By The Light of The Moon

This is a coincidence. Everything is a coincidence.

1. Glámr

In Old Norse, the language of the Icelandic sagas, glámr was a poetic way to refer to the moon and moonlight. In the light of the moon, everything is indistinct. Everything seems to be other than what it truly is. Someone with poor eyesight has glám-sýni.

Glámr was also the name of a monster—a shepherd’s hireling who committed the fatal sacrilege of eating food on Christmas Eve. In death, he becomes a terrifying draugr, who murders those he catches and curses those who escape. Glámr’s curse corrupts your vision forever, making you clumsy during the day and deathly afraid at night, when everything under the light of the moon looks to be something other, and worse, than what it is.

2. Glamer

Glámr, in its sense of illusion, seems to have crossed into the language of the Scottish highlanders. There, it merged with the word grammar, which back then was also considered dangerous and magical. A magic spell, after all, is just words arranged in the right order. Magic was gramarye. A spellbook was a grimoire.

(Clamor, a much older Latin word, might also have been an influence.)

A glamer, then, was a magic spell to create an illusion. Some travelers could cast them, as could faeries, with the aid of primroses. You could defend against them by wearing a four-leaf clover. This sense, and the modern spelling of the word, were immortalized by Sir Walter Scott in 1805 in his Lay of the Last Minstrel.

A moment then the volume spread,
And one short spell therein he read:
It had much of glamour might;
Could make a ladye seem a knight;
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall
Seem tapestry in lordly hall;
A nut-shell seem a gilded barge,
A sheeling seem a palace large,
And youth seem age, and age seem youth:

All was delusion, nought was truth.

3. Glamour

Glamour soon began to take on a more metaphorical meaning in English. Glamour was a quality that made things seem better, or more real, than they were. You could perceive someone as perfect and superhuman thanks to the glamour of young love. Poetry and fiction were often described as creating a glamour surrounding their subjects—Washington Irving glamorized ordinary towns in New York State with stories like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

People became increasingly glamour-positive. Here’s the conclusion of an essay about optimism, published in 1896:

Such is the important part played by this mystic glamour which Nature kindles, and which Art and Poetry make it their business to sustain. Of course, the objection may be made that this glamour after all is an illusion, and therefore, should be discouraged and not fostered. But to this there is a sufficient answer. It may be called an illusion, but it is also a reality. It is an important factor in human nature, without which there could be no rapture in childhood, no enthusiasm and hope in youth, and no pleasant reminiscences in old age. And in conclusion, let it be asked: Which of the two is really the truer : the fact with the mystic glamour upon it or the fact without the mystic glamour upon it—the fact as seen by a highly organised intellect or the fact as apprehended by a dull mind—Wordsworth’s idea of a primrose or that of Peter Bell—Newton’s theory of the Universe or that of his dog Diamond?

The last line there gets better if you recognize that Peter Bell and Diamond are themselves glamers: the former is a character invented by Wordsworth, the latter probably apocryphal. Legends of Newton’s dog Diamond, in fact, were popularized by the same Sir Walter Scott who brought the word glamour into English. I’m not sure that Wordsworth’s idea of a primrose was really “truer” than that of a random non-poet, or that a dog perceives a less-rich world than a physicist does. But a concept in the mind of a fictional character is a shadow of a shadow.

Glamour is still an illusion, even today, but it’s a consensual one. Celebrities have glamour if, and only if, we decide that they do. We all agree to make them feel larger than life. We airbrush out their pores and stream their images to people they’ll never meet.

4. Glomar

In 1974, the Global Marine Development corporation, owned by the prototypical tech billionaire Howard Hughes, first deployed its Hughes Glomar Explorer, a deep-sea mining ship, named for Hughes and a contraction of Global Marine. Its official purpose was to mine manganese, a metal that’s rare on land but common on the ocean floor. This was probably a lie from the start. In fact, the Glomar was funded and operated by the CIA. An advanced Soviet missile submarine had sunk, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, six years earlier. The Soviets had very visibly failed to retrieve it, so the CIA thought they’d take a shot.

(Incidentally, people are still talking about mining manganese from the ocean floor, then not actually doing it. The main problem, other than the risk of destroying a unique biome we don’t even know exists, is that manganese nodules are usually about the size and shape of a potato. Engineers are still working on adapting the designs of potato harvesting tools such as the Potato Spinner.)

Photo by Des Colhoun via Wikimedia, CC-By-SA 2.0.

Glomar entered the dictionary when the CIA deployed its first ever “we can neither confirm nor deny” about this covert salvage mission, which (the public eventually learned) was partially successful. A “Glomar response” or “glomarization” is a way of hiding information without lying or inadvertently revealing it. If the CIA had answered “that’s classified,” that would give away that the Glomar was doing something classified. “We can neither confirm nor deny,” if it’s used consistently, prevents that kind of negative-space information leak. At worst, it lets us all agree to pretend we don’t know.

5. Glimmer

The word glimmer evolved alongside glamour. They’re both ultimately derived (probably) from the same lost word for faint light, making them technically “doublets,” words with the same etymology and different meanings. Glamour is the effect of faint light, but a glimmer is the light itself. Glimpse is a similar story—the same origin, separate evolution, slightly different meaning.

Glimmer has recently taken on a new metaphorical meaning, as the counterpart of the modern meaning of trigger. A PTSD trigger is a real sensory experience that creates an illusion—you feel like you’re back in one of your worst moments, or even believe that you are. A glimmer is the same thing, except it transports you to a moment of calm. Light shining through leaves, say. If most of your nature experiences have been peaceful, nature is calming.

6. Au Clair de la Lune

The first person to record himself singing never knew it could be played back. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French scientist, invented the “phonautogram,” a device that transcribed sound waves into scratches on glass. He doesn’t seem to have thought of the idea of reversing the process; turning the scratches back into sound. He imagined people learning to sight-read the scratches and recognize words, not hearing the voices.

But on a long-enough timescale, information is information. The embodiment doesn’t matter. And so, the oldest known audio recording is of a man slowly and distinctly singing a traditional French children’s song about having spontaneous sex with your friend’s neighbor. Odd subject matter for a lullaby, but if you associate it with calm moments, who cares about the entendre?

Au Clair de la Lune is fitting as the first true auditory glamer. The title translates to “by the light of the moon,” just as the Icelandic glámr does. It’s used in the same way, to evoke seeing things indistinctly.

Au clair de la Lune
On n’y voit qu’un peu.
On chercha la plume.
On chercha le feu.

By the moon’s light
There’s not much we can know.
They sought to write.
They sought to spark a glow.

7. Truth

What can we see clearly by the light of the moon, but in daylight only dimly?

In Peter Bell, Wordsworth describes how limited his protagonist’s perspective is.

He rov’d among the vales and streams,
In the green wood and hollow dell;
They were his dwellings night and day,—
But Nature ne’er could find the way
Into the heart of Peter Bell.

In vain, through every changeful year,
Did Nature lead him as before;
A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.

But what was a primrose to Wordsworth? At age 28, finally living his best life, he wrote that primroses felt peace and joy.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

Ten years later, mourning his brother’s death, he wrote that primroses died and were resurrected every year.

Once more I welcome Thee, and Thou, fair Plant,
Fair Primrose, hast put forth thy radiant Flowers
All eager to be welcomed once again.
O pity if the faithful Spring beguiled
By her accustomed hopes had come to breathe
Upon the bosom of this barren crag
And found thee not; but Thou art here, revived

Much later, contemplating his own mortality, he reminded himself not to be jealous of the primrose’s annual resurrection, as his own afterlife would be even better.

I sang-Let myriads of bright flowers,
Like Thee, in field and grove
Revive unenvied;-mightier far,
Than tremblings that reprove
Our vernal tendencies to hope,
Is God's redeeming love;

To Peter Bell, a yellow primrose is a yellow primrose “and nothing more.” To Wordsworth’s pen, the primrose is, in a way, something less—it loses its color. Wordsworth’s other poems about primroses don’t establish their colors (primroses can be many different ones)—only his spiritually numb character sees the yellow. Wordsworth drains his flowers of their particularities. This is essential to his metaphor; the primrose that grows in the same place each year is, visibly, not the same primrose. But in the pale light of moon and memory, one can imagine that it is.

By the light of the moon, it’s easier to see what we want to see. Facts neither confirmed nor denied may be chosen freely. It’s an illusion, but a true one, in the same way a mirror is. It externalizes the viewer, projects them onto a place where they aren’t, allowing them to see themselves.

Lack of detail is generality, abstraction. And in generality is power. I can only imagine what Wordsworth would have made of de Martinville’s experiments, where he “reduces” music to mere two-dimensional scratches on blackened glass. But that reduction was really an elevation from substance to data. de Martinville was etching his own voice onto glass, without knowing it. Achieving immortality by the light of the moon.