Darkest Depths Moon 2024
Dear Lunatics,
Between me and tonight’s nearly full moon is the crystalline fall atmosphere, the pale haze of industrial smoke, a triple paned hospital window, an elderly man’s prone, tube-filled body, a gauzy curtain, then my own prone, tube-filled body, lying in my hospital bed, shivering and sweating under stiff white sheets that are far too shroud-like for my peace of mind.
Two months ago, I wrote about moonbows, about dying bodies and rainbow bodies, about how our darkest suffering glistens a little in the moonlight.
One month ago, I wrote about my conversation with the last living man to have walked on the moon, about how faith resulted in a miraculous reunion between him and his wife who had been pushed aside during his days at NASA.
Two months ago, my dispatch attracted many new subscribers; last month, I lost some.
One subscriber asked, politely and reasonably, to be removed from the Lunar Dispatch due to an allergy to “god talk.”
I respect this decision. Many people experience religious trauma; others are simply averse to discussions of the supernatural or divine.
What interests me, as I sit here with tubes porpoising in and out of my rainbow-bruised body, is how difficult it is to see ourselves. I expected to lose a flock of followers two dispatches ago, while I fully expected my last dispatch to set the internet aglow.
But God works in mysterious ways. (Oh no, there go more subscribers spinning into orbit!)
I’ve been thinking about Flannery O’Connor, who was a year younger than me when she wrote her final short story, “Revelation.” She finished it as she was dying of lupus, scribbling in a notebook that she hid under her pillow from watchful nurses. (Given this was Georgia in 1964, I assume she’d been forbidden to write in the hospital for the good of “her nerves.”)
When she was younger and just embarking on what would be her short writing career, Flannery began a prayer journal. She kept it even while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which, though definitely not a holy place, is at least a holier-than-thou place (yes, I was wait-listed).
The young Flannery wrote:
Dear God,
I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
Isn’t this the solemn wish of all saints? To be so wounded, so carved full of holes, that the light from another world can shine through.
Flannery was no saint, which in itself is a good sign that she might actually have been one. Most real saints have, from the beginning, sharp elbows and sharper tongues.
As Flannery herself put it, she was a “pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex.”
I’ve never written to God.
But some days, I do write to Flannery.
Dear Flannery, why is the path of love so heavily graveled with suffering?
Dear Flannery, why are we born as bright and whole as a fresh piece of paper into this world full of hole-punchers?
Dear Flannery, why is our only weapon against the Devil, who is superior to us in every way but one, humility?
There is nothing humble about this week’s full moon—the fourth of four straight super moons.
But absent a series of carefully appointed mirrors, I am unlikely to see one ray of it.
Such is life on planet hospital.
In her last short story, Flannery wrote about a Mrs. Turpin, a sanctimonious Southern woman who, while ensconced in a doctor’s waiting office, passes spiteful judgement on the specimens of humanity that surround her.
While Mrs. Turpin ranks her fellow patients by race and class, she is observed cantankerously by what seems to be a Flannery stand-in—a young, bookish college student whose piercing eyes see straight through Mrs. Turpin’s superiority complex.
The girl’s name is Mary Grace (Flannery dropped her own first name, Mary, when she began publishing). Mary Grace eventually becomes so repelled by Mrs. Turpin’s small-town prejudices that she actually hurls a textbook directly at her.
What more potent depiction of Flannery’s life’s work than an unsmiling, keen-eyed young woman hurling a book across a doctor’s office at a self-satisfied, hypocritical Christian? (As Flannery surely knew, the Catholic Church refers to itself as a hospital for sinners.)
After taking the textbook off the noggin and being called a moral “warthog,” Mrs. Turpin goes home, ices her bruised face, and, while hosing down her farm’s hogs, has a vision at sunset of a parade of souls marching into the sky toward heaven, lead by bands of white trash and people of color and freaks and lunatics. Bringing up the rear of this otherworldly procession is a tribe of fortunate, respectable people like herself, now, for once, at the back of the line (wait-listed, you might say).
Stunned, Mrs. Turpin stumbles back toward the house. “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”
If anything disqualifies Flannery O’Connor from sainthood—whether religious or literary—it’s her backward view of race, which came to fuller light when her personal letters were published long after her death.
Yet even here, we find Flannery one step ahead, as she signed herself into the hospital for that final visit as “Mrs. Turpin.”
No, the book-throwing girl is not Flannery in disguise. The author recognizes herself in the sin-compromised Mrs. Turpin, destined to bring up the rear on a hot-coal walk through Purgatory toward that starry heaven in the sky.
Saints can be infuriating, can’t they?
It’s a good thing I’m not a saint or else I would feel compelled to leave you with an ending of substance.
Of impact.
An ending that would net The Lunar Dispatch more followers than fish in the sea.
But I have nothing to offer but these new holes cut into my body, and whatever weak light they might give off on this, the eve of the Darkest Depths Moon.
See you on the Cold Moon!
—WD
Ah, some readers find it hard to simply received what they are offered. I guess we’ve all been that reader somewhere along the line. Heal well, Will!
Last month's newsletter was inspiring to say the least! I pray you are doing well and are doing ok!