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What happened outside of my classmates bore greater interest than what happened within them. This trend held true through my tenth year high school reunion and beyond. Results of a decade milestone survey were published alongside pictures of attendees. By then superglue had been invented, but to no avail. Eventually organizers caught on, because the writing prerequisite was dropped from future reunions to the relief of many. I was always an exception. On an unrelated occasion, while I helped my eldest sister move, Mary’s husband Steve said to me, “When taking something heavy, put something light on top.” He could have been describing the writing style I tried to cultivate from the beginning: deep and entertaining.
The youngest of four siblings, by the time I was born my eldest sister and brother had mastered sarcasm. So from the get go I had to understand hidden meanings to learn language. For example, on my eighteenth birthday the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified. That tells you something about me, but only indirectly. My first insight in writing compelling compositions was a knack for identifying lousy sentences. To unblock my muse, I struggled to fashion catchy beginnings. I modeled my compositions on stories with surprise endings, not lists, and I loathed lists of boring sentences.
Our composition teacher made overtures to inspire her students. She granted us personal choice from five new titles to spark each assignment. Typically one and only one title ever appealed to me. “What I Saw on the Moon” remains the only topic I retain as a distinct memory. Since at that time nobody had yet been to the moon, I contrived a story wrapper introducing a relative of mine, from the future, who communicated through me what he saw on the moon. Then in my conclusion I woke up, as if from a dream.
In-between, I described a creature. My brother authored the description and deserves full credit. His curiosity overcame him during a writing break at dinnertime. He read my incomplete story up to the point where the creature appeared. Following my brother’s suggestion, the creature “pranced about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator.” You might think this tells a whole lot more about my brother than the creature, but I’d wager you couldn’t be too sure. My brother was an avid viewer of the Steve Allen Show. With audience participation, the TV host often constructed what we now call Mad Libs, although I prefer to call them Allenisms, which rhymes with Aneurysms. That’s as far as I’ll go in trying to explain my brother.
But notice the description. The creature “pranced about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator.” It does nothing to convey the creature’s appearance; rather it describes its behavior. So from the creature’s description you can’t picture it. Surprise! In fact it’s incomprehensible, which is the point. After all, what’d you expect to see on the moon? At face value, no pattern exists in the choice of words. This is the random nature of Allenisms. But order does exist in the parts of speech, which is the structural integrity underlying Allenisms. What an Allenism is missing is any sensible context connecting the choice of words. It’s the random words that stand out, attracting attention initially, and subsequently for those totally lacking in mental discipline.
Throwing away the words and filling in the blanks, consistent with the surrounding context, reveals the hidden meaning disguised by Allenisms. Communication is the art of synchronizing thoughts and emotions with other people in a common context. But often the context isn’t understood, so miscommunication occurs. The allure of Allenisms is that they return us to the state of childhood, when parents purposely spelled words out loud to communicate in code what wasn’t meant for children’s enquiring minds. Even to adults, Allenisms sometimes sound suggestive and appeal to our sense of adult content, a nearly lost art of growing up.
People spell the word “cookie” in front of their dogs to avoid the conditioned Pavlovian response. Dogs don’t understand context, and I haven’t yet met a dog that could spell. Persuasion is the art of discovering what means “cookie” to other people, then embedding it inside self-serving contexts. As Napoleon Bonaparte phrased it, “You can get a man to do practically anything for a small piece of colored ribbon.”
Allenisms are related to idiomatic expressions, which exist within shared linguistic and cultural contexts, e.g. like a fish out of water, like a cat on a hot tin roof. These examples describe distressing circumstances. Useful as shortcuts, they communicate feelings of frustration, a condition often hard to express in words. In a sense they’re euphemisms, strange yet familiar stand-ins for difficult emotions. Cross breeding idiomatic expressions might produce Allenisms, of a sort, e.g. like a fish on a hot tin roof, like a cat out of water. But Allenisms must be incomprehensible and without discernible context, the placeholders of hidden meaning. Valid contexts differentiate idiomatic expressions from Allenisms. One way to mentally bridge this gap is to rediscover a lost context, e.g. my classmates adopted the status quo of conformity and avoidance like a cat out of water, whereas I was driven by a thirst for emergence and immersion like a fish on a hot tin roof.
Likewise, the creature’s description exhibits a context, albeit a private one. In my youth, elephant jokes were the rage. “How can you tell if an elephant has been in your refrigerator?” “By the footprints in the butter.” So a creature “prancing about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator” isn’t devoid of cultural significance, no matter how many raw impressions to the contrary. However, the creature’s description does contain ambiguities that confuse context, presenting a litmus test to readers. It’s not apparent whether the refrigerator prances about of its own volition, or whether some cause and effect relationship on the part of the elephant is responsible for this observed behavior.
What is apparent is that this frustrating configuration inhibits both the refrigerator and the elephant from becoming self-actualized. Some would blame the elephant for inhibiting the refrigerator, contradicting those who would blame the refrigerator for inhibiting the elephant, while still others would seek to analyze how the elephant got stuck in the refrigerator in the first place before fixing blame. Blame stems from exclusionary, cause and effect worldviews which I reject on rationally supportable grounds. A systems perspective serves my muse better. It requires that I try to wrap my mind around the whole problem space, while striving to see the big picture on the Tao to transcendence – not an easy task by any standard.
One way to make sense of the creature’s description is to think of the whole exercise as participating in the child’s game of telephone. Although it’s a given that the initial message is understandable, after passing through relays, the translation coming out the other end is distorted beyond recognition, with the original meaning being lost. But can its true meaning ever be reconstructed? In hindsight, I think it can. My past self’s future relative is the source of the creature’s description. Who is he? The straightforward evidence appears in the title, “What I Saw on the Moon.” Therefore, in a relativistic sense, my past self’s future relative is me in the present. My brother is my relative; and I am my brother’s relative, which accounts for my past self’s confusion.
The Apollo moon landings commenced when I was in high school. I watched them live on TV. The final moon mission concluded during my college years. I was surprised to hear rumors that the moon landings were faked, supposedly enacted on a secret sound stage someplace on earth. Even today students argue the flag was waving in the breeze. In a real vacuum on the moon, of course, it couldn’t. So, as the conspiracy theory goes, the whole thing must’ve been special effects. Therefore, according to doubters, it didn’t really happen.
I worked in Hollywood doing visual effects in the 1980s, and we didn’t have the technology to fake the moon landings then. High speed cameras would have been required to get the slow motion look of lower gravity. Back then this could only have been done with film, passing film through the camera faster than normal. But film to video transfer looks different than straight video, and the moon landings were broadcast in video. I’m convinced American ingenuity planted the flag on the moon. As for the waving of the flag, a pendulum will sustain its motion longer in a vacuum. It was just vibrations not wind. From my perspective, NASA’s Apollo missions accomplished their goal: to land men on the moon and bring them back safely.
Mythbusters Moon Myths
So how does my story end? Wake up. This isn’t a dream. The mysterious creature resides here on Earth, not on the Moon. The elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party, political puppet of wealthy special interests. Plutocracy and Capitalism are relics of Feudalism. The elephant is trapped in a class struggle, where no resolution will transform the sealed refrigerator into a coffin. To transcend this class struggle we must look at the creature from another perspective.
Here the refrigerator signifies a box, where brainstorming an exit strategy requires thinking outside the box. However, elephants learn to obey human masters. Shackled to a stake in the ground, a baby elephant learns to surrender all attempts at escape, because no amount of exertion can break free from the shackle, but circumstances change when a baby grows into an adult. In the new context, an adult elephant could easily pull up the stake and gain freedom, but the adult never questions the lesson learned as a baby. An elephant never forgets, despite the fact that insight could liberate the elephant from bondage. As imagined, I saw the whole spectacle from a distant time and place. Hence, novel insights expose hidden meanings and opportunities.
