I’ve not liked a single poem I’ve encountered referencing an eclipse, though I’m on this and other topics quite open to having you change my mind. When it comes to pop, there’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, written by Jim Steinman, performed and made immortal by Bonnie Tyler, and first titled Vampires in Love. At the time Steinman was also writing, you see, a musical about Nosferatu.
In this house, we consider Total Eclipse of the Heart five minutes and thirty-three seconds of slay. Tyler wanted a ‘Wall of Sound’ production effect, the oceanic, enormous, anthemic sonic style pioneered by Phil Spector—son of the Bronx, genius auteur, eventual murderer :( :( :(
Spector had retired at this point, so she went to Steinman as her next best option.
TEOTH, while perfectly constructed for soundtracking diva behavior and impassioned belting with your friends at sweet louche house parties—if anyone still has those—does not really DO a lot with the eclipse metaphor. I mean, it’s there. 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. Present, but not vigorously applied, we can say.
If you’ve been (somehow) shielded from this news, a total solar eclipse will come to us on Monday, April 8, 2024, and will be visible across much North America. There’s been a whole-ass national carnival of events and planning around Miss Eclipse, really the kind of intra-United-States tourism you typically only see during marquee Sports Events. I will watch it from where I am, though sadly Iowa City is five hours away from the path of totality.
As you likely know, the historical response to the eclipse has traditionally not been hotel booking and sightseeing road trip. In ancient times the eclipse was an ominous portent, a sign of change and terror. Of the total solar eclipse of 585 BCE:
That eclipse came as two warring factions, the Lydians and the Medes, were engaged in a conflict that had dragged on for several years. On seeing it, the two nations laid down their arms and made peace.
When it comes to art inspired by our grand celestial event of obscuration, interruption, and bounded terror, it is indisputable that Annie Dillard, so far, contemporaneously rules this court. Here she is in Total Eclipse, first published in 1982 and one of the great pieces of nonfiction of our age.
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. I had seen a partial eclipse before, and here was another.
BEARS THE SAME RELATION AS KISSING A MAN DOES TO MARRYING HIM!!! AS FLYING IN AN AIRPLANE DOES TO FALLING OUT OF AN AIRPLANE! MOTHER!
Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it. The alpenglow is that red light of sunset that holds out on snowy mountaintops long after the valleys and tablelands are dimmed. “Look at Mount Adams,” I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember.
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 19th-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 that the wind laid down.
THE GRASSES WERE WRONG; THEY WERE PLATINUM! THIS COLOR HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN ON EARTH!!
It’s a death row meal of an essay. Piercing, grand, luxuriant, beautiful.
The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.
The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.
Aside from the question of directly and nakedly eclipse-inspired art, it also seems worth noting to me that reading, say, Louise Glück, is eclipse-adjacent. Cold, pristine, merciless, and for me, often productive of awe.
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
— Louise Glück
I have this bong rip of a theory that there are writers of the celestial revolution, writers of the black hole, writers of the meteor shower, and writers of the eclipse. Glück is a writer of the eclipse. So are, in my admittedly lighthearted thinking: Michael Cunningham, Lydia Kiesling, C Pam Zhang, Dorothy Allison, Annie Proulx, and Jose Saramago, among others.
I’ve written, I think, exactly one thing directly in conversation with a real-world eclipse, my short story Rubberdust. I wrote it in 2017, and The Kenyon Review published it in 2019. It got selected by Curtis Sittenfeld and Heidi Pitlor for Best American Short Stories in 2020, the first truly dramatic stroke of publishing recognition in my life.
The seed of what became Rubberdust was a lie I told for no reason. I was in a new town, meeting new people. A solar eclipse was happening that day. People were passing around those paper glasses of uncertain provenance. With truly no motive in mind, I impulsively told the man I was taking a walk with that I felt weird about looking directly at the sun because I had a friend in the second grade who did this every day, and lost his sight.
Wow, he said. I know, I said. Vaguely appalled and amused and ??? at myself—this wasn’t the sort of thing I was given to doing. I was anxious then, I think, in a way I rarely had been before. Perhaps I wanted to be thought interesting by the new people around me.
Either way, my lizard brain had complied with a story.
But why that story, and why had it materialized so easily? I cast around in memory’s dumb leaf-clogged gutter, and realized that I had made a friend in second grade, this charming little boy, and our friendship had been based primarily on the joint production of eraser shavings which we stored in our wooden desks. I could not remember why we did this.
I thought back to my schooldays in Oman, and felt a liquid ache. It was the reappearance of memories situated in a world so far removed from the reality of the people all around me that I suspected they were unintelligible—to anyone but me.
This is the immigrant's pain, I thought, aside from bureaucracy, privation, uncertainty, and missing people from the old life; you also have to translate your past, or decide to not even try.
Later that night, I wrote in a notebook gifted to me by my friend Praveen what I thought would be a first line: "Please listen. I grew up in a place that I cannot return to." It was wrong, somehow. All of a sudden I knew better what I wanted to tell, and it was not a lament. I wanted to write a story of the funny secret lives, peculiar logic, and intense emotion of young children. Of the fear that you are not, at your deepest level, Good. Of what it is to have to translate for an audience your (foreign) past, which is to say, your (foreign) self. Some room was flung open in my brain; I began writing, the story poured out of me.
That may be the hallmark of future writers: telling lies for no reason. I know it was for me.