Cold Moon 2021
A Nocturne
Dear Lunatics,
Here in the Boston area, the full moon—aka Cold Moon, aka The Long Night Moon—is hiding behind snow clouds.
So tonight, while the moon is backstage having a smoke break, let’s talk about Apollo 10.
Apollo 10 was the "dress rehearsal" for Apollo 11.
Two of the three astronauts, Eugene Cernan and Thomas Stafford, flew the lunar module to within 8 miles of the lunar surface before turning back.
It must’ve taken incredible willpower to get that close to landing on the moon before dutifully reversing course.
Prior to returning to Earth, Apollo 10 orbited the moon 31 times.
During these rotations, the astronauts scanned the Sea of Tranquility for a good landing site for their Apollo 11 successors.
But while the astronauts were on the far side of the moon, something strange happened.
They heard music.
Recently, NASA released an audio recording of the three astronauts discussing this unnerving space melody.
Cernan: That music even sounds outer-spacey, doesn’t it? You hear that? That whistling sound?
Stafford: Yes.
Cernan: Whooooooooooo.
Young: Did you hear that whistling sound, too?
Cernan: Yeah. Sounds like – you know, outer-space-type music.
And later…
Cernan: Boy, that sure is weird music.
Young: We’re going to have to find out about that. Nobody will believe us.
Cernan: No. It’s a whistling, you know, like an outer space-type thing.
Two months later, Apollo 11’s pilot Michael Collins was flying on the dark side of the moon.
He heard the same eerie tune.
Collins describes the moment in his memoir, Carrying the Fire:
There is a strange noise in my headset now, an eerie woo-woo sound. Had I not been warned about it, it would have scared hell out of me.
According to NASA, the strange sound was simply radio interference.
But who knows?
Sometimes, when I’m staring up at the moon, I imagine I can hear a faint musical note. A quivering, metallic tone. The auditory equivalent of biting down on tinfoil.
Is it just me or do you hear it too?
For centuries, musicians have been inspired by the moon’s song. (Some famous examples can be found here.)
Fittingly, the song I streamed most frequently in 2021, according to Spotify, was Hey Moon by John Maus.
Also dominating my top twenty was the music of composer Julius Eastman.
No doubt Eastman’s The Moon's Silent Modulation would have made an appearance on my Spotify list, but no recording is available for streaming.
Eastman died homeless in 1990, and the majority of his compositions were hauled away in trash bags when he was evicted from his East Village apartment.
Fortunately, one of Eastman’s compositions, Femenine: No. 1, Prime, came to light in 2016, a quarter century after the composer’s death and, coincidentally, the same year the Apollo 10 audio surfaced.
There’s definitely something celestial about this recording, even though it was not made on the far side of the moon. (It was made in Hollywood…on Sunset Boulevard.)
It boggles my mind to think of Julius Eastman’s ouevre taken out with the trash, rotting in some New York landfill.
His works of genius have been only partially recovered by the long, painstaking labor of friends and musicologists.
“Our whole Western thought is a kind of futuristic thinking,” Eastman said in a 1976 interview with the Buffalo Evening News. “I am not writing for some kind of futuristic thing anymore, for life-after-death. I don’t give a hoot about the future, posterity or anything else along those lines. You know, I think that is a step in the right direction—hopefully backwards.”
I keep imagining those Apollo 10 astronauts coming so close to the moon, yet not descending to the surface to take that one giant step into the future.
How did they summon the restraint?
Did they have Eastman’s Zen attitude toward posthumous fame?
We’ll never know.
It turns out the mission planners at NASA didn’t trust the Apollo 10 astronauts, so they only equipped their lunar module with enough fuel to get close to the moon but no further.
If the astronauts Cernan and Stafford decided to make an unauthorized moon landing, they wouldn’t have had enough juice to get back to the command module. They would have been stuck on the moon forever.
Like Odysseus strapped to the mast, they got close enough to hear the moon’s siren song and lived to tell about it.
—WD
P.S. Please follow me on Instagram to see my artwork and “blind drawings” (sketches made without looking at the page).
Here’s my blind portrait of Mr. Julius Eastman:
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Thank you!
As always, you’ve created a fascinating read!