Turn Around, Bright Eyes

Some news and recalling Annie Dillard's 'Total Eclipse' essay

Apr 06, 2024

Little known fact: wayyyyy back in the last millennium, the very first video I ever watched on MTV was Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 classic Total Eclipse of the Heart (lyrics by Jim Steinman.) All those swaying lanterns. I won’t apologize for the earworm because the timing of those lyrics could not be more apt. Be glad I don’t quote Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun. (Ooooops.)

On Monday, April 8, 2024, for 4 minutes and 28 seconds, our moon will engulf our sun like the black lens cap of my Canon camera. Where we currently live in North America is very near the path of totality for this impending Total Eclipse. (Yes, in fact, I must capitalize this singular cosmic event.) Last December I held big dreams of renting a cabin and stealing away with my teen so we could witness it within the 115-mile-wide path. Instead we recently flew to Ontario to visit my two dear, nonagenarian parents whose final orbits around the sun begin to slow and unfurl like a flag licked by wind.

A Total Eclipse of the Sun. 1882. Chromolithograph of a pastel drawing by artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. From the New York Public Library’s Archive of Public Domain Images.

In March, an e-mail arrives from my teen’s school announcing that, though we are not exactly in the path of totality where we reside in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a gathering will occur on Monday to mark the cosmic event. School will end early to allow parents to join the school community and witness what we can together. We will be issued dark glasses through which nothing but the sun will be visible and stand together to view at least a partial glimpse of the Total Eclipse (though 94% is nothing to sneeze at and is certain to still arouse awe.) I regret not booking a New Brunswick cabin but I relish that my kid will experience this event amid the gaggle of dear friends they’ve made since we moved here in September 2022. I picture us all as a circle of Whovillagers, hands joined in a chorus of fahoo fores dahoo dores as the Grinch peers down the mountain. Maybe it’s better to break out in Bonnie Tyler:

Every now and then I get a little bit nervous
That the best of all the years have gone by
(Turn around)
Every now and then I get a little bit terrified
And then I see the look in your eyes

But first, a wee sunspot of news I have not yet widely broadcast: in February, my application was accepted for an MFA in creative writing. This May and over the next two years, I’ll be on my own path of totality. I aim to complete a book proposal (close to 20,000 words) along with the first three chapters of the tome I seek to write, chapters polished to a high, bright sheen of Earth-forged metal.

In 2026, upon the close of the MFA, I plan to fly myself and my teen back to the Land of Ice and Fire. A decade will have passed since I stood upon the volatile geology of Iceland or sailed amid the ancient ice of Kalaallit Nunaat. I aim to celebrate the degree’s completion by witnessing the next total eclipse with my kid. It feels fitting this degree will be sandwiched between these two epic events because part of the book’s focus is on carving space for the sacred in our lives.

During the winter of 2023 I participated in an inspiring nonfiction workshop via Orion Magazine guided by the highly talented author Jessica J. Lee whose Dispersals just hit the shelves. The year before I completed yet another 12-week nonfiction writing course I highly recommend: What the Land Inspires led by nature writer Gary Ferguson. Gary’s course marks the first time I read words penned by Annie Dillard. As part of our instruction, the cohort was assigned to read a section of her brilliant essay, Total Eclipse.

The section comprised a masterful paragraph or two detailing the face of a clown framed in a hotel room. What I quickly realized is you cannot read only a small bit of Dillard’s writing. You can’t get no satisfaction via a partial eclipse of her words. You must experience her words standing within totality. I searched for the entire essay and lost myself right along with her, her husband, all those communal bodies of strangers amassed upon that peak in the Yakima Valley.

In my adult lifetime, certain essays stand out for me framed in burning flames like a solar eclipse against the sky. This was one (literally and figuratively.) Reading it was like lying awake while a neurosurgeon pulls my hair and skin back from my skull and saws into the bone. During brain surgery, perhaps the patient’s brain still sends a signal that represents the sound of the saw opening the skull to expose the pink, spongy labyrinth of tissue beneath. I wonder which part of the brain is dulled enough so the patient refrains from sitting up and freaking out? How does the brain register what is unfolding? You can feel the deadness race up your arm, Dillard writes about the eclipse and the 195-mile-wide shadow of the moon flying across the face of the sun at 1800 miles per hour. You can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.

Moving your eyes over Dillard’s essay is like peering directly at the sun without protection. The sensation is biblical. Maybe Moses felt something akin to my reaction as he stood in the presence of a bush simultaneously aflame yet not consumed by fire. Particularly when the bush says, Hey. You just can’t help but kneel. With each paragraph of her essay, an invisible hand reaches out of the sky and presses down upon your shoulder so forcefully, you cannot help but genuflect. Before reading Dillard’s piece, I’m not quite sure I properly understood that a writer could describe an actual event, something real they lived through, in the surreal, enthralling, mesmeric way Dillard conveys her own experience. It’s a masterclass in putting the creative in Creative Nonfiction.

The Total Eclipse Dillard details unfolds on February 26, 1979. Her essay is first published in 1982. Forty years later, the two paragraphs I’m assigned about a clown’s face are enough to compel me to subscribe to access the entire essay. Pretty sure beads of sweat broke out on my brow. I held my breath, then gasped and gulped air. The vellus hair on my arms and nape pointed like parishioners swaying at some kind of strange, ethereal mass. This weekend I re-read Dillard’s words ahead of Monday’s eclipse. Her words still rise with my body hair like the large slabs of ancient bluestone at Stonehenge. Igneous rock possibly as old as 3000 BC dragged a distance of 150 miles from Pembrokeshire, Wales. It’s theorized the slabs, weighing between 2-4 tonnes each, were carried to the Salisbury Plain either by glacial or human effort. So too is the reader transported by Dillard’s writing and set perpendicular to the earth in worship of the sun:

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lit from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed.

On the drive to school yesterday, my teen and I chat about the imminent event. How important it is that humans gather to witness it. How such an event is a chance to experience something sacred and divine. That these cosmic events link our atoms to atoms that comprised humans thousands of millennia ago. Humans who also likely stood together to watch the sun disappear.

The experience of awe is always tinged with terror. That is its formidable and humbling aspect. I try to imagine what humans long ago on our evolutionary timeline thought or felt upon witnessing an eclipse, long before the machinations of our universe were better understood. They must have concluded the world was ending.

NASA explains these machinations best. More challenging to elucidate is the enormity of emotion that courses through our bodies as we witness the moon swallow the sun directly between our planet and our life-giving star. At this moment in time, our species truly does hang in the balance. Amid ongoing mass extinction, global pandemic and catastrophic climate crises, we cannot deny the only world we’ve known is in the throes of some kind of death spiral. Perhaps the act of gathering together on Monday, granting our Cosmos its proper due, recognizing we are part of a much bigger picture are all acts vital to fully comprehending and accepting that we cannot continue to live as we have. Was Bonnie Tyler an uncanny ‘80s version of the Oracle at Delphi?

Together we can take it to the end of the line
Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time
(All of the time)
I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks

For her part, Annie Dillard makes no bones about the impact of a Total Eclipse:

It had clobbered us, and now it roared away. We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the Earth’s face.

At this moment on this planet, a slap from some dark, loping god is just what humanity needs to wake those of us sleeping up and snap us out of the path of total destruction that centuries of colonialism and capitalism has wrought. To start anew. The moon and sun prepare to humble every inhabitant on Earth. Fingers crossed their reminder alerts us all towards united commitment and action before some future eclipse becomes a true harbinger of our imminent demise.

To stand together in awe and be so thoroughly reminded of our cosmic connections is an opportunity no one should miss if we can help it. An eclipse is a perfect time to pause and stand together, something we all might do much more often on our beautiful planet. To look up and beyond ourselves is to acknowledge that the future of our species and all the species living on this planet is a glorious privilege worth securing. We thrive better in balance and together. Every living thing on Earth gasps in united gaze upon the same moon, sun, and stars.

Come Monday, many of us will cease the clutter that clouds our daily existence to congregate and fix our eyes in jaw-dropping wonder upon the darkening sky through which we hurtle and spin. May Dillard’s words and April 2024’s Total Eclipse transport us in each their own aw(e)ful and astounding ways. Don’t miss the chance to carve space for this sacred solar phenomenon.

Ready? Here. Take my hand. Form a ritual circle. Sway in sun-eclipsing chorus...