Last
night, I watched a documentary about the landing on the moon in the ‘60’s. The first two-thirds of the documentary were
about the preparation and landing. It
actually brought tears to my eyes, when Neil Armstrong said the famous
sentence, as he stepped down off the last rung: One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. That surprised me, that it should be so emotive. I’m really not like that…
I
recalled sitting in class with what seemed like the whole school packed into
one hot room, watching a television set with doors on it that was wheeled out
for the weekly educational programmes. I
was at a Catholic girls’ secondary school, and I must have been thirteen years
old. The school was only two years old,
when I started there. It was way out the
back of town. There was a sort of creek
running through the school (more gully erosion than creek), with a log across
which we teetered to get to the top “ovals” (read paddocks). We saved all the scraps from lunch-time to
give to the pig farmer up the road, and we burned all the burnable rubbish in
an incinerator after lunch. We all had
jobs after lunch break. For quite a
while, mine was sorting the scrap-and-rubbish-buckets, putting the scrap
buckets under the building, and setting light to the contents of the incinerator. That was fun, as we (the two of us: a girl
called Marguerite and I) were allowed into class a bit late, and we also had an
exclusive kind of status. However,
Marguerite’s parents threatened to sue the school when she contracted hepatitis,
and, thus, ended our foray into recycling.
I also recall looking out the window, one day, and seeing a cow
meandering through the schoolyard. Dora
Stewart and I ran out to chase the animal out of the school grounds, and a good
time was had by all.
My
father did not believe in the Moon Landing, even at the time. He claimed that the moon did not exist- that
it was merely the reflection of the earth in space. He said that the publicity stunt was merely
to take people’s minds off the Vietnam War.
He also said that someone had come and deliberately scraped the paint
off our roof, that Mum was a communist, that some of the advertisements on TV
were aimed at him, and that he was on a blacklist. You get my drift…
So,
last night, much of this came back to me, watching the ungainly, boxy shape of
Neil Armstrong stepping down into the dust.
There was, unfortunately, a vague sense of cynicism in my enjoyment that
had never really been there before. What
was it that the conspiracy theorists claimed about the American flag? Something about a breeze that should not have
been there, blowing the cloth. They also
claimed there was some object that didn’t belong, lying on the ground, that you
could discern if you magnified the image.
These notions reminded me of the Beatles’ song that was supposed to say
“Ringo is dead!” if you played the LP backwards. Conspiracy theorists are often not cynics, at
all, but people who long for mystery.
Anyway,
the niggling of vague doubt was completely erased as I watched the third
segment of the documentary in which the three astronauts spoke of the many
years that followed the moon landing.
They spoke of being changed men; they spoke of the fact that they could
never look at life or the universe in the same way. “The landing on the moon was only one day in
my life”, one of them said…”the rest has been devoted to Jesus”. He explained that he had started attending a
Bible-reading group, on his return to earth, and that his newfound beliefs
eclipsed that one day that was a turning-point in his life. Another said how he remembered looking out of
the Apollo and seeing the moon and the stars and thinking: “The earth, and
everyone on the earth, and everything that man has made, is made of the
stars…We are all one!” He told what a moving experience it was, to come to that
realisation. I do not remember which old
man it was who said which words, but I was struck by the awe with which they
spoke, not of the moon, but of the earth.
“Sometimes, I just go out, and go on an escalator”, one of them said,
“just to have people around me. And I
think to myself: We really do live in the
Garden of Eden!” All men spoke of
the strangeness of being one of only two men standing on a planet uninhabited
by any others; of knowing that everyone else was down there on the earth, but
that they were so far away, and so alone.
One described the loneliness of this realisation, but another described
the feeling as euphoric.
Thinking
about the documentary, later, it struck me how ironic it was that three men
could travel so far, and under such unnatural circumstances, to achieve these
insights. Listening to the wonder in
their voices, seeing the openness on their faces, there was no question, in my
mind, that these men had experienced something extraordinary. The image of the Garden of Eden came up
several times, and I remembered the day I came to my own epiphany. I can’t recall what I was doing- I certainly
wasn’t setting foot on any celestial body.
But I recall the sudden understanding that the Book of Genesis is not a
story about the past, at all. It is
prophetic. We are living in it right
now.
