From the moon to diplomacy

On a night when despite the light pollution the sky is clear and the moon is bright, and with my hopes held high like a plate on a pool cue and my mood ambitious, it seems only right I should be attending a screening later about those few brave men who have landed on the moon. (As I alight from the train, I remember the two trainee astronauts I met in the lusty south of the country across the ocean one time and thought were Buddhist monks.) One of the astronauts in the film stared to camera and recalled peering like a child out from the capsule, and how everything he knew, everyone he loved, everything he had ever been brought up to see as his world, he could now hide, conceal, block out, with his thumb. He could hold it out and make it all disappear - it was that small, that fragile, like an unsmudged smudge. It was obvious to another astronaut - like an epiphany, he said, a moment of ecstasy - that when he stared at the moon, the earth, and the sun, he knew, he just knew, he said, there was a major spiritual power out there responsible for all this. Not one of those religions we've created for ourselves in order to make our own kind of sense of the world, but a serious, all-knowing, immense, omnipresent tribal elder of a spiritual power. (Travelling home alone, I was thinking they were all like tribal elders now, these men of the moon, these wacky, far-sighted elders.) They had deep space in their eyes, the big picture. There was nothing small, dull, trivialist, consumerist, or just plain vain about them. In fact I was still thinking about them like this as I rocked and rocketed alone through the underworld on a silver train to my next destination, a talk given by a slightly different tribal elder, a shrewd and cunning man, but an elder all the same. He was talking about the war zone and special relationships, one special relationship in particular. (I thought of my own murmering.) I suppose if I had more time I could knit these two experiences - the men of the moon and the man of the world - into the one jumper. He was candid, unpublished, and at times shone the torch of experience and illuminated all manner of detail. Of his own people, correctly or incorrectly, he described them as poor on vision but good on pragmatics. (The opposite of the artist, I was thinking, who is good on vision but poor on pragmatics.) Later, as I placed all the different pieces together again in my mind, someone stared threateningly at me at the last station. I gently ignored them and stared at the moon, immediately transported. None of them along the line ...