The Moon

This face of the Moon, found in the natural configuration of rocks on a shore, is an example of pareidolia - a phenomenon in which one mistakes random visual information for some kind of real object or person. When turned clockwise, the barnacle-covered sea-stone at the bottom edge of the picture becomes the terrifying visage of an Ancient One. His is the most frightening face I can imagine. The face transforms into a monument left by a giant race of Precursors - like the Watchers of Genesis: the Nephilim. I imagine this face on a distant planet or buried beneath Antarctic ice, waiting to be discovered. The full horror of our ancestry will confront us. All those things we perhaps thought we saw at night in the desert are Real.

When I was a child we lived in the desert. My parents had an old 1957 Plymouth Fury with a space behind the back seat--a shelf beneath the slanted rear window on which I would lie as a child, looking up at the starry sky on Moonlit nights. One night we were returning home across the desert. In the vast distant darkness still-darker silhouettes of cacti and looming tree shadows rotated past the windows of our car. The Moon followed our car as it raced across the desert. We drove for over an hour, over hills and around curves; turned to follow other desert roads and always the Moon hovered just over my head outside the back window of the car.

Later in life, in another desert, I noticed the moon in the sky. I drove for hours in the night and found that the moon had its own course and did not follow me at all. This realization foregrounded, suddenly, the strangeness of the Moon's behaviour that night when I was a child. That early Moon, so huge too, much larger than our satellite could ever be.

That childhood Moon, or Watcher and this Ancient Watcher of Stone are of two different species. My memories only clarify for me their very distinctness. I was never afeared of the following Moon, in fact it was a comforting protector, but this stone Moon, with its Void-eye is an annihilating Entity, something that is all-annihilating, that is as old as space itself and as brute and insentient.