Episode written & produced by Ross Sutherland

Voice: Ross Sutherland

Transcribed by Sathya Honey Victoria

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 Imaginary Advice, Episode 49

Re: The Moon

Hey look, it’s…the moon!

[sound of the moon - eep!]

Did you know that the moon is thought to be about 4.51 billion years old? Did you know that? If you don’t know what the moon is, it’s the only astronomical body that orbits planet Earth. It’s our only permanent natural satellite, guys, so, yeah. It’s kind of a big deal, actually.

If you’re not familiar with it, I’d really appreciate you doing me a solid and checking it out.

Did you also know, um, moon lovers, did you also know that the 17th century poet Matsuo Basho said that we should think of a haiku kinda like a finger pointing at the moon. [eep!]

But, he said, you gotta make sure that you don’t put too many jewels on your finger, cos then people stop looking at the moon and start looking at the finger instead.

See, it’s meant to be a poetry lesson about keeping your writing simple and honest. And it’s nice, isn’t it? I really like that quote.

I mean, Basho probably never actually said this though it is still attributed to him all the time.

There’s not a huge amount of monks with bejewelled fingers wandering around back in Basho’s day, Edo Period Japan. Wouldn’t really have been a relatable analogy.

The real origin of the quote is probably the American haiku writer James W. Hackett from his 1964 book of haikus.

But it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Doesn’t matter whose finger it is. Basho’s or Hackett’s. Because…we’re not meant to be looking at the finger, are we? We’re supposed to be looking at the moon.

[intriguing music]

We have to look past language, past the person who says it and try to imagine the thing beyond, right?

I teach poetry classes from time to time with all different ages. From about 5 years old on up. I teach in schools and prisons, hospitals…First exercise I do in pretty much every single class I teach, no matter who they are or how old they are, I ask them to describe the moon.

Everyone can learn something from this exercise, I think.

“Write a list of metaphors” I say, “The Moon is an…[adjective] + [noun].”

Robotic voice: The moon is a dark record.

The moon is a blue church.

The moon is a haunted inflatable.

Now of course, the moon is kind of a poetic cliche. It’s a pretty hackneyed romantic subject but in many ways that makes it the perfect place to start, particularly for an unsure writer, someone anxious about the rules and systems of poetry. 

It’s easy to be tricked into believing a poem arrives in the writer’s mind all at once, fully formed, rather than through, you know, fucking around, which is the truth. And is there a better place to fuck around than the moon?

Robotic voice: The moon is a sad bassist.

You see, the moon has a kind of powerful gravitational field (obviously not in real life, of course) but in poetry it does. In poetry, the moon draws in concepts, it draws in language. Words just seem to stick to the moon. 

I maintain that a poet can pretty much compare the moon to anything, and the reader will read that line and think to themselves, “Oh yeah, I kinda see what they’re getting at.”

Robotic voice: The moon is a time-lapse mouth.

The moon is an Aztec supermarket.

It’s almost as if, through centuries of art and attention and manipulation we’ve exaggerated the moon so much that we’ve broken it in our brains! And now it’s just this open figurative channel. The moon is a, it’s a kind of open goal. Oh, there’s another one!

When doing this exercise with students there’s one other condition that I insist upon. I ask my students to select their adjectives and nouns not from their imagination but from the world around them. They have to open a dictionary on a random page or another type of book on another page or choose a word from a recent text message or a word overheard on the radio or the playground. Not from the same source either. I want them to be putting together two words from two different sources. One source for the adjective. One for the noun.

I’m trying to encourage them to act first, think later, to work intuitively and to use their environment as an extension of their imagination. [chuckles] I also want them to smash together words that don’t really belong together to create sparks and confusion to create a brand new, never-before-uttered description of the moon, no matter if on first glance it just feels like gibberish.

Despite the excessive commentary that already covers the moon it is still possible to say something new about it. 

Robotic voice: The moon is a Roman floppy disk.

The moon is a feline sitcom.

The moon is a Hebrew kingpin.

So I’ve done workshops like this about once a week [laughing] for about like 17 years, so I can go all day if you want. I’ve got reams of this stuff in folders next door.

Robotic voice: The moon is a ubiquitous chairman.

Sometimes in class we take it further. I might ask the class, “So, this description of a moon here: if this line was the first line of a story, what kind of story would it go on be?”

Or, “if I was to say to you, ‘on the day that I was born, the moon was a dead travel agent’ …what kind of person would I be? What kind of horrific person would I be?”

But-but I insist, like, we don’t start thinking about any of that until after the line is written. First, we write it, then we work out what it means. First: the accident, then: the autopsy. 

No matter what goes onto the page it always seems to make sense in the end. It always seems to make sense. At least, to my ears it does.

That’s how powerful the moon is! Everywhere you point—there’s the moon.

[music continues]

Now, language is elastic, I know that. We can stretch any metaphor pretty far before it breaks. But I think the moon is particularly suited to these kinds of manipulations. Every pool of water reflects it, after all, but it’s always the same moon. [eep!] 

I don’t think Basho would like this very much, however. He was trying to encourage us to speak plainly and honestly.

But you gotta remember Basho is writing at the start of poetry. At least, relatively at the start of poetry. The moon is so new back then in Edo Period Japan. The moon’s still got that, that fresh car smell. Back then, the moon is still pure. It’s 100% proof. Perhaps, the idea of speaking honestly and plainly about the moon still felt possible then. At least, it felt like something to aspire to.

But that was back before millions of people lifted their ridiculous bejewelled fingers up to the sky and claimed the moon as their own. 

Robotic voice: [overlapping, unintelligible descriptions of the moon]

[record scratch] Somewhere in that endless attack…I think we broke the moon. We pointed at it so much that it-it kind of became everything.

And I find that interesting. And useful for poetry, sure. But I mean, it makes me nervous too. Because [chuckles nervously] I mean, I don’t know if I want this phenomenon to spread further. I don’t want to believe that if we talk long enough about anything we end up breaking it somehow. 

Basho lost the moon, but I don’t want him to give up on everything else.

It’s unsettling to imagine a world where we can no longer speak plainly on anything. Where all of us are weighed down with borrowed jewels, all of language now glittering like an incomprehensible rap video.

In a world like that it’s no longer the moon that’s broken: it’s the finger.

This would be a world where anything could be considered a metaphor for anything else and any semblance of “meaning” will only arrive later as an afterthought.

I guess I’m saying I like the moon but…yeah, I wouldn’t want to live there.

[ethereal music]

Robotic voice: The moon is an obvious nickname.

The moon is a photocopied lake.

The moon

The moon

The moon

The moon

The moon

The moon

The moon

The moon

[repeats until it becomes unintelligible, beating like a heartbeat]

________________________________________

[forest sounds]

Monroe’s was surrounded on all sides by forest.

Perhaps this is why the obsession began, birthed from a kind of claustrophobia. A feeling that the school occupied a borrowed space. A clearing that should never have been.

[eerie, beautiful music]

Apparently, when the school first opened, the trees began right at the gates: dense pines that bar-coded the sunlight at home-time. At least, that was how I imagined it.

By the time I came to Monroe’s, the school had expanded the clearing a mile in every direction. [driving on a country road] The road approach felt desolate now: just blackened tree stumps and debris, the school sat squat at the centre of it all.

The teachers said that the forest had been cleared for an expansion. Some said, “new sport centre.” Others said, “new science block.” But we all knew, [chuckles] nothing would ever be built there. It was simply a way to hold back the forest. To expose any creature that emerged from it.

[school bell - children chattering in corridor]

The forest was still visible though. That jagged green horizon, you could never erase it completely. [beautiful eerie music continues]

We’d often catch teachers, mid-class at the window, their minds lost inside it.

[heartbeat from the moon]

[mysterious music]

My friends who went to other schools were jealous of us Monroe boys as we had an extra day off, once a month. 

On this day, we were supposed to stay in our homes. Under a kind of voluntary house arrest. Teachers called the holiday “Radiator Day” because our parents were supposed to chain us to our bedroom radiators. Only one or two parents actually complied. Nevertheless, the rest of us had to keep a low profile. The school had eyes in the community.

Because the lunar cycle doesn’t tally exactly with the calendar, Radiator Day tended to oscillate. Sometimes it was the 14th, sometimes it was the 15th. You had to be absolutely certain every month [moonbeat] because any pupil that approached the school on Radiator Day would be shot on sight. The school had built a special tower for the caretaker to sit with his rifle. [forest sounds - moonbeat]

[sound cuts out - knocking on door]

Just after I started at Monroe’s I remember there was a big school meeting with all the parents there too. The school had decided to ban all white circular objects from the school. 

[dreamy music]

From then on, the plates in the cafeteria were pink and square, like the plastic lids of Tupperware boxes. The school had always been vegetarian, but from then on, other foods began to disappear from the menu: spaghetti hoops, pineapple rings, bread rolls…

There were no more ball sports in PE. Running was still allowed, but the circular track was replaced by a straight line.

Swimming continued until the following year, when a parent wrote in to say that all bodies of water are tidal, even if the tide is imperceptible in small waters. Even baths were in conversation with the moon. 

Luckily, the school still let us take showers. 

[music continues]

In my third year, morning register was moved outside. We would line up on the school field in alphabetical order. After calling our name, Teacher would throw a stick.

It wasn’t simply to see if anyone in the class would actually run and collect the stick. It was to examine any reaction to the stick whatsoever. It was very important that we didn’t look at the stick, that we didn’t acknowledge the existence of the stick at all. We had to look nonchalant whilst staying absolutely rooted to the spot. Looking casual was hard under such intense scrutiny. Several boys from my class ended up removed for further examination. 

Regulation hair was no longer than 1 centimetre. Our fingernails had to be cut half a centimetre below the tip of the finger. Also: no pupil at Monroe’s had incisors. Part of our induction day involved a visit to the on-site dentist. Pupils who got red-flagged could lose even more teeth. Kevin Eddleston in the year above us ended up having all his teeth pulled after a prank. 

There were a couple of rumours around Kevin Eddleston’s prank, but the school rarely succumbed to gossip. The school had prohibited friendship groups larger than three pupils as way to combat “pack mentality,” as they called it.

Friends were assigned to us at random by the faculty. I got Gareth Shubb, who wore square spectacles and performed one-man Blackadder episodes for us beneath the caretaker’s sniper tower. My other assigned friend was Carl Jibbons, whose mother had shaved every hair off his body, so he looked like some kind of grey stress-toy.

In my fourth year, wheels were added to the blacklist. Both cars and bikes were prohibited from approaching the school. Once inside the clearing, Carl, Gareth and I had to lock our bikes and complete the final mile on foot.

Possibly of all the changes this was the addition that aggrieved us the most. Teenage boys hate unnecessary walking. We hated the walking even more than the detention cages they built behind the sports hall or the blackout windows they installed to block out the sun. “Essentially, it’s just a hot version of the moon,” said Mr. Kenwood. “It could trigger any one of you. Then where would we be?”

Over time, we could feel the school transforming, extending itself. Filling with shadows. The voices of teachers began to tremble, their eyes red from lack of sleep. Every week they found new ways to be terrified of us. The imagination was breath-taking.

[music ends - strange void ringing]

________________________________________

[rain]

On Radiator Days, Gareth and I began to cycle into the forest, rucksacks heavy with cider. Sometimes we’d approach the edge of the clearing and howl into Gareth’s dad’s megaphone [howwwwwl] just to fuck with the caretaker. [yapping and howling - rifle shots in the distance] He’d let off a couple of blind shots, nothing more.

Carl would have been there too if not stuck at home handcuffed to the plumbing. He would have loved it more than any of us.

[music] By our final year, Gareth and I had actually formed our own choir. Radiator Ensemble, we called ourselves.

There were twelve of us at our strongest. We’d drink ourselves out of our minds, strip to our waists, roll in mud, we’d skitter around on all fours yapping at squirrels, then howl at the school from the edge of the forest. We sounded like a warped doo-wop record.

[moonbeat]

Most of Radiator Ensemble never made it to graduation. Teachers found dirt under their nails or scratches on their face. Gareth ended up muzzled. I graduated in a class of four.

I got my certificate though. Which is the really important part. I moved abroad soon after. 

As I understand it, Monroe’s isn’t there anymore. They blew it up and then uh, they turned it into a lake. [moonbeat continues in background - music] 

Sometimes though, I look up and for a second I’m right back there. Aged nine, lined up for register on that dark October morning when Kevin Eddleston came bursting through the school fence on a quad bike. This huge battery-powered spotlight glowing on his lap, almost as big as him, Kevin Eddleston. Blasting that huge perfect circle of light across us, the kind of light that hits you in a play just before the closing monologue.

The snarl of the quad bike as the circle grew bigger and bigger, Kevin laughing and howling and laughing. And then all of us running with him, chasing him as he circled the school field, round and around we went. Wherever that light beam pointed we would have followed. 

[music cuts]

________________________________________

[sentimental Moonriver instrumental]

Robotic voice: O o o o o o o.

[intriguing music plays again]

Frosty boys bosh shots of scotch on London’s soft common, 

Rock off to soppy mono toss, 

Lost songs of London, Town of Bop! 

No motor, no lolly, no job to mock, 

from tons of pot down to Jon’s bong only 

(too strong for Tony, only Tony don’t know so). 

Gordon’s cold brown cosh of old hotdog now looks so good

Tony scoffs lot; sods off to look for Polos. 

Johnny shows Gordon how to body-pop; 

slow Robocop foxtrot 

to Bobby Brown, Snoop Dog, Whoompf! by Clock. 

Now two o’clock: Tony growls bon mot torch songs 

from London’s soft throng of woods; 

lost moth for God’s two moons. 

Poor Tony looks down, drops Pollock on both boots. [violent retching] 

[music continues] On plots so holy, old dogs poo boldly. 

Goons do loops of blocks, too cold for words. 

Gordy pops bon bons. Jon spots Bono. [soft gasp] 

Both gobs go ‘O.’

________________________________________

[IMAGINARY ADVICE]

So, finishing today with a style of poem known as a univocalism. That’s a poem that only contains one vowel in this case, obviously, the vowel was O.

Thanks for listening to this episode. Um, I’m doing some more live editions of the podcast over the summer. I’m at Latitude Festival, Green Man, Port Eliot and Edinburgh Book Festival. Plus doing shows in Bristol, Manchester and Norwich. You can check the dates and details on my website. That’s www.imaginaryadvice.com. The dates are also on the Facebook Group Imaginary Advice Podcast. You can also find me on email at Rossgordonsutherland@gmail.com. On on Twitter, @RossGSutherland.

I make this podcast all on my own, [laughs] I write and record and edit it. It takes a huge amount of time and resources! If you’d like to help lighten the load you can support me through Patreon. That’s Patreon, patreon.com/rossgsutherland.

If you already support me through Patreon, thank you so much! You make this possible. You are the-the-the hilarious cat video that leaves me crying tears of joy in the grim bus station of my life. So, thanks for that.

I’ll be back soon. You have been listening to Imaginary Advice.