Literature & Spoken Word Community | Southbank Centre

Rick Stroud is Over The Moon

Posted on behalf of Rick Stroud by Rosie Goldsmith

It is now a week and a bit since my encounter with Buzz Aldrin and I have landed back on planet real life. I emerge from the airlock and the first thing I encounter is my Moon event at London Literature Festival, Escape Routes. The festival is drawing to a giddy close. So many good things have exploded into Southbank Centre in the last fortnight. I pause to celebrate the events I made it to and mourn the ones I missed. I think back to a frantic few days when we tried to get the National Theatre of Brent to premiere the National Film Theatre of Brent from a Volkswagen camper van on the concourse outside the Royal Festival Hall. It nearly worked but fell at the last fence because the NTOB’s commitments to the BBC clashed with the LLF dates. Pity because a centre-piece of their event would have been to run a comedy documentary we made together about the Apollo 11 moon landing. We planned to present Buzz himself with a boxed gala edition of the film. Shame, but there it is.

At my London Literature event I gave my talk, slides and film and descriptions of all the strange lunar things I have discovered since I set out to write my book, ‘The Book of the Moon’. The discovery, for instance, that ancient moon gods still have power as demonstrated by Salman Rushdie’s struggle with the moon god Hubal. Hubal is thought to be the precursor of the Islamic god Allah, (whose name means ‘The God’). Hubal was the most powerful of the 360 gods worshipped at Mecca in pre – Islamic times. Hubal had three daughters and the devil tricked the prophet Mohammad into writing in the Koran that they should be worshipped. And so the prophet was hoodwinked into writing a blasphemy. The verses he wrote are known as ‘the satanic verses’. Hubal and his daughters have given Rushdie grief ever since he used those verses as a device in his book of the same name. You can call it coincidence or superstition, but you can’t help wondering a bit about the unseen forces that are all around us.

Those unseen forces were at work as I packed up my computer at the end of the event. I thought about how my own life has been changed since I began to describe my lunar fixation. The research has bought me into contact with a whole new world of people and places unconnected to the film world that I have spent my life in. And yet in the queue outside, (beautiful people wanting to buy the book) there were three friends from that same film world who between them have been present at every stage in my film career. They had come separately to hear what I had to say about the moon. I couldn’t help but wonder if in some way the moon’s power hadn’t drawn them to Southbank Centre to turn the end of my event into a small personal celebration at landfall in a small private odyssey.

The evening wound up with another lunar coincidence. In the Green Room I ran into my friend Kamila Shamsie, a lovely woman and a lovely writer, (her book ‘Burnt Shadows’ is one of my top reads of the year and deserves to win a major prize). I had researched the giant observatory at Jantar Mantar in Jaipur while accompanying my wife and Kamila to the Jaipur Literary Festival. On a beautiful Indian evening we had stared at the huge sculptural shapes of the observatory, my book unwritten and me not knowing that the writing of it would lead me to several literary festivals and at almost all of them there would be the gracious figure of Kamila strutting her own brilliant stuff. From the Green Room I remembered that evening in Jaipur and thought what treats the moon has brought me. Through the window there was that self same moon, waning gibbous. I gave it a nod and murmured a quiet prayer of thanks.

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2009 | Tagged: Buzz Aldrin, Kamila Shamsie, Rick Stroud | Leave a Comment »