Chang'e, Chinese Goddess of the Moon · Female Voice

Let your eyes close.

Wherever you are lying tonight, let the bed take your weight.

You do not have to be anywhere else for the next few hours. Some part of you has been trying to be somewhere else all day.

Let your breath out. All the way out.

And again. Slower this time.

Now notice something. You are alone in this room, and the room is quiet, and the quiet is the exact thing that has been hard.

I am not going to tell you it is not hard.

Some nights the quiet is rest, and some nights the quiet is just the absence of one particular voice, and you can tell the difference immediately.

Let your shoulders come down away from your ears.

Nothing in this room is asking you to be cheerful about anything tonight.

Tonight I want to tell you about someone who ended up further from the people she loved than any other figure I know of in any mythology.

She has been up there for more than two thousand years of written record. And the interesting part is not how she got there. It is what everybody down here slowly decided to do about her.

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Her name is Chang'e. She lives on the moon.

To get to her you have to start with the archer. The old texts say there was a time when ten suns rose into the sky at once. Not one of them taking its turn, which was the arrangement. All ten together. The Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Huainanzi both carry pieces of this, and the picture they give is of a world being cooked.

A man with a bow shot nine of them out of the sky. The earliest sources call him Yi, though you will usually hear Hou Yi now, and those were probably two different men who got run together over the centuries. He left one sun, which is the one you have, and that is the only reason anybody survived to tell it.

He was the most capable man in the story, and it did not protect him from what happens next. The one who solved a problem the size of the sky still ended up standing in a courtyard, looking up.

For bringing down the suns, Yi was given something. The texts call it the drug of deathlessness, and he did not simply find it lying about. He went and asked for it, from the Queen Mother of the West.

She is worth a sentence. In the oldest descriptions she is not gentle at all. The Classic of Mountains and Seas gives her tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail and says she presides over catastrophe. The serene, beautiful version came much later. Remember that, because this tradition does it constantly.

Now, there are two versions of what happens next, and they are not from the same era.

The one most people tell now is the kind one. A man comes to steal the drug while Yi is out, and Chang'e swallows it herself to keep it away from him, and her going to the moon is a sacrifice she makes for everybody else.

That version is late.

The Huainanzi was put together around the second century before the common era, and what it says is very short and very cold. It says she stole it, and fled to the moon.

That is the whole account. A handful of characters. No reason given. Nothing about what she was afraid of, or what he had done, or whether she meant to come back.

The oldest thing ever written down about her is an accusation with no defence attached to it.

She does not even keep her name. The older form of it is Heng E. It got changed later because an emperor was called Heng, and you did not go around using an emperor's name. Accused, unexplained, and quietly renamed.

And it gets worse before it gets better.

There is a text from the second century of the common era called the Lingxian, by Zhang Heng, an astronomer and mathematician who built the first instrument that could detect a distant earthquake.

He records that before she went, she had her fortune told. She took the omen. It came back auspicious. And she went.

And then he writes that when she arrived, she became a toad.

That is the ancient version. Not a beautiful woman in silk on a silver disc. A thief who checked the omens first, and was a toad by the time she landed.

Now stay with me, because here is the part that matters. They did not leave her like that.

Over the next two thousand years the tradition slowly, without anybody deciding it, made her kinder.

The toad faded out. The theft acquired a reason. The reason became sympathetic. And by the time you reach the poems and the festival she is not a thief at all. She is the most beautiful and the most alone figure in the sky, and people are writing to her.

A whole civilisation looked at a woman by herself in the dark, for twenty centuries, and kept quietly revising the story in her favour.

I do not know a better argument against the voice you get at two in the morning.

Because that voice tells you the harshest available version of what you did is the true one, on the grounds that it came first.

It came first. That is the only thing that is true about it.

She is not entirely alone up there, though it took a while.

There is a rabbit. In the Han dynasty the moon already carries both a toad and a rabbit, and the rabbit is pounding something in a mortar. Later tellings make it the drug itself, ground out forever.

And there is a man with an axe. Wu Gang, a good deal later than she is, out of a Tang dynasty collection of strange stories. He was set to cutting down a cassia tree on the moon, sometimes given as an osmanthus, and the tree heals itself as fast as he can cut it. He has been swinging at it ever since.

Nobody planned any of that. Over centuries, people looking at the same bright thing kept adding to what was on it. And what they kept adding was company. A rabbit that works. A man who never finishes.

A woman who has been there longest.

None of them can leave. And none of them are alone.

And then there is the festival, which is the part I actually want you to have tonight.

The Mid Autumn Festival falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when the moon is at its fullest and brightest of the whole year. This year it lands in the last week of September, a few days from now.

It became a real festival in the Tang and the Song. Not ancient, exactly. About a thousand years of it.

And the thing at the centre of it is reunion. That is the actual word. The families come together, the cakes are round, the moon is round, and the roundness is the point.

Now think about who needs a festival like that. Not people who live in the same house. They do not need a night appointed for it.

A festival of reunion is built by, and for, people who are apart. That is the only kind of person for whom the idea carries any weight at all. The whole occasion exists because of distance.

Somebody is always missing from that table.

In the year ten seventy six, a poet called Su Shi sat up drinking on the night of the Mid Autumn moon.

He was a long way from home, and he had not seen his brother in about seven years.

He got thoroughly drunk, and he wrote a poem, and it is probably the most quoted Mid Autumn poem there is. Children still learn it.

Most of it is him arguing with the moon. He asks the sky when the moon first appeared, and what year it is up there. He gets irritated with it for being at its roundest and brightest on exactly the night when people are apart, which is a very human thing to be annoyed about.

And there is a line in the middle where the moon comes around the red pavilion, and stoops low at the silk draped door, and shines on the ones who cannot sleep.

He wrote that about you.

Then at the end he stops arguing, and lands somewhere else entirely. He writes that people have sorrow and joy, that they part and they meet again, and that the moon has its dark and its bright, it waxes and it wanes, and that this has never once been perfect in the whole history of it.

And then the line everybody knows.

He wishes that the people he loves will last a long time. And that though a thousand li lie between them, which is the old measure, and which really just means further than you want to think about, they can still share the same moon.

That is a man alone at a table, drunk, missing his brother, nine hundred and fifty years ago.

And what he arrived at was not that the distance was fine.

Because it is not fine. Let me say that plainly, since you already know it.

A shared view is not a person. It is not a hand, or a voice, or somebody in the next room. Nobody who ever missed anyone was consoled by astronomy.

So I am not offering you that. I am offering you something smaller and more usable.

There is exactly one object in your life that you and the person you are missing can both look at.

Not a photograph. Not a screen, which only shows you a picture of them. The same object, the actual thing itself, at the same time.

There has only ever been one. And it is up right now, whether you can see it or not.

You do not have to resolve anything with them to look at it. You do not have to be forgiven, or forgive, or have the conversation you have been rehearsing for weeks.

You just have to look up. That is the entire requirement.

Su Shi did it drunk and annoyed and nine hundred and fifty years ago, and it was enough to get him through the night.

The distance stays exactly the same size. It just stops being the only true thing about the two of you.

Now let me have your body, because you have been carrying this in it.

Let your hands open.

Feel the weight of your arms going down into the bed. Heavy. Nothing to hold on to.

Your shoulders coming down away from your ears. Further than that.

Your jaw coming apart. People who are missing somebody tend to hold it in the jaw. Let it come apart.

The small muscles around your eyes letting go. They have been working all day.

Let your forehead go smooth. Your throat soft.

Your chest rising and falling without you managing a single breath of it.

Your belly soft. Let it be soft.

Your lower back releasing down into the bed.

Your hips going heavy, and the long muscles of your legs.

Your knees. Your calves. Your ankles. And your feet, finally still.

All of it can stop now. There is nothing to be done about anybody tonight, and there was never going to be.

Here is what is true in this room right now.

You are warm. You are lying down. You are safe.

And somewhere the moon is up. Whether you can see it from your window. Whether it is cloudy. Whether it is broad daylight where they are.

It is up. It is the same one.

You do not have to feel better because of it. If it does not help tonight, it does not help tonight.

It is just a fact you are allowed to put your head down next to.

Let the room go soft at the edges.

Let the walls go a long way away. Let the ceiling go.

Let the sounds outside turn into weather. A car is only a sound. None of it is asking anything of you.

Let the thinking about them go. Not resolved. Just set down beside the bed, where it will still be in the morning.

She has been up there a very long time. The rabbit is still working. The tree is still healing itself as fast as it gets cut. Nobody up there is finished with anything either.

And the whole festival, the cakes and the lanterns and the round table, was built by people who could not get home. They did not fix it. They made a night of it, and looked up.

You are allowed to do the same, and then go to sleep.

Nothing is being asked of you.

Nobody needs you to be less far away tonight than you actually are.

Let it come up around you the way water comes up around a stone. Slowly. From underneath. With no effort from you at all.

Nothing needs you now.

Not until morning.

Rest is a practice.

You practised tonight.

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