Dragons and Kittens

Reflections on Last Week's Eclipse

“We are as vulnerable as kittens. Love fends off the worst of it.”
—Anne Lamott, “It’s not so ‘terribly strange to be 70’”

The last total eclipse of a generation is last week’s news, but I’m still circling that sun. So many important things have happened since then, including more war to fulfill the rumors of war, yet here I am still trying to make meaning of what we saw in the sky.

At 2pm last Monday, I set aside my work (figuratively, since it’s not a pile of knitting but lines of 1s and 0s in a humming box) and drove a mile to park beside old railroad tracks near the greenway. My town wasn’t in the path of totality, but an 86% eclipse is still a thing to see. The park along the walking trail seemed like the best spot for open sky and eclipse viewing company. Disappointingly, nobody else there seemed to have the same idea. They rode bikes, walked dogs, lounged on blankets with their kids (school had closed early), and generally looked anywhere but up. Didn’t they know something important was happening up there?

Meanwhile, on a different greenway in the path of totality, my sister saw fireflies come out at midday.

I knew Americans by the millions were watching elsewhere, but on that spot I was awkwardly alone in my enthusiasm: a goof in cardboard glasses who stood in the middle of a field and craned her neck toward the sky.

But then the clouds parted and I lost my self-consciousness.

There are times when what we know eclipses what we feel—when our stored knowledge occludes our living experience—but as Annie Dillard famously wrote, a solar eclipse is not one of those times.

Usually it is a bit of a trick to keep your knowledge from blinding you. But during an eclipse it is easy. What you see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know. —Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”

It was like watching a movie through 3-D glasses: I’d been sleepwalking through scene after flat scene until I saw the realer-than-real spectacle in the sky and woke up.

Those of us gathered around this virtual fire have all passed at least nominally through a science curriculum. Every schoolkid knows a dragon is not, like, eating the sun, even if they can’t be trusted not to stare and burn their retinas. We know we don’t have to make a sacrifice to appease angry gods or bang rocks together to scare off a hungry demon.

In our world-weary sophistication, we know that the sun is just fine; it doesn’t need saving and neither do we, at least not right at this minute for this reason. Yet for most of human history, people knew nothing of the sort. We know how they felt by the word they chose for the phenomenon: the Greek ekleípō means not “occlusion” but “disappearance” or “abandonment.” People saw a black maw swallow the source of all light and warmth, and some of them quite reasonably died of fright on the spot.

It seems important to note that people in pre-scientific cultures were no dumber or more naturally credulous than we are now. They did what we still do when faced with the terrifying unknown: scream, take drastic useless action, and then babble out stories to make sense of what happened. Our narrative scaffolds don’t change reality; they just frame it in a way that makes us feel as if (ha) we’ve got things under control.

This Vox article summarizes some of the many creative stories people have told about eclipses throughout human history. Here’s one that struck me.

Aztec priests predicted that if there was a solar eclipse accompanied by an earthquake on the date 4 Ollin, the world would end, so every year on 4 Ollin they would perform a ritual human sacrifice. (As the priests likely knew — they were sophisticated astronomers — there would be no solar eclipse on 4 Ollin until the 21st century.) Solar eclipses on other dates were also met with human sacrifices.

Let that sink in: the stewards of the sacred were also the sole guardians of astronomical knowledge. They knew the world wasn’t going to end even if the prophecy (which they probably didn’t believe either) was right. Yet every year, they pretended it might. I’m guessing this charade was about job security: they needed the people to stay scared so that they could pretend to save them with a bloody spectacle and then get fed and feted for their trouble. Innocent heads rolled to protect ancient 401(k)s.

The truth is, even now, that darkness blocking the light feels more like a fairy tale than a science lesson. It feels bigger than life—as if it has to mean something. In a different time, I’d probably believe whatever story the shamans cooked up, as long as it gave me an illusion of a hope of control.

The next truth is, it does mean something: we are desperately vulnerable here. Each of us is a tiny, soft-shelled speck clinging to the third rock from the sun. As we whirl around a flaming sphere at 67,000 miles per hour, the least we can do is to see what’s right in front of us, that we’re in this together. That mom feeding her toddler on a blanket in the park, that pair of old friends looking into each other’s faces and laughing as they walked, had the right idea—were looking, after all, in the right direction. Love is all we’ve got. Whoever offers faith without love, control without compassion, is a false prophet.