Products Are People Too
Image: My own photo, from a video installation at the Design Museum’s Archigram show, some years ago.
Next topic. When I started thinking about this, I went back to my science fiction. Sci-fi authors are exceptionally good at stretching and examining what it means to be human, which is why I started there. [I’ve previously spoken about Sci-fi I like.]
But I got distracted by this story in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. He’s speaking about the history of the Moon’s orbit:
‘There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed 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.’
They go up to the Moon to gather Moon-milk, which is to be found there.
And this is one of my favourite paragraphs because it’s so incredibly florid. This is at a tangent from my talk, but I’d like to read it out to you.
‘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, molds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue. You had only to dip the spoon under the scales that covered the Moon’s scabby terrain, and you brought it out filled with that precious muck.’
I don’t know why I like this story. Part of it is Calvino’s language, but a good deal of it is that I’m in love with the idea of the Moon.
I would love to go to the Moon.
Who would you like to go to the Moon? [Most!]
Just curious.