Totality

on August 21st 2017 Millions traveled from around the world to form new cities in fields in parks on mountaintops and on beaches hiking driving biking flying to a thin strip of time and space where for one or two minutes they might experience something imagine not knowing this was going to happen imagine before we could predict this I overheard my fellow pilgrims say and even when you know nothing can really prepare you they say you have to see it they say in the weeks preceding the event I was too busy to do the eclipse research I'd intended what at the time I thought was my life's work was busy imploding and I was far too burnt out to be capable of caring about some hyped up event for people who need more experiences in their lives if I weren't on the hook to give a workshop at a 2-day eclipse event I would have skipped it so I went and I did my thing and on the morning of the eclipse when I was done with my responsibilities I acquired caffeine and a lounge chair and I settled in not long before the eclipse began trying out my eclipse glasses for the first time the sun was yellow and round perhaps if this weren't the first excuse I'd had in a long time to just lie in the Sun for a bit I would have been less eager to watch the eclipse from the very beginning certainly very few others at this Festival were interested in that part looking at the group as a whole you would didn't think anything special were happening but I wanted to see it begin not just come in at the climax I'm not sure whether I expected it to start with a cookie cutter bite being taken out of the Sun but the way it started was that first the sun looked very yellow and very round and then it started looking not quite so very round in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on for a few moments until the unround started to have a particular place as if the sun were a little little bit flattened somewhere on the upper right it made me wonder without the predictive power of science at what point would you look at the Sun and say yes this is an eclipse happening if this were only a very slight partial eclipse would I second guess myself and by the time I rubbed my eyes and looked again it would be over as if it never happened eventually the eclipse started to look like an eclipse and I alternated between looking at the sun as if a piece were taken out and looking at it as if it were blocked by a big round Moon and looking at it as if it were something else altogether I looked at it as the sun chasing the moon and slowly overtaking it I looked at it as a deflating balloon for a bit it looked like the head of a cat or a fox with two pointy ears I looked at it as if it were not an eclipse at all because without the glasses the sun remained its usual too bright to look at self I knew the others at the festival knew it was happening but it was easy to imagine that they didn't that no one on earth did that it could come and go unseen like so many Mysteries I looked at it from the perspective of the sun losing sight of the earth and from the Moon accidentally rolling between the Sun and Earth oops sorry Earth didn't mean to block your light like walking down the sidewalk and suddenly realizing you're between a group of tourists and their photographer now everyone's staring at you Moon usually no one would be so go as to stare at your dark side but you just had to get in our way not your fault you're just trying to move along on your usual commute we're the ones in the way the first sign of the that didn't come in the form of a yellow smudge through dark glasses was I started to feel cold I supposed that if the eclipse weren't in the morning working against the growing Heat Of The Rising Sun I might have noticed it earlier I expected it to get progressively darker but that's not what happened first came the cold even as the sun approached a sliver mere minutes before totality the sun remained too bright to look at the day looked perfectly sunny and it felt a bit cold and the Shadows were a bit sharp who could say why without the glasses and the forn knowledge who could say anything definitive about that moment it was easy to imagine people not knowing about the partial eclipse and telling each other I felt such a strange chill this morning there was this feeling in the air a sharpness to the world how strange me too me too now I know why we cover this event with science no matter how intellectualized it it's impossible to guard against the supernatural pull as the sky began to dim in those final minutes before totality everyone was watching the sun was a sliver of a crescent and then the edges started to pull in a few people started to cheer and then more as that sliver shrunk down to a DOT and we egged it on come on Eclipse almost there yes we did it Eclipse achieved I cheered with the others and I laughed as the last dot of the sun disappeared I'd expect the eclipse to look like something at that point a Corona around the Sun a dim Circle but through the glasses I saw nothing oh well I took off the glasses to look around me at the dimmed landscape to smile at the people around me and see the sunset sky in all directions kind of cool I guess but is it really worth all the hype and trouble if there was one thing I'd learned about eclipses is that you're not supposed to look at them with the naked eye I just assumed this applied to the total eclipse during totality as well so it wasn't my intention to look at it but then I did and then I could not stop I'm not sure what I expected but this wasn't it I'd seen photos of Coronas around Suns but this wasn't that and I'd expected that those photos like many astronomical pictures are long exposure have other wavelengths and otherwise are capturing things that the naked eye can't see I thought there might be a glow of light in a circle or nothing or I don't know what I didn't expect was an Unholy horror sucking the life and light and warmth out of the universe with these long reaching arms that what I'd seen in pictures was not an exaggeration but a failure to capture the extent of this thing that human eyes and not cameras are uniquely suited to obs absorb the horror of I protest the idea that the Sun or the moon or the whole in the universe where the sun was ripped away from us was black it was not black it was a new color perceivable to the human eye only in certain conditions I understand why people would describe it as black just as without a word for red you might describe blood as black but it wasn't and so no photograph could possibly capture what it's like and no screen can yet display it in a photograph the sky around the corona is black which is fine because the sky actually is black but no photograph captures how the black is finally seen to be as rich and beautiful and colorful as we should have appreciated it to be all along but we've lost our chance because it's every fiber is compromised the corona is a howling spider sucking the life out of the darkness and into this god- awful thing that shows us what nothingness looks like I know intellectually it's not a hole or an emptiness it's the moon now revealed to be this Unholy unfeeling collection of matter hung precariously above our beloved Planet by an invisible string it is heavy heavy in the darkness the moon will never be the same it's dark side cannot be unseen gone is the being of pure light flying gently across the heavens it is a corpse a dead thing the dusty remains of old Thea horrifically attached to its sister Planet by a withering gravitational umbilical cord when our son came back when that unnaturally asymmetric Corona slithered back out of our universe when the Blue Sky started creeping back over the Dark Side of the Moon to cover up what no one was meant to see everyone cheered live music began we danced and sang as the Shadows started to grow soft again after a few songs the official events were over and after several conversations with other event goers the sun was halfway back to normal at this point I peeled away from the crowd grabbed a couple beers and and lay back to watch enjoying that awful Shadow leave and allow us our sun back it was warm again watching the eclipse end over an hour after totality was my favorite part the best part everything was becoming right again all on its own I watched as the sun became whole round and yellow with soft round shadows in those final moments I felt a happy anticipation there was no longer a bite taken out of the Sun and then it was kind of Roundy with a dent and then pretty Roundy and then very very round and yellow I clapped and cheered to see the Sun come back to normal only a couple others took note behind me most of our little city had already disappeared I put the glasses back on and enjoyed my second beer while watching the beautiful yellow round sun above me when when I looked around again out of 500 Eclipse goers there was just one lonely tent left in the field one tent and one car in the parking lot

Channel: Vihart

Views: 99,512

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Id: QV2oTxX2oZc

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024