Eclipse

x-posting from X

A creature of habit, I wake up and follow my routines and subroutines as though pulled across the day by a string. For the most part, the laws that govern me are the ones I wrote for myself. Once in a while, in the sacred times and places of this world, I am granted contact with a deeper order and reminded that the only Rule that isn't merely guideline is the natural law of the physical universe.

Standing in the full shadow of the moon, I experience surrender to the cosmos. The the vault of heaven opens and its secrets spill. Intellectually, geometrically, I can place the positions of the three celestial bodies in my mind. But on the brink of totality, when the eye of the black sun opens, when even the simple things you think you can count on become untrue -- shadows cast on the ground are circular -- the dim of night in the middle of the day -- I feel the animal panic. The birds take flight at once -- the horses whinny -- the dogs bark and pace around. My ancient mammalian brain recognizes the divine disturbance, the moment of Revelation. My hair stands on end. Old men praise the Lord and hold their wives tightly. Children are screaming at the top of their lungs in excitement and terror.

Around the pitch dark eye, the glow of the solar corona -- it appears not as a neat circular outline, but as giant, million mile, multi-armed filaments stretching away from the sun, some bigger than the main disc. My familiar sun, the circular star that I can count on to show up every day, a profoundly alien spaceship embedded in the sky. This was always the true nature of our precious Sol -- the only thing that's changed is my ability to see it, with the familiar heat of the main disc perfectly blocked briefly by our moon. My leaky abstractions break. My carefully built heuristics, rewritten.

For a moment, one fraction of a heartbeat, my mind and soul are one with our beloved universe. I feel the Earth in orbit, I feel the moon rotating around it, I feel the ocean of magma moving as it flows around the planet and the corresponding slow spin of the magnetosphere pulsing at the same time. I feel the entire solar system in motion and for once, I am not a mere spectator with my nose pressed up against the glass but instead a part of ānanda tāṇḍava, the celestial dance.

The shadow of the moon passes over and through me, and cleanses me of my ignorance. A dark enlightenment; umbral Rapture; the world grows monochromatic and cold; like all true art, it thrills and discomforts me. All of this, everything I love and hold dear, everything I hate, is running on the great physics engine governing reality. From simple mathematical rules, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful. This is the truth of things -- matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be me. I am not a free-floating mind, but a brain in a body. There is comfort here -- for all my worries about whether I am doing the right or wrong thing, there is another truth, that I am pulled along by the same clockwork that defines the motions of the cosmos. Both my deeds and misdeeds are finite and preordained.

All metaphysics must incorporate physics. I am reminded that the vast majority of human delusions are not higher spiritual truths but less beautiful and less true than the iron law of the mathematical universe. There is nothing I could have done to prevent the clockwork of the moon overhead, as it has done since the divine watchmaker set it in motion, and so it will continue long after my bloodline is dust and humanity has either moved off-world or died.

The four minute window is closing. Time is running out, and with it, my connection to the transcendent. As the sun takes its first peek from behind the moon, strange shadows move across the ground and the warm light returns; the springs unwinds. I return to the nominal world, the world whose truth is defined by the people around me. When the sun makes its reappearance there is jubilant cheering. People break out into dance, children laugh. Where did these tears in my eyes come from? The reverse energy of totality infects the crowd. Just as the sun is the giver of all life on Earth, to experience its return is to experience the rebirth of the world.

The platonic sprites wink at us, the careful plan of a celestial clock. An Earthly total solar eclipse is a cosmic anomaly; the sun is 400 times farther away than the moon, and the width of its disc 400 times larger than the moon's. Our very own precise miracle, at this cosmic sliver in time and space. For as long as the race of man has been around, the moon has been painting the world with great sweeps of totality a hundred miles wide, several thousand miles long, like an inscrutable god granting random Revelation to small swathes of humanity. How did the Ancients cope with these brushes with the cosmos? Likely just as I have done; a jolt of inspiration and then the slow slide back to cooking fires and the hunt. It's an important gift of the lineage of Man that cosmic truth doesn't drive us to Lovecraftian insanity, that it leaves us nourished and reborn. A reminder then, for when various puppeteers call you to your routines and subroutines, when guilt and doubt gnaw at you, to find that truth which will not unmake you, that even your mechanical fragility makes you part of the divine.

From the day we arrive on the planet 
And, blinking, step into the sun
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round