I read Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography ‘Return to Earth’ in 2020/1 as part of my research for The Siren of the Deep – a solo show I did at Eastside Projects in Birmingham. The arc of it has stayed with me ever since, and is a part of this work too, so I’ve come back to it now. He describes his whole life leading up to the moon landing – achieving excellence in every stage of the specific path he’d cut out for himself (or sometimes by others), until this extreme pinnacle of achievement – something no-one else had ever done before himself and Niel Armstrong – a transcendence so astounding it had previously barely been imaginable. But then what? This is the bit I’m interested in. He ended up in a psychiatric hospital, because the depression that followed was too much to cope with. Because, what do you do after you’ve landed on the moon? 

I think this is the hole that apophany fills: the absence of epiphany.