Totality

Ephemera and memory beneath the entangled sky

My daughter saluting the solar eclipse in 2017.

“Every single day since I was born the sun has been there,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard, in Autumn, “but somehow I’ve never quite got used to it, perhaps because it is so unlike everything else that we know.” I had opened the book after unfurling a picnic blanket and settling into a camp chair on the north shore of Crystal Lake in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, from which we would witness the 2024 eclipse. With absurd auspiciousness, the pages had fallen open to a chapter entitled “The Sun,” in which Knausgaard complains about the sun’s implacable reign over our days. “That we cannot even look directly at the sun without being blinded or having our eyesight permanently damaged sometimes feels like an unreasonable restriction,” he writes, “even an insult.” And it occurred to me that today was different—today, our dispensation had come. 

Not everyone greets this advent with a carnivalesque spirit. A relative Whats-apped from her ashram in the south of India to caution against even venturing outdoors on the day of the eclipse, and she invoked the baleful presence of Rahu, the demon in the Mahabharata who eats the sun. How strangely complacent our tribe here seemed, by contrast, as we milled in the state park between the last snows soaking to mud and the far scrim of ice graying down the lake; as we stumbled and splashed over the sodden earth, fiddled with our paper eclipse glasses, and looked to the sky.

Many have pointed out how strange a conjunction the solar eclipse is, its many complications resolving to one mind-boggling condition: that the sun and the moon, so disparate in diameter and distance from the earth, coincide in apparent size from our earthly perspective. The data used to track and predict such conjunctions are called ephemerides. They are woven from a wild, unwieldy skein of orbital dynamics: the monthly cycles of the moon’s phases; the passage of the tilted lunar orbit through the plane of the ecliptic; and the moon’s relative advance and retreat, with consequent changes in apparent size, as it traces its orbital ellipse around the earth. Among the first chroniclers of the ephemerides were the Babylonian court astronomers who clocked the skies for nervous kings; today, it’s done by organizations like the Solar-System Dynamics Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who track not only sun and moon, but eight planets, 293 planetary satellites, 3,933 comets and cometary fragments, and 1,356,131 asteroids—this last number including Pluto with its demotion to “dwarf planet,” though its moons still are counted in the “planetary satellites” number above. I take delight in the bureaucratic fussiness of this list, the work product of a government office whose job it is to track the movement of heavenly bodies, a kind of ministry of magic.

Ephemerides is a beautiful word with a meaning that’s, well, quotidian—roughly, it means “daily things.” We use the word ephemera for the transients of our days: mayflies and moths, calling cards, snapchats, bluejay feathers, waves, dewy spiderwebs, ice cream cones, a sudden hot flush of the cheeks, Cecilia Bartoli's long f-sharp in the aria “Son qual nave ch'agitata,” a breeching whale, a backward glance, windshield frost, sandcastles, the head on your beer, ticket stubs, matchbooks, echoes, rainbows, reflections in mirrors, candles, certain flowers. That some of these things are also called memorabilia underlines the strange way that memory and transience are linked and kindred powers. The sun lives six thousand days, the moon dies every month; everything remembers and everything changes; meaning comes in conjunction. 

By midafternoon on Crystal Lake, some hundreds of people had gathered in the last of the snow, and as the light softened and fermented, the chatter and splash of the crowd softened, too, emulsifying to a hum, a murmur of collective attention. The last lozenge of the sun’s disk dissolving, dissolving—and the moment totality hits, into the giddiness and swoon a freight train comes chugging along the lake, the engine driver hits the horn, and the crowd lets out an exaltation, an earthy, guttural yawp. We breathe and blink in the strange light beneath the streaming corona. There is no name for it.

I was about to say that nothing prepares you for this sight; not even previously having seen totality is enough to stanch the juice and swoon of the moment, the giddy vertiginous laughter, the whelm of being pressed close to something at once intimate and incredibly vast. But I don't think this is so. For being of the earth, being earthling, is preparation enough. And the swoon, the exaltation, is the fitting response—oh, but it’s more than “response,” it’s integral, as much eclipse as the streaming corona and the beads of light crystalizing out of lunar canyons. Eclipse of the quotidian and all its sublunary habits. I wonder if totality is an actual psychedelic experience—does it tickle the endocannabinoid system, trigger some of the same chemical cascade as psilocybin? I don’t mean this in a reductive way; for the moment, we are organisimically in touch with earthly being. Beyond Vishnu and demon, the eclipse is an aspect of the three-body problem that gives forth everything that matters to us. The overwhelm is what we do, we earthlings, we ephemera. 

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This video from the Exploratorium explains the Saros cycle, the long-running texture of orbital complexities in which we and the solar eclipses are woven.