ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Time: a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible….
and
desire and risk-taking…

‘The Distance of the Moon’ is a short story from Italo Calvino’s short story collection Cosmicomics, published in my Penguin Moderns edition with three other short stories:

• ‘Without Colours’
• ‘As Long as the Sun Lasts’
• ‘Implosion’

Cosmicomics was first published in 1965 in Italian, and translated into English in 1968. There were 12 stories in the collection, and Wikipedia tells me that:

Each story takes a scientific “fact” (though sometimes a falsehood by today’s understanding), and builds an imaginative story around it. An always-extant being called Qfwfq narrates all of the stories save two. Every story is a memory of an event in the history of the universe.

(I have not the faintest idea how to pronounce Qfwfq and would love to be enlightened by anyone who knows.)

There are, of course, learned analyses of ‘The Distance of the Moon’, and there is even a musical composition derived from the story but I’m going to confine myself noting the impulses of desire and risk-taking that emerged from my reading of it.

‘The Distance of the Moon’ derives from an outdated theory that millions of years ago the moon was much closer to the earth.  A distance that could be bridged… and humans did so, using a boat and a ladder.

(The story pre-dates the moon landing in 1969, but Calvino would have known about US President John F Kennedy’s announcement that they were aiming to send a man to the moon.)

The narrator, recalling past events, explains the fascination with the moon and how it was different then:

But the whole business of the Moon’s phases worked in a different way then: because the distances from the sun were different, and the orbits, and the angle of something or other, I forget what; as for eclipses, with Earth and Moon stuck together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, then the other.

Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it wuld huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while.  The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high that nobody could hold them back.  There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon risked a ducking in the sea by a hair’s breadth; well, let’s say a few yards anyway.  Climb up on the Moon?  Of course we did.  All you had to do was row out to it in a boat, and when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up. (p.1-2, see an artist’s visualisation here.)

Quite apart from the fascination with the Moon, people also go there to harvest ‘moon-milk.’  The narrator, (who by now we have realised is somewhat disingenuous) explains:

We went to collect the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket.  Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese,  It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next, through the fermentation of various bodies and substances of terrestrial origin which had flown up from the prairies and forests and lakes, as the Moon sailed over them.  It was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, moulds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue.  You only had to dip the spoon under the scales that covered the Moon’s scabby terrain, and you brought it out filled with that precious muck.  Not in the pure state, obviously; there was a lot of refuse.  In the fermentation (which took place as the Moon passed over the expanses of hot air above the deserts) not all the bodies melted; some remained stuck in it: fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fish-hooks, at times even a comb.  So this paste, after it was collected, had to be refined, filtered. (p.5-6)

They have an ingenious method for transporting it back to Earth:

We hurled each spoonful into the air with both hands, using the spoon as a catapult.  The cheese flew, and if we had thrown it hard enough, it stuck to the ceiling, I mean the surface of the sea.  Once there, it floated, and it was enough to pull it into the boat. (p.6)

So what is Calvino on about with this nonsense?  Well, yes, about how Time is in control, and we humans are not.  One day, our little planet will reach the end of its viable life, and that will be it.  We could stave off climate change, though there are no signs that the will to do it is universal enough, but whichever scientific theory you subscribe to, we cannot stave off the ultimate fate of the universe. So Calvino’s story reminds us that what seems permanent in our universe is not.  But our narrator is also on about something else.  He is not just collecting moon-milk; he is in love with the wife of the boat captain, who fancies someone else, the narrator’s cousin.

The narrator’s cousin is motivated by the purity of the cosmos. He is delighted by the Moon’s nearness, and his virtuosity in playing games with the moon is because he was unable to conceive desires that went against the Moon’s nature, the Moon’s course and destiny. At the moment of crisis when the Moon starts to move away, the captain’s wife has to make a choice: will she fulfil her desires?  How does her decision impact on the narrator’s chance of fulfilling his?

What risks are we willing to take to fulfil our desires?

BTW William Weaver also translated Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, (1979, see my review).

Update 15/8/23: I have since read the other stories in this edition: ‘Without Colour’ and ‘As Long as the Sun Lasts’. ‘Without Colour’ is melancholy: Qfwfq is alone on the earth before its colours have emerged, and he meets Ayl.  They explore their world together, discovering love as they do so.  But they are separated by cataclysmic geological events, bringing about an ending that reminded me of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Becky at Oulipo identifies the palindromic name as an oulipo element.

Author: Italo Calvino
Title: The Distance of the Moon
Translated by Martin McLaughlin (‘As Long as the Sun Lasts’), Tim Parks (‘Implosionj’) and William Weaver ‘The Distance of the Moon’ and ‘Without Colours’
Publisher: Penguin Moderns 2018, first published in Cosmicomics 1965
ISBN: 9780241339107, pbk., 56 pages
Source: Personal library