Moonshadow, Moonshadow

This week, I realised for the first time that a moonshadow is not just a Cat Stevens song. Having spent most of my life in cities, I am used to viewing the moon as a rather tame object, rolling around above the neon and the high-rises in a pale soup of light pollution. But out here in the vast, lake-littered forests close to the Russian-Finnish border, the moon is a violent thing. I stepped out of our cabin one clear night at 2. 30 am and there they were; long, sinister shadows cast by the silvery light in the sky, the mud and the shacks of the little settlement shimmering in a ghostly pallour.

This moon is a strange creature; the shadows it casts in our imaginations vary wildly between different people and cultures. My favourite dictionary definition of all time, from the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), is the superbly lazy description of the horse as a Beast well-known. A little unfair to horses, perhaps, but reasonably accurate. The moon, on the other hand, may be described as a Beast unknown.

Let's look at the evidence. The Polish anti-Stalinist poet Antoni Słonimski, with a healthy dose of Central European idealism, saw the moon as possessing great symbolic value. It was the last outpost of purity in a world that was both politically and morally corrupt. In his poem, 'In Defence of the Moon', he urges:

Let the moons turn unchanged in their courses

Let the sky, at least, remain pure

John Keats, on the other hand, saw the moon as the head of a sort of celestial royal family. His famous 'Ode to a Nightingale' states, with satisfaction:

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays

Beautiful words, and I think of them often as I gaze up at that Buckingham Palace in the sky. But trust the British to put everything into a hierarchy!

My favourite, however, will always be the wandering Tang Dynasty poet and scholar Li Po, one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. As he spent his life roving around the enchanted forests of ancient China, he saw the moon as a friend and a drinking companion. He had only to lean up against a tree with a cup of white wine, look up at the heavens and he would be in good company.

I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For her, with my shadow, will make three people.

Plenty to mull over, then, as I sit here back in St. Petersburg typing up my notes on this Beast unknown; no, the Beast unknowable. Outside the window is the noise and the glow of the big city, the glare of the misleading electric lights. Here, too, we cannot quite trust what we see. What was it that Nikolai Gogol, St. Petersburg's own glorious weirdo, warned us all those years ago?

Beware the hours of darkness, when the devil himself lights the streetlamps in order to show everything in a false light.

But that's another story.