Collective fascination
Annie Dillard & Anne Carson on expecting the unexpected during the total solar eclipse
“Night songs in midday twilight — night / without sunset, the sun noon / high, bruised black by the moon.”1
On Monday, April 8th a total solar eclipse will pass over North America.
“Eclipse” is derived from the Greek ἔκλειψις, ekleípō, meaning “disappearance” or “an abandonment.”
In the 2003 Fall-Winter issue of Cabinet Magazine, Anne Carson wrote, “The word eclipse comes from ancient Greek ekleipsis, “a forsaking, quitting, abandonment.” The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on color. What after all is a color? Something not no color. Can you make a double negative of light? Would that be like waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your own mind? There is a moment of reversal within totality.”
I recently watched an old news report covering Manitoba’s 1979 total solar eclipse. Bundled in parkas, spectators stationed their telescopes upon frozen lakes, awaiting the moon’s passage between sun and earth. School children watched from televisions in their classrooms, the curtains drawn. Airlines handed out viewing glasses so passengers could enjoy the show with a bird’s-eye view. The most striking aspect of the footage is the unbridled joy experienced by the crowds—cheering and gasps, a sense of togetherness; for many, a total solar eclipse is a once-in-a-lifetime event. This is not an everyday occurrence. It almost feels like something magic.
The newscaster in an ABC broadcast called the 1979 eclipse “a spectacular sight”, marvelling at how midnight appeared at midday. “It’s eerie,” another announcer comments as they follow the moon’s passage with the fervour of commentators reporting the play-by-plays of a ballgame. “It’s totally black. Darkness at noon, or midnight, as you called it. People are hushed in what almost seems like a ritual thing that mankind has been silenced by in awe since the beginning of civilization.”
Carson notes, “As the moon’s shadow passes over you—like a rush of gloom, a tornado, a cannonball, a loping god, the heeling over of a boat, a slug of anaesthetic up your arm (these comparisons occur)—you will see, through your spectroscope or bit of smoked glass, some of the spectral lines grow brighter, then a flash and the lines reverse—to a different spectrum with some lines removed and others brightened. You are now inside the moon’s shadow, which is a hundred miles wide and travels at two thousand miles an hour. The sensation is stupendous. It seems to declare a contest with everything you have experienced of light and color hitherto.”
The dark lasted longest in Helena, Montana during that eclipse of 1979, thousands flocking from around the world to experience those fleeting moments in the path of totality.
The temperature drops, the light changes. Among strangers, a silence washes over. There is something unifying about experiencing an eclipse with people you don’t know—a collective fascination, perhaps a brief sense of fright: what will happen when the lights go out? Will the hand you reach for belong to the person you love, or to someone else?
Among answers, I am the question, writes Lisel Mueller in her poem Night Song.
Together, sun, moon and earth are the question.
Annie Dillard recounts her total eclipse experience in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters:
“It began with no ado. It was odd that such a well advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky. I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it. During a partial eclipse the sky does not darken – not even when 94 percent of the sun is hidden. Nor does the sun, seen colorless through protective devices, seem terribly strange. We have all seen a sliver of light in the sky; we have all seen the crescent moon by day. However, during a partial eclipse the air does indeed get cold, precisely as if someone were standing between you and the fire. And blackbirds do fly back to their roosts.”
The occasion of the eclipse calls to mind the first line from a poem written by Heian-era Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu (translated by Jane Hirshfield), who lived in the late 10th and early 11th centuries2 :
Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
Dillard describes the colors—or anti-colors—of an eclipse in haunting detail: “I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.”
In the old news footage, as the moon swallows the sun, the ABC News reporter describes the light as “eerie—yellowish-grey”. His colleague muses that on average, an eclipse will happen in the same place approximately every three hundred and sixty years—“I was just thinking about what this area was like three hundred and sixty years ago…and I wonder what it will be like three hundred years from now.”
For weeks anticipation has been mounting, the news serving up a barrage of eclipse-centric stories: where, when, and how to see it best. Reporters warn of prolific traffic jams, millions of astro-tourists descending upon typically sleepy towns for a chance to witness totality. There’s a sense of festivity in the air.
“There is a spectacle and something is added to history,” begins Ann Lauterbach’s poem Eclipse with Object. “You are invited to watch.”
The sky darkens in the afternoon and something fundamentally human takes over. Our bodies respond to the phenomenon. We scream with awe. We cry. An event like this tends to put things into perspective—how small we are, yes, but how connected we are too. With so much adversity, hardship and division in the world, it’s sobering to think that for three minutes or so, strangers from all walks of life will find a common bond, standing shoulder to shoulder to witness the union of the sun, the earth, and the moon.
When all said and done and the lights come back on, millions of people will check out of their hotels and travel back home, resume everyday life. The sun, earth and moon will return to business as usual, and so will we. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.3 A bittersweet feeling washes over me each time I watch footage or see photos of crowds from those old eclipses. How the world has changed. How we have changed. How fleeting life is. Forget death and taxes. The only two sure things are the sun and the moon. This Monday as I look to the skies in awe and wonder, I’ll be remembering the reporter’s parting words for that day the sky went dark in 1979 and wish for the same:
“May the shadow of the moon fall on a world of peace.”