Reveal and conceal

Not all journalists are the same. H. L. Mencken, journalist extraordinaire, lived in the America of the first half of the 20th century. Our current politics of huge economic bail out packages and debate over American involvement in war bring Mencken to mind. He did not support the New Deal, nor American involvement in World War II.

Mencken is often referred to as the American Nietzsche. Like this German philosopher whom he loved, Mencken is known for his pithy, koan quotes. Let me share three:

"Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it."

"Explanations exist, they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every problem, neat, plausible, and wrong."

"We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine."

Moonshine is a word that Mencken probably loved. It is complex and provocative and insidious and dangerous. Like the moon itself, it has many faces. Moonshine can simply mean the light of the moon, said to have the power in the time of the moon's fullness to turn rational beings into lunatics. Or it can mean nonsense, like Mencken's here quoted notions of explanation and ordinary truth. Or perhaps the reference might be to the liquid intoxicant created by smugglers in the light of the moon and explained away as mere moonshine, really nothing, to those who came to enforce prohibition.

But this mere nothing moonshine, sought to reduce the mind to a less painful nothing, can be hazardous. Lead or glycol can contaminate from the still construction, or lye and methanolcan be added to create fallacious higher proofs. And these chemical invaders can cause blindness or death.

Moonshine conceals more than it reveals.

My favorite Mencken creation emerges out of his conversation with a stripper. She told him that she wanted a better word to describe her time-honored profession. A stripper concealed by any other name might aid in the joy of the revealing. The genius of Mencken provided an amazing suggestion. He told the stripper to call herself an "ecdysiast."

Mencken created this noun from "ecdysis," which refers to molting, the periodic shedding of the exoskeleton in arthropods. Without the help or hindrance of moonshine, arthropods go into a deep inactivity during which their exoskeleton separates from the underlying skin.

This is necessary: The inelastic rigid- ity of the exoskeleton requires its periodic shedding to allow growth.

After molting, the arthropod is "teneral," a kind of moonshine creature: fresh, softbodied, pale. It is during this time that damaged or missing limbs can begin to regenerate. That process often needs time to occur over the course of several molts.

Each molt is merely a brief encounter, a one-night tryst. Within only a couple of hours the new exterior hardens and darkens like tanned leather, again congealed and the beneath concealed.

The ecdysiast, homo sapiens or arthropod, dances the veils away, many more than 70 times seven, a scriptural expression of infinity. We remember a severe dance that led to head hacked off in promise to stepdaughter prompted. Or the myth of Ishtar dancing and shedding garments and regaining them in her journey through the seven gates of the underworld.

Our longing for the under to be revealed is only matched by our need to see not; to conceal in the light of minds moonshined darkly. We know in the space between hardnesses, in the moments of degenerate regeneration, that what we see is not what we get. The once concealed, loose and pale and shining bioluminescence is by layers revealed, dancing itself into hardness, then loosening itself again.

Mencken was not right about this one: Truth remains a stranger. We can never get used to her dance. Her veils are endless. What is revealed today soon hardens to conceal, then softens to reveal again. We are moonstruck and we are the loving It.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse w ho hopes t o inspir e pr ofound mu tiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You ma y e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.