Totality

It sounded as if the streets were running—
And then—the streets stood still—
Eclipse was all we could see at the Window
And Awe—was all we could feel.
   – Emily Dickinson
  

I.

“I’d like to change my answer,” she says. Our tour group stands in clusters, killing time before we go through customs from Argentina to Chile. Wrapped in scarves and dozing on our neck pillows, we wait to be called forward to have our passports stamped and spend our last Argentine pesos on bottles of water before boarding our flight. 

“Of course,” I say, opening my notebook. On the trip I asked everyone why they were here and recorded their answers, trying to understand why people traveled half the world for it. Why I had done so, too. Less than 24 hours before, our group had watched a total solar eclipse on an alpaca farm in Bella Vista, Argentina. She and I sat against hay bales, knitting while we waited for the moon to begin passing in front of the sun. 

“It’s like being a pilgrim,” she tells me, and I understand. The first time many of us saw a total solar eclipse we felt a terrible awe, and now we can’t help but pursue the most sacred thing we know. Science made believers out of us.

A guard calls her to the booth, and she slides her passport to the guard who opens it and stamps her through. There’s a term for people like us: umbraphile. It means “lover of shadow” and what many eclipse chasers proudly called themselves. My second question for umbraphiles after why was always: “What would you compare it to?” People tell me: aurora borealis, a waterfall at Yellowstone, watching a tornado touch down, a space shuttle night launch, and even Christmas morning. Nothing ever felt right or true enough, but the simile is the rhetorical tool for the sublime encounter. Even if it fails to explain it, our similes help us get close, or at least help us try, to fail closely enough to what we are trying to say that we feel satisfied. 

Pilgrimage feels the closest to my own truth, too. We travel to remote parts of the planet and struggle to get there in order to encounter something sacred. The location of the pilgrimage’s destination changes every 18 months or so because the alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth changes. But it is as if God made appointments, and all we had to do to see it was take two planes, four buses, and wait for a divine arrival. Many people journey no matter what, and some make the effort with a more casual love. Still, when I look around the boarding area at the other members of our group, I see people from all over the world leaving their homes behind and cramming onto airplanes for days and hours of travel to see something that only lasted for two minutes. 

The length of an eclipse can range from less than a minute up to seven, depending on alignment. But it’s all predictable. Since Edmond Halley predicted the eclipse in London of 1715, astronomers have been able to pinpoint the exact path of totality. It’s extraordinary but explicable. Astronomers have long studied the stars, informing kings and emperors of their meanings, their predictions. For most of human history eclipses have been bad omens. The etymology of disaster is “bad star.” The stars portend ill so often and the eclipse along with the comet seems to be the worst of all possible celestial signs. 

I don’t know if this eclipse is a bad omen. I don’t know if it foreshadows like a dream or if it portends any fresh disaster. Even for me. I admit, though, that I am looking for a sign, hoping for a dream with some meaning. Before I traveled to South America to see the eclipse, a friend did a tarot card reading for me. I asked the cards a question about love, and the answer we found that day in the cards’ images was that my mother would teach me something about love on this trip to see the eclipse. My mother was a devout woman. She would not have liked me doing a tarot card reading. She especially wouldn’t have liked appearing in my reading. This would have been a bad portent for her. A disaster. Some devil mark upon her. 

But she was dead, so she didn’t have to know I was going to South America to wait for a dream of her. And I thought, even dead, she could learn to trust the stars a little more. After all, Jesus was born during a celestial event and may have died during another. Three out of the four gospels mention a veil of darkness, although astronomers know there could have been no eclipse at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. There is also no mention of an eclipse in any other historical literature of that time. A sandstorm, people will now postulate. A cloud of ash from a volcanic eruption, some claim. Others keep it simple and believe, saying clearly that particular eclipse was a miracle.

That’s part of why I went—my agnostic insistence on miracles even if I’m not sure about God. I like to wander and always wished to be a pilgrim.

It’s why I’d crossed hemispheres, to find other umbraphiles who understand, who’ve felt this conversion, who feel the same calling. No one’s answers have fully matched my own, and yet the boarding area of the Argentine airport teems with strangers who share a common love, who witnessed something spectacular once and started chasing the miraculous darkness around the world.

II.

“It’s just always been something I wanted to see,” my roommate tells me when we meet. She’s a science teacher in China. I’m a poet from the United States. We meet in a hotel room in Buenos Aires and are the only two single women on the umbraphile tour. She pulls cameras and binoculars out of her carefully packed suitcase to show me. I’m embarrassed that it didn’t even occur to me to try and capture the event this way. It would be silly to show her my notebook, my books on eclipses, the yarn I brought in case I’m bored on buses.

John Glenn was the first astronaut to bring a camera into space. It hadn’t occurred to NASA to test cameras or try and capture images of Earth from the cosmos. It wasn’t until Walter Schirra picked out a better camera and brought home photos of his orbits around the Earth that NASA realized seeing is believing and worked to modify cameras, giving astronauts photography training on Earth. They practice in deserts, photographing geological features, figuring out how to capture landscape with lenses strapped to their chests.

“I’ve seen a couple annular eclipses,” my roommate tells me, and though I have not actually seen partial eclipses, only one previous total solar eclipse, I am quick to quote Annie Dillard to her: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”

One of the reasons the eclipse is more like a marriage is because it is a rare meeting of two celestial bodies that are exactly the right size and distance from each other to make an eclipse happen. The Mars rover Curiosity captured a photo of an eclipse when Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, moved past the sun. But it was still too small, too misshaped to create what we see on Earth when our moon and the sun align. 

During the first afternoon after we meet, my roommate and I get coffee and alfajores. She tells me about how she almost dated a flat-earther, but she couldn’t get past his beliefs. After she relays the set of statements the flat-earther made, we discuss how his entire disbelief of known scientific facts lies on another belief—that somehow science robs him of significance in this world. To him, his life has less meaning if the Earth is round, if it revolves around a sun, if we are just on some lucky rock in the infinities of space. For me, the eclipse almost refutes that. I don’t know that my life is special, but this planet is. That the sun is 400 times farther than the moon and 400 times its size and that the elliptical orbit sets up opportunities for that shadow to fall upon different places of the world feels like impossible odds. It tips my ever-wavering scales towards belief.

At the Argentine alpaca farm that lies in the path of the coming totality, my roommate and I go to meet the animals after setting up her camera. Though it is winter in Argentina, the sun is strong and the sky cloudless. We pose for selfies and try and capture the alpacas’ quizzical faces, wondering how they will respond when the sky goes dark. We arrive at the viewing location hours before first contact. It is supposed to be the ideal place in the path of totality to avoid clouds. We’ve been shown the charts, the exact height the sun will sit over a specific peak in the Andes when the moon comes to cover it. Everyone files off of tour buses and scouts out the best places to set up their tripods, wanting the best view for a rare photo.

When I met my new love, he knew I wanted to learn more about the stars and gave me a book on amateur astronomy called 365 Starry Nights for Christmas. I’d known a few constellations once and desired to know more. In the introduction the author says “knowledge is a prerequisite for love.” I both like this statement and am troubled by it so I write it in my notebook to carry the thought with me for a while. When I go out onto the street in front of my house in January to begin my year’s study of the stars, I learn the names of all the stars in the winter hexagon—Rigel, Aldebaraan, Capella, Castor & Pollux, Procyon, and Sirius. It feels the way of many facts—a prelude, an invitation, not love yet but the potential for it. And I think, yes, knowledge must precede love. Then I think of when my ex-husband slipped earbuds into my ears so I could hear recordings of the sun, and it repulsed me. It was a music with no silence in it. Knowing made me love it less. I think also of the way my mother loved, how it also felt like a music with no silence in it. I once compared her love to a spotlight—something that rained down light, a primal force that was so bright it obliterated me. It was immediate, consuming. Sometimes I felt like its hostage. 

During the Apollo program, astronauts took over 18,000 photos. Many were not good. They were unfocused or poorly framed, but all NASA needed were those few iconic photos to let the viewers on Earth know something spectacular had been seen. They only needed a handful close enough to awe. Because there were severe weight restrictions for the return home, astronauts were instructed to only bring the film home and abandon the cameras on the moon. That’s where they still were, perhaps tipped over into lunar dust or possibly pointed back at us in this remote Argentine field as everyone adjusted their focus, their solar filters, and waited with on bales of hay for it to begin.

The moment the moon takes the first “bite” out of the sun is called First Contact. Although cheers go up at that moment, we all know we have over an hour to wait for Second Contact, when the moon will completely efface the sun. It will be a while before the real show starts. We buy beers from vendors. We chat. 

Then the portents come. The shadow of the moon begins to arrive like a storm. Everything darkens, though you can see the shadow’s hem, the bright day-blue of sky beyond the dark bell of shadow. The wind changes direction from west to east. Everything cools, and the welcome winter heat that drenched my skin earlier in the day vanishes. Lapwings squawk overhead, and I feel the hairs on my arms rise. I begin shaking. I knew what was going to happen, but it still startles me. I cry. I can hear people around me crying or laughing with a nervous joy. And underneath the human sounds I hear dozens of camera shutters clicking. It’s almost there. I can almost look at it. The lapwings fly over us, calling like heralds, aware a moment before I am that the inevitable darkness is here.

When we were falling in love, my ex-husband told me how stars were born and said I should look up the photo the Hubble spacecraft took years ago of the Pillars of Creation, one of the most famous images of stars being born. At the end of our marriage he says they’ve been destroyed, a supernova swept away the stellar nursery. The timing feels portentous. A message from the stars. A metaphor meant for me. A disaster. And I was in the path of it.

III.

“No. No, no, no,” the Canadian woman on the bus tells me. Her partner filmed her reaction to the eclipse and then showed it to her, but she won’t tell me what it was. It embarrasses her. Her partner gently heckles but keeps the secret with her. She stares straight ahead on the bus. She does not offer apologies or explanations, and it both frustrates and delights me, this insistence on privacy that is so rare in the 21st century. I assume it’s the same elated distress so many of us feel in those minutes, those disoriented joys, the violently spiritual awe that grips us, but I don’t actually know. I can’t know. Everyone else uses a different simile for my questions. 

One man says: “On the outside of the experience, you can’t understand it. On the inside of the experience, you can’t explain it.” I think this must be true of so many things beyond eclipses, but it feels true. When I repeat his statement to others, they can’t refute it, though many don’t want to quite agree. They’re still searching for some language to frame what happened to their body. Another man says it is deeply spiritual but not emotional, and I try to tease apart the difference between the two, wondering if this viscerally sublime event is in fact beyond feeling. Later, when I tell my new love this, he will say he thinks it’s the opposite, that it’s emotional but not spiritual. 

“Yeah, but you haven’t seen an eclipse before,” I remind him, this amateur astronomer who has built his own telescope, spent a year polishing the mirror. He chased dark sky with me and wrapped me in blankets in a field so we could wait for the clouds to clear and he could show me star clusters he loved. I know how much an eclipse would mean to him. And when I say this, I see how much it hurts him.

“Well, that’s what I think I would feel,” he says, and I change the subject.

The Canadian woman has seen a couple other eclipses but the effect has clearly not worn off. Her partner knew the faces she made and the things she said in those moments were things he wanted to capture on video. I’m not sure if he’s given her a gift or hurt her with this offering, though in the moment it feels like it must be both. She let someone she loves see her vulnerable, and he gave that vulnerability back to her. It does seem like a terrible aspect of intimacy sometimes, to have someone see and know what you look like at your most spiritually bare. That trust in another is also enviable, and my desire to pry her story from her is unfair and unkind. I have my own secret about the eclipse, but no one thinks to ask me why I am here in rural Argentina or what I am waiting for.

I saw my first eclipse in 2017 in Columbia, Missouri with a friend and her family. While we waited, her daughter curated a museum of found objects along the shore. She placed all her discoveries along a driftwood log on the banks of the Missouri River. While I sat in a blue camp chair and took notes about the swallows catching bugs in the shadows of trees, she looked among and under rocks for the common treasures of currents. Occasionally, we would slip on our solar shades and stare up at the sun to see the moon’s progress, each of us finding our similes for the ratio of darkness to light. We passed the time reading Annie Dillard’s essay on eclipses out loud, then we put on our glasses again while looking at the ground and made sure they sat comfortably on the arch of our noses before we looked up.

We were not the only ones along the banks of the Missouri. A total solar eclipse had not passed through the United States since 1979, and this one in 2017 was billed as the Great American Total Solar Eclipse. Everywhere from Oregon to Nebraska to Kentucky pre-ordered their protective eyewear and traveled into the path of totality to see these celestial bodies align. The crowd got rowdy as the light narrowed. Two young men jumped in and rode the dangerous currents down to a dock. People shouted and cheered, and I eyed them like a mother, admiring their courage and terrified. A wall of gray shadow started to move towards us across the river. I knew it was supposed to be moving at a thousand miles per hour but it still felt slow, like watching any storm roll in with its stately bombast and drama. The light changed. Of course the darkness approached but we were not plunged into night like I’d feared. All around the dome of shadow, there was a twilight, making the air look dull, like a Victorian house lit by gas lamps. Yellow. Eerie. The crickets noticed it too and started rubbing their legs together to sing. And that’s when I realized—how quiet everyone was. All the whistles and cheers gone silent and everyone looking up. It was so still I could hear the river moving over the stones, and I began crying. I could take off my protective solar lenses and stare up, too. I hadn’t expected this—the shaking, the pleasurable terror of it. My body was experiencing something my mind hadn’t caught up to yet.

Then it struck me.

The river, its music.

I’d heard it before. 

I’d dreamt it. Weeks ago.
 

 
Once the moon crossed over and the sun began returning, the shadow lifted, the crickets quieted again, confused but obedient to the commands of light. Those of us on the banks of the river started speaking again. I asked my friend what she felt, and she didn’t have words for it. I asked her father. We all began trying to explain to each other something we had no language for, no way to understand. It was like a bite out of the sun and then it became like a storm, before it finally became like the sun died for two minutes and was resurrected. Though nothing touched me it made me very aware of my body, how very much of a body I am.

It was like being awake in the dream I had two weeks ago. The one where my mother finally died a good death. I’d been dreaming her death over and over again for years, and every time I did something to hurt her when she asked for help. Two weeks ago she finally came to my brother, sister, and me wearing white and knew she was dying. We all held hands. And in the way of dream logic and film edits, we were in a new scene. I held her in my lap on a railroad bridge pointing to the water. She couldn’t speak but could nod as I asked questions about what she wanted. The rocks? Yes. Beneath the water? Yes. They have a message for me? Yes. And then she died in my arms smiling and relieved. There’s a madness to belief, which is why I’ve always preferred doubt. That’s why I kept the story to myself at first. How when the awe quieted everyone the crickets appeared, the owls called, but I heard it—the water, the sound it made moving over the rocks. 

I didn’t dream of my mother’s death again after that, though I hoped to. Fool that I am, I thought I could recreate the experience, so I’d booked a trip to Argentina for the next total solar eclipse believing I could summon the dream again. In the weeks leading up to it, I tried waking up to record my dreams. I dreamt of former lovers and friends I didn’t speak to anymore, but my mother did not return to me. Even though I had hated the dreams in which I twisted her nipples or pulled her hair when she came up to me, she was still so present in my thoughts, both waking and sleeping. But since my dream before my first eclipse, the pain of her had gone quiet. No matter how many times I asked her to visit me again, my new dreams refused. She’d already had her last goodbye with me in the old dream, and like so many living things, I was greedy. I refused it for years. I failed to accept that I got my miracle and tried to make it happen again by chasing eclipses to another continent. I was not a devout pilgrim, just a grieving one who wasn’t looking to have pain taken from me but have it given back, to hold that ache in the shape of her.

IV.

“It’s like falling in love again,” the umbraphile two seats down from me on the plane says. “You can’t really recreate the first time because there are too many variables at play you don’t have control over. But with an eclipse, you know exactly where it will happen and even though you know you can’t recreate the first time, you can’t stop yourself from trying.” 

I know right away that I am guilty of this. His simile becomes one of my favorites. And instead of trying to read on the flight, I try and let my mind drift. I already know my grief is guilty of this. A friend once told me an expectation is a planned resentment, and there I was a thousand miles from home, expecting my dead mother to come to me because I’d chased the sun and moon’s paths. I thought I would get to talk to my mother again, even if it was only in nods. I’d get to hold her again, see her again, love her in death with more tenderness than I had in life. 

Although I could claim two successful eclipses, and the second was even more successful in terms of the aesthetics of the sublime, I still felt disappointed, like I’d tried to fall in love again only to find this new person’s laugh startled me or kissed with their eyes open. I am guilty of believing that it will all work out, of being disappointed when my love is common and helpless.

My new love taught me about the Golden Record on Voyager and all the music it contains, but he didn’t tell me the Golden Record’s most important story. Late in the process of assembling a copper record that would take our messages of Earth to the stars, one of the record’s architects, Ann Druyan, conceived the idea of sending a recording of brain waves—and she volunteered her own. Before the date she was set to have her EEG, she scripted her thoughts, trying to make sure she thought about great literature and philosophy so that if her thoughts could be read thousands of years from now by another lifeform in the universe it would contain important figures from history. But the night before, her love, Carl Sagan, proposed. When she went in and tried to think about monumental abstract ideas, the one that wouldn’t leave her was love. “My feelings as a 27-year-old woman, madly fallen in love, they’re on that record,” said Druyan. “It’s forever. It’ll be true 100 million years from now. For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death.” I appreciate knowing that when all of the images and sounds from Earth were carefully curated to send pilgrimaging into the universe in search of a listener, what slipped past their planning and surprised them all was these irrepressible and exuberant thoughts of love.

In interviews after the Argentine eclipse, the most common response I get from umbraphiles is how small it makes them feel. It’s a wonder in its own way that people will traverse continents and get themselves into debt to experience how small they are. I understand what they mean, but I am not afraid of how small I am; I am relieved by it. I think it is glorious, to be nothing and no one for a while.

My roommate recorded the eclipse and though the blurred images failed to capture the moment, but she lets me listen to the audio. I hear the people we spent the day with. I hear her. I hear amazing and holy shit and oh my god. I don’t hear myself, though I know I let out an awkward laugh, an oh god this is it laugh you might give when someone is breaking up with you or the sonogram seems wrong, the kind you give when you know you’re at the end of something. I felt like I was nothing, which meant I felt something huge, like my soul trying to get out of my body, to prove its existence. Its absence an evidence.

My new love seems to have almost no darkness in him, though he does have ghosts. He’s had his ACL reconstructed three times and had patellar ligament allografts from two different donors. I call the dead people in his knees Bob and Carol and sometimes address them as if they still contained some of the anima of their first lives. He finds this ridiculous, but I like our differences, the ways we bridge them, the similes we use to explain what we do. We even use metaphors to explain how we are experiencing the love we are sharing, talking through our edits as it grows and deepens.

At a lunch table, the new group of umbraphiles I am interviewing goes around the table announcing their similes with the gravity of benedictions over our seafood. We order an extra bottle of Chilean wine. We listen to each other say things about how the sun doesn’t feel alive until you watch it die or stories about first or second eclipses. We tell each other plans for the next one. Digital cameras are passed around to look at what we were all able to capture in those two minutes. People share regrets, too. Some were frustrated to hear so many people during totality. Others wish they’d looked around more. I wish I’d looked around less, ignored the people who were trying to show me the pinprick of Jupiter glowing behind me when I had this celestial resurrection unfolding in front of me.

“Thank you,” one of them says at the end, directing his gratitude towards me.

“For what?” I ask, because I assumed I’d been too nosy, made the afternoon about what I wanted to know, scribbling quotes between bites of salmon.

“It doesn’t feel quite real until you share it,” he says, and I understand how reflection cements experience.

“Yes,” another umbraphile at the table says. “It’s the difference between watching a movie at home and in the theater. Part of the pleasure is sharing it.” 

We never did come close to agreeing on the right simile or feel quite the same way as each other about the experience, but it was a good failure, one that brought strangers closer to each other. What mattered was that we tried and understood ourselves and our experience better at the end of it. Searching for the language was part of it, some imperfect expression of a perfect feeling.

Despite my disappointment in my second eclipse, my new love and I are planning for the next one, sending each other hotel ideas, flight prices, the best viewing spots in the path of totality. I think I know better now than to hope for the same experience. Falling in love is a new and inexplicable enlargening every time, but it never looks or feels like the last time. In the meantime, we pull out the star atlas and dark sky maps and check the weather for clouds, improving our patience. He helps me find constellations in the summer sky with facts and metaphors, how Antares is the heart of Scorpio, how if you look in the black triangle in of Sagittarius, you’re looking at the center of the galaxy. I trust the quieter messages of these stars, these calm and timeless truths. Not the fantasy of destiny, but facts. Until the next eclipse, I am watching the sky, learning its stories, putting my faith in the darkness’s gentler ecstasies.

Traci Brimhall is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, forthcoming 2024). Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, and Guernica, and featured in the Best American series. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Kansas (2023-2026) and is traveling to Illinois for the 2024 eclipse.

Read Traci Brimhall’s Letter to America poem “Shelter in Place” appearing in Terrain.org.

Header photo by Daniel Roberts, courtesy Pixabay.