blue moon—n. 1. the second full moon occuring within a calendar month; 2. informal once in a blue moon: very rarely; almost never. “blue moon.” Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. HarperCollins Publishers. 31 Aug. 2012.
Writing counter-interpolative communiques on the night of a blue moon, the Speculator must observe the same ancient choreography that sorcerers, night soil men, two-headed doctors, literature professors, street hustlers, gypsy flower peddlers, and professional dog walkers have known since antiquity: one engages in a ritual dance to accomplish certain ends.
One appropriates symbols—the magic wand, the shit bucket, the mojo hand, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the too-tight jeans, the bouquet of dyed roses, the dog leash—and invokes the primal forces of creation. One uses obscure terms and appellations and loads them with meaning. One waits for the hour of Mercury, drinking beer and burning incense on the roof, staring at the moon. One observes certain ancient footwork while brandishing symbols to speak truth to power.
Thus change is brought to bear on events and minds; existing chains of causality shift; and new paradigms are born. All from a dance, from preordained steps taken in darkness and solitude, from a Doctrine of Signatures old enough to justify itself (suggesting the monks who would recopy medieval grimoires and write Proven in the margins as a way to attest that the magic operations in question had worked for them, too). All from ostrich feathers and incense and words of barbarous invocation; from a mojo hand with van van rubbed on its seams; or a reinterpretation of Ozymandias in 310b, Humanities Hall, at noon; or a pair of cheap jeans, an imitation Stetson, and a lewd gesture at a passing car. One performs rituals on the roof at midnight, in the classroom, at an altar in the basement made from the door of a condemned house, or on Polk Street in full view of the headlights streaming past like lemon-white balloons.
Consider: when cornered or confronted or dragged into the light, evil thinks of weapons. When given no way out, a fool or an animal fights to the death. Consider also: there is nothing more evil or foolish than a human animal cornered by reason, by sincerity, or by common sense. Thus the Speculator, the peddler selling bouquets of symbolic meaning and tugging on the choke chains of relevance, speaks what passes for the truth of her individual experience while avoiding the retribution of the masses, for whom the bottom line has always been and always will be three hots, a cot, and unlimited cable.
Symbolism can cut more deeply than plain language. Well-honed symbols can be made to resonate like poison from a razor’s edge the way a good venom will echo through the body, taking organs like a general takes land. The Speculator says, let the venom be good. The Speculator says, you are more than your animal wants. Maybe the Speculator even goes so far as to say, think.
Think and avoid being interpolated into power structures that feed your animal wants at the expense of your rational and superarational mind, flooding you with stupid details, with the endless distractions of sitcoms and status updates and the antics of politicians. There are no politicians. There is only the precession of symbols moving along preordained grids, along schematic causal chains, designed to reinforce dominant paradigms that make money to perpetuate themselves. Cities like circuit boards. Telecomunications data streams like enfolded spiderwebs, matricies of obligation, of misdirection, of stasis and social expectation woven in layers.
If we could not telecommunicate, what could we become? The human potential movement says, nothing. The Speculator says, how did we get here in the first place? And maybe the Speculator adds, let the venom be good. Let there be curses, spite marriages, drunken train hopping, total network failure from perpetual IP configuration faults, the throwing of beer bottles from roofs, the dark whisper of rain over the junkyard, the junkyard that used to be the parking lot of a sports arena, the parking lot that housed a circus, the circus that got wet by the same rain that fell on Constantine before he converted and ruined half the world. Because all water cycles from ocean to sky to earth endlessly like the mistakes we don’t remember and are destined to repeat.
But the Speculator must remain mindful of the moon. When the moon enters Pisces, it obscures everything, occludes thinking like water running down glass. There are shapes one knows, certain forms, certain modes of acting, feeling, believing, assuming, receiving. The Speculator sees them as fish at the bottom of a pool, twisting, blurry, just out of reach. And so he writes this essay in the hour of Luna, saying let there be darkness and light and let them dance on the face of the blue moon—like ripples on water made by molten lead or flights of birds on the bowl of the sky or the shapes one sees coalesce in the clouds—and let the dance mean more than syllables in the animal screams of fools.
The Writing Expedition 