The moon once had its own rotation. Used to swerve on its own axis at its own rate, glib to the presence of its primary, us, keen on its independence. Keen on proving that just because it came from our flesh it is its own body. The greater earth has dragged, for hundreds of millions of years, all of the moon’s mass towards one pole, has maimed its rotation to naught. It still revolves around its axis, only, on our terms. It rotates at the same rate that it revolves, one heavy pole eternally trained on us, the other, the dark side of the moon, prohibited from glancing us forever.
The moon, too, drags on us. It ushers our mass, our tectonic plates, towards one pole— in the same way that it beckons tides it beckons land. The friction from this drag has slowed our day some thirty measurable hours, has changed our reality and continues to do so at a diminishing but non-zero rate. And one day we, too, will be top-heavy, will stop rotating altogether, will train one face to the moon, the other away, our two celestial bodies locked in this trance, revolving only by the allowance of the other.
And I struggle to make this meaningful. Not meaningful like incredible— it is that on its own, on the weight of its own factual merit. Not meaningful in illuminating our own experience— we have done this to a fault. We have reduced most of these striking revelations, which have arrived at an increasing pace in this enlightened era of precision and exploration, to make metaphors for our own narratives. What I mean to say is I struggle to allow this be meaningful. To allow it be its own, incredible mess of supernatural wonder.
The eclipse has just ended. It is the first I have seen, and the last I’ll see for a while. And on Earth’s surface this particular eclipse, granting totality to a strip of land which on this go-around happens to house the most technologically advanced people of known history, who happen to have the most access to information, to data and to explanations than any humans have ever had. It passed over this strip and we flocked into its path of totality, aware that, as Annie Dillard says, “seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” Last week I sat in a coffee shop and told my friend we would have to take off work, and leave by 9am to get there in time. Why, he asked, would we do that? Because it’s the eclipse, I told him. Because for no discernible reason (a shocking thing to admit, these days), our only satellite is exactly 400 times smaller than our star, and 400 times closer to us than our star is. Because throughout the history of humanity this moment has been foreboding, eerie, awe-inspiring and because we have the data to know where and when to properly see it, because it is improbably happening and we improbably know about it, and because without it the framework which all of our art comes through will be missing a crucial experience, like never witnessing an orgy or a birth. Because like seeing a dead body or getting seriously injured, it is an awful thing which we must know about. He said fine, he would go.
When 99% became a hundred I was beside a man in a lake, a man even more desperate in his search for god than I am, and it became sunset, which is as fitting a word for what happened as what we usually call that. Suddenly it made no sense that we were swimming, and the twinkling on the crest of the waves dimmed to nothing and he howled, later admitting that he didn’t mean to. For two minutes we stood, silent. Sunset became sunrise, the atmosphere returned to the strange green-yellow light of partiality, our only known reality returned to itself, and we shivered, our throats soar from screaming.
Sitting in the woods about thirty feet above Lagonda Lake— thirty feet from the beach where my friends lounge on blankets as the sun forgives the Earth and returns its warmth, thirty feet of low brush leading to the meadow I’m in now, mothership to a civilization of hungry gnats— I realize as if I didn’t already know that all phenomenon, all viable and historical options for awe-inspiration, all traditional human means of transcendence apart from grotesque tragedy, are lost to us Moderns. That the best means available to us now are palimpsest mythologies, faulty simulacrums of once noble Truths, once core-shattering recognitions which we are too aware of, too reasonable to be truly shook by anymore.
If you think I’m being a downer— if you think I’m ruining what was a nice, communal moment for a troubled moment in a troubled nation— I have to insist that I’m honoring this erratic holiday as true to its origins as possible. Eclipses, for most of the universe’s history, were not predicted. They were haunting, shocking events which blinded the ignorant, which happened just rarely enough to forsake tradition, which came upon thinking feeling creatures without warning, portents of doom. They inspired generals to war, inspired civilians to behead their kings more than they beckoned moments of reflections, day-trips with friends to fields in Ohio. We should be like the birds— in moments when perhaps this whole experiment is coming to an end as it has five times before, in moments when, if there are gods, they may just come down upon us with all due wrath— we should be silent.
Or not silent, but screaming, running wildly. We should schedule Bacchanaliae (an oxymoron), should choose one skyscraper in each city to burn to the ground, should choose one mayor to hang, should turn our cars and our water heaters into weapons, should unilaterally launch, each head of nation in one petrified twisting of the keys, every weapon growing dusty in Indiana-stockpiles. Should pillage nearby towns, should claw and tear and rape and slaughter.
Tom Robbins presents a theory in Jitterbug Perfume that suggests magic is as real as all the lore would have us believe. That Pan walked the Earth in deer hooves playing the flute while seducing and inspiring, that the ether is full of Djinn and Faeries and that spells and incantations are all possible with the right intention and focus of energy, but that this world of the mystical was dealt a brutal blow by rationalism, that every invention towards measurement and every internal drive towards Reason has squashed that magic, reduced it to the invisible and the weak. That a reality full of digital waves and photography has banished these powers into realms no longer within our capacity for recognition, so long as our brains are so fashioned by categorization and empiricism. That the dragon was slayed not by sword but by fumes, by language, by the written word and the rational mind. The literal interpretation of this notwithstanding, what do we lose with modernity, all its incumbent insistences on the obliteration of the inexplicable? What need do we have for spells when a thoughtless flick of a switch brings light into darkness, when distances are reduced by flying metal engines? Why should we be able to communicate silently, from the land of the dead into the land of the living, when we can scroll photos of our deceased, when every human being can be reached in seconds by a specific series of numbers? What need do we have for miracles when we have doctors, lawyers, rocket scientists and baristas? Bathed in warm water, buoyed in a tub of our filth, we floated above our primordial mass, suspended by this magic.
The bathtub of human meaning has been draining for thousands of years— since telescopes placed our celestial bodies into systems and Descartes placed our spiritual ones into our brain. The water flows heedless into the drain— our groin is now exposed, shivering— and we are recalling the weight which had been blissfully buoyed by our stupidity. This, not to imply that we are not still stupid. Just that we have defined the term, cornered it by thick boundaries so that it has no choice but to turn on us in its petulant, stupid way. It is true that life is a party. A party, a dangerous thing, which invites death to the door but delays allowing her in. But the Earth rotates, the moon moves from the path of totality, and light returns. And your eyes sting from your search for meaning, your friends await you on a blanket by the beach; it is almost warm enough to swim.