Moonday, Moonday

It is Monday and that makes me think of the song "Monday Monday," which I've always liked.

Yes, the audience is playing with sparklers. 

But it also brings to mind a term that has always perplexed me: the name Moon Day.  Why is one day out of seven, named after the moon?  Don't we see it every night or, almost every night?  I'm not going to get a better view of it today than yesterday or tomorrow, am I?  I certainly won't see it at all if I don't look up.

I try to step back, before calendars, and before this laptop, and before today, when I've just rolled out of bed with enough leisure time to consider this.  Before being told what all the labels are, what would have been observed originally, to bring us to this worldwide understanding that one day a week is named for the moon? 

Staring up into the night sky, surely the moon is noticeable, and it certainly seems appropriate to watch it, try to figure it out and maybe name something after it.  It certainly seems important when you look up, if there are no light bulbs around.  The cycle is a month.  Just ask your mother, or your father.  Apparently the cycle is 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.8 seconds.  (I copied that with a right-click from a site where the first part of the phrase was italicized:  I don't know why it was italicized, but I'll leave it.  Those Italians didn't know what they started.) 



If the first night that the new moon is visible each month was called Moon Day, that would make sense to me.  Or maybe each time it got the biggest, the moon could be commemorated in this way, with that name.  Either way, once a month would be noted and named after the moon.  And that connection, that's obvious to me, remains in English in that one moon became one moonth and two moonths is now two months.  And here we are in the first month of a brand new year.  And here I am thinking about what, in heaven's name, connects one day to the day that is seven days later?

Now that we start working every Monday, that fact connects them and overshadows astronomy.  We work, and in a fundamental way, we are what we do, so we take it that way. 

It's Monday; time to get up at a certain time and be somewhere.  But what about when we hunted and gathered every day?  There weren't any weekends until calendars.  How is one Monday connected to another, apart from an earthly connection of systematic convention?  In our current reckoning, we do Monday things because the calendar says Monday; not because there is something Mondayish about those days that has determined their name.  If I woke up to a Monday every 4 days, we'd still do whatever was expected on Monday, which might be different but just as unquestioningly understood, just because it has that name.  Is there anything up there that our week is patterned after?  What's the reason up there, that we trudge, down here?

The week is the month divided into four.  So to somebody, those 29 days needed to be broken down into smaller units, but why units of seven?  A few years ago, I wouldn't have so many possibilities of exploring this idea right in front of me, instantly.  But today, I do, so I also found some images in which there is a depiction of the moon, each night of the month.  And there are also images of the moon each night for the entire year, divided up into the twelve months.  Viewed this way, it's easy to see that in the middle of each month, the moon "goes away" and "comes back."  I can picture people wondering where it went and being glad to see it again.  But I wouldn't have divided up this list of 29 stages into four at all.  But somebody did, and somebody else agreed and here we are with a worldwide understanding.

Here's an entire year of moons, from moma.org. 

Yes, it seems to grow, and shrink, and return back to where it started and this happens every month.  But I still don't get how in each seven day period, one day is related to the moon more than another.

I know I call it Monday today because everybody else does and therefore people know what I'm talking about.  So people expect me to be somewhere.  We all know what a Monday is but we accept it without question.  Maybe to me today should be another day and I'll just stay here, writing.  My boss will not understand.