Earthrise from Apollo 8

Tonight I was reading about the astronauts of Apollo 8 in TIME's 40th Anniversary Issue 1968, before looking at Vija Celmins work on the PBS link provided on her Featured Artists page here and learned more about her Night Sky series. Thematically, the circa 1974 work of Paul Thek connects to two. Or rather Apollo 8 made the connection in the December of 1968. (It doesn't really matter that we are moving backwards in time here, does it? That's how memory works in the present.)

I got the anniversary issue because the astronauts were/are my heroes. In 1968, I was in kindergarten, and I still can remember sitting on the wooden floors of my elementary classroom as we watched the Moon mission on a school-issue black-and-white telelvision set the following January. I still have my GI Joe Astronaut and space capsule. No need for Star Wars until a decade later, and by then I was looking at the Moon for other romantic reasons.

Paul Thek's view of Earth echoes Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman's reply to Houston's mention of the fine night sky in Texas that was reported as having "a beautiful moon out there tonight." Borman noted: "Now, we were just saying that there's a beautiful Earth out there."

Forty years later, there are many of what I might call "layers" of memory akin to what Celmins refers to as layers she allows between canvas and final coat. In Celmins' process there's sanding down and building up. It's that way with time and space, isn't it? With each new layer something has the chance to be forgotten, maybe wished so. But Celmins suggests that there are memories that come through.

I guess that's why, post 2001 (minus Space Odyssey), Skylab, Space Shuttles, and International Space Station, I watered up a few times reading about the Apollo 8, and why I sometimes fill an aching fullness when I look at the Moon, and why I look forward to gazing at the Night Sky in CI:08. Layers. Memories.

Image credit: National Air & Space Museum, Smithsonian