not hermetically sealed. Nor do the other life-forms who share the environment respect man-made borders; insects, reptiles and small mammals brazenly invade human dwellings on a scale unheard-of elsewhere, and even the plants slowly creep in while nobody is watching and destroy whatever gets in their way. And I haven’t even mentioned the hurricanes.
Despite all this some still try, shutting themselves up in climate-controlled offices all day and climate-controlled houses all night, and moving between the two as quickly as possible. I honestly think they’re in the minority, though, or at least they used to be, which is probably part of the reason neither neofeminism nor any other belief system which relies on rejection of Nature has ever caught on there (or anywhere else in the Deep South). And I never even tried to join their number, nor do I think I could have had I wanted to. The tides which ebb and flow in every woman were always particularly strong in me, and that wasn’t the only natural factor which was; the combination of my sinus problems and the bursitis in a cracked rib (incurred in an auto accident when I was in my late teens) allowed me to predict the weather with a high degree of accuracy for most of my twenties, and as I wrote in my column for last Halloween my spirits have always invariably lifted as autumn arrives and the leaves begin to turn.
October usually enjoys a particular sort of cool weather, a crisp breeziness quite unlike that one might experience on an early spring day or a comparatively warm winter one; this is October Weather, my name for that special atmospheric condition I associate with turning leaves and the imminent arrival of my birthday. In New Orleans I was often cheated of it; October Weather might not come ‘til November and then immediately depart, or some years it might not appear at all. In fact, one of the reasons I chose to move to the upper South from my native country was the promise of more distinct seasons, including a long, colorful autumn. The odd, late, chaotic autumns we’ve had the past few years due to the changing climate have caused me considerable annoyance, but they’re still more dependable than what I got in New Orleans so I reckon I can’t complain. But when that weather did arrive I was filled with a sort of wild, witchy joy; I wanted to stay out late, to suck the fragrant air into my lungs and fly through the night under the harvest moon with my hair streaming behind me. As a young teen I often sneaked out in the middle of the night to enjoy such weather, and after I arrived at UNO I would wander about the campus on such evenings or ride my bicycle to midnight movies at the Robert E. Lee Theater a few miles away. More than once I invited my cousin Jeff or whatever boy I was dating to moonlight picnics on such evenings; since UNO was largely a “commuter college” with a low resident population the campus was virtually deserted at night, so we had our pick of sites.
Jeff was a big fan of Van Morrison’s, and there were three of his songs which Jeff particularly associated with me: “Brown-Eyed Girl”, “Tupelo Honey” and the one which forms my epigram; one of the things which let me know that my husband might be “the one” was that he associated those same songs with me. And though as I age my reaction to October Weather isn’t nearly as strong as it was in my teens and twenties, on clear, cool October nights I still feel the urge to go out and dance in the dry leaves under the moon.
I keep getting this kind of “pagan vibe” off some of the stuff you write, Maggie. Is that just my imagination or is there something to that? You describe the natural world in ways that make me envious of the ways you perceive it.
It’s not your imagination; I’m a pagan. The first time I wrote about it was on August 1st of last year, and I mention it on all the sabbats (such as Halloween, coming up soon!)
Nature is awesome. I particularly love watching the world come alive at sunrise. I get to my fishing spot while the world is still dark and just sit there in the cool breeze and listen to and watch the birds as they cheer on a new day. 🙂
I once shocked my mother by saying that my brother and I were more pagan than Catholic; she’s never let me forget it. But the truth is, I spent more time on the water (what you do in New England), sailing, hunting or camping than in concrete and glass bunkers. Boston is actually surrounded by natural landscape that almost nobody ever sees.
Here in Seoul, Korea, you can go for years without ever seeing green; certainly, there’s not a yaseng dongmul (wild animal) anywhere but the pigeons and the rats. And the cats that eat them. But these are feral cats, wild and in constant terror of people.
Last fall, I went to Canada to hunt and show my SO how real people live. It was a long drive, up through NY state and the countryside we’ve totally forgotten there. Once in Canada, I stopped in the capital of Ontario province, Toronto, and had a looksee.
My Canadian contact showed us around. What stunned me was the way this huge city – I estimated about the same size as Boston, or at least it felt that way – was pulsing with natural energy. There were parks everywhere, one of them about the size of an American town, and from the tower in the middle of the city looking out it seemed like the city outside the downtown core was lost in a sea of green.
It was then that I talked with my SO about the heretical idea: There was another way to think about living spaces than we’re used to in Europe (where my SO was educated) or America. These Canadians have a huge megalopolis, too, but it has green lungs. When we woke up early to go hiking, I remember seeing a red fox wandering purposefully through some abandoned docklands, and I saw no end of rabbits.
Here in Seoul, you could live almost totally disconnected from the natural world. But I did something similar recently. I went up Namsan Tower one quiet evening, and looked out at the city. I was struck by the glittering power and beauty of the lights, of course; but what shook me was the realization that there was green all over the mountains on all sides. Green that it’s easy to forget in everyday life.
So I imagine that living with a deeper understanding of our place in the natural world – and as part of it and a product of it – tends to sharpen the resistance to the mechanical, sterile interpretations of human life that neofeminism tends to breed.
New Orleans’ City Park is the largest urban park in the United States; it’s 1300 acres, 50% larger than New York’s Central Park and 2.5 times the size of the Principality of Monaco. Snaking down into the city alongside it is Bayou St. John, at its north end is Lake Pontchartrain and only a few minutes to the south by auto is the mighty Mississippi River, one of the largest river systems in the world. No matter where one goes in New Orleans, it’s hard to forget Nature…or death, since we bury our dead above the ground in the largest necropolis in North America.
Don’t you mean a few minutes south by streetcar, cher?
Oh, no, the streetcars are much slower! 🙂
Moondance is one of my top ten favorite songs
“One more moondance with you, in the moon light. On a magic night”
I think it would have sounded a bit better if the flute didnt sound quite so ‘woody’
Its funny the way music locks in memories, one of the first horror movies I ever saw was An American Werewolf In London, I was about 12 or 13 so everytime I hear Moondance I see Jenny Aguter naked in a shower
Not a bad vision, that Jenny Agutter. She looks great in Walkabout, too.
The Deep South seems to have a large population entrenched in the idea that Man is separate from Nature by divine intention, and that the proper place of Nature is at Man’s feet, begging for mercy it ain’t gonna get.
That’s true, but that’s largely a Bible-based belief that has nothing to do with environmental conditions.
Yeah, I can see that. Just pointing out that the South isn’t immune to it. I’ve lived here most of my life, and it bugs me sometimes.
Your (choice) comments on your changing response to “October weather” reminded me of a poem by Philip Larkin, the last line of which is truly fine:
Philip Larkin – Sad Steps
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate –
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
Mid-atlantic and New England fall is like being on a thirty degree yo-yo all season long, and has been for hundreds of years. ‘Unseasonable weather’ just doesn’t apply to this time.
[…] fascinated with horror lore and imagery. Autumn was both my native season and the one in which I felt most comfortable, and I struggled with depression for over twenty years until at long last sex work helped me to get […]
This is such a beautiful post. It speaks to everything I love most about women. As strongly as I’ve always felt the pull of nature, I’ve known implicitly that women have a direct link to nature I never will, but I can catch a glimpse of it’s beauty through them.
It’s why I love early literature so much. When Hera seduces Zeus in the Iliad, book 14:
“Therewith the son of Cronos clasped his wife in his arms, and beneath them the divine earth made fresh-sprung grass to grow, and dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth, thick and soft, that upbare them from the ground. Therein lay the twain, and were clothed about with a cloud, fair and golden, wherefrom fell drops of glistering dew.”
No one captures the feeling of pure lust like they did.
Your comments above make me realize for the first time why feminism has always made me so uncomfortable. It’s not their rejection of men. Hell. rejection is simply a part of life. It’s their hatred of nature, the very thing that makes them most beautiful. Your right. Only someone raised in an environment cut off from nature could hold such a twisted view of best part of who they are.
Thank you for sharing so much beauty in your writing Maggie. It ain’t quite as good as actual sex, but it’s close!