"The moon is near the stars" a ten-year old student told me when I asked for a sentence with the word "moon". The perspective she was displaying immediately struck me. It was a novel thought, for me at least, because I know that the stars are nowhere near the moon. I tried to explain the relative distances of these celestial bodies from the earth, but my explanations were rebuffed. "No," I was told, "the stars only look far away, because they are smaller than the moon." Well, there you go. You only have to look up to see the truth for yourself.

What has been occupying my thoughts since that galactic exchange, is how our perspectives of things are altered by experience. There are times when these new perspectives are incredibly beneficial, but there are times when such new perspectives remove the element of magic from what were previously wondrous, inexplicable phenomena. A whole myth of green cheese and little lunar men gave way to the reality of a bare barren rock when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.

If the moon is near the stars the realms of possibility are often endless. Fairies live under mushrooms and wishes come true. We can play hopscotch on the stars, leaping excitedly from one twinkling adventure to the next. A million or so light years are no match for the unrestrained imagination. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci would have given me the same sentence as the ten-year old in my class. He constantly sought to change his perspectives of things, but always with the objective of moving the moon nearer to the stars.

In an age when imagination was dispelled as heretical, da Vinci imagined people flying or swimming under the sea with the fish. He seemed to live by the dictum that if it could be thought it was possible. As in those days, our time similarly dismisses imagination in favour of knowledge. We do everything we can to prove that the stars are really nowhere near the moon. What was once called naivete is now labeled stupidity and we rest content knowing that a mass of rock, devoid of wonder and mystery, orbits our earth.

Twinkle twinkle distant star
I don't wonder what you are;
And I know you're not so high,
Just some gas in another sky.

21 May 2002

Dion Marc Delport

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