Explaining the Excitement Over Total Eclipses

It’s a life-changing experience. Unforgettable. Do whatever you need to do to be there, whatever the expense. People endlessly testify to the profound and transformative nature of total eclipses, while I’ve been skeptical. It gets darker. You wear uncomfortable eye protection, peering through essentially black duct tape. Then it gets lighter again. Unless one grafts on some woo-woo New Age significance, it’s hard to understand why it would be some big deal.

But these are smart people. Folks not prone to effusive testimonial. So I’ve been eager to investigate. During my previous total eclipse, as a child in the early 1970s, I remember staring into a cardboard box at a tiny crescent which struck me as bogglingly unimpressive. I contemplated myself as a wrinkled, wheezing, bleary-eyed geezer viewing the next one in the unimaginably futuristic year of 2024, if I’d somehow live that long.

Well, yesterday the enfeebled geezer hunkered down in a Haitian cheesecake store in Dallas on the central line slated to get four minutes plus of life-changing TOTALITY.

I’m a big fan of Val’s Cheesecakes to begin with. Plus, they were making griot (fried goat), which I love, plus a special blackout eclipse cheesecake, draped in chocolate, which in itself would deliver the superlatives this cosmic event was promised to deliver, inoculating any disappointment. Also, I’m sort of a minor Haitian celebrity, having played for a stretch with Tabou Combo, the legendary compa band. Haitian cab drivers ask to take selfies with me. It’s a thing.

When people find it hard to explain a transformative experience in words, it’s generally a matter of reframing. Especially with scientific types, who are often locked into a certain perspective, so, when their ground shifts, they struggle to express it in their familiar geeky jargon. Since framing is my fascination, I had traveled far to try to understand. So me and the other Haitians anxiously awaited the magic hour, while, across the street, two workers welded a broken gate, oblivious to it all despite their $200 helmets that were surely the fanciest eye protection in town.

Partial eclipses I know about...and dislike. I have a particular aversion to having my eyes dilated. Like everyone, I dislike the feeling, but I particularly hate how the world looks. I’m no fan of the unique lighting of partial eclipses, either, which turn everything sickeningly beige. A bit like sunset, but with the sun vertical, rather than filtered through layers of horizon atmosphere to produce sweeping color bursts. It’s a ghastly otherworldly beige - like you’re on Europa - which my higher functions deem disgusting, and which my more visceral functions deem off and wrong and yuck. I understand why birds and beasts get so freaked. I’m edgy, myself.

But I’d been assured that totality’s different. Like, totally. As I mused about this, things turned much darker with jarring suddenness. So sudden that we Haitians were surprised to observe streetlights turning on. It was no longer the mild amusement of watching a bite disappear from the Sun. It was a whole other thing. Nothing like the ultimate consummation of a partial eclipse. It’s a smash cut. A black-out - literally. A never-before-experienced segue, a doorway to oblivion. Even lightning has foreshadowing - roiling dark clouds and ozone and such. This comes out of nowhere.

All of a sudden we (and by “we”, I mean the broadest possible we) were presented with a sci-fi glistening knob above us, in what we’d previously thought of as the sky. If you told me it was falling straight toward me, I’d have believed you, staring blankly upward like a hen in a downpour.

There are countless Zen proverbs about how a painting of the moon is not the moon. A poem about the moon is not the moon. Abstract isn’t a paler shade of concrete; it’s a discrete realm. We imagine that we know what an eclipse is, but we really only know paintings and poems. That’s not knowing.

Indulge, please, a digression. This nicely conveys the visceral gut-punch of Actuality colliding with expectation. I never expected the hoariest show biz shaggy dog joke to shed light on the mystery of eclipses, but….

A washed-up actor lives in squalor, his career on its last legs. Problem: he can never remember lines. His agent’s on the phone (perhaps his last-ever call), exultant at having found his troubled client the perfect role.

“All you gotta do, Herbie, is get on a plane, be at the theater by 8:45, and open the second act. And the good news is you have one line - one single line, Herbie! - to speak. Do you have a pen so you can write this down? Ok, here’s your line: “Hark, is that a canon I hear?” Got it, Herbie? Can you do this? Put down the phone, pack a bag, and the car service will be there in ten minutes to bring you to the airport. What’s the line, Herbie? I wanna hear you say it!” 

“Hark, is that a canon I hear?” replies Herbie, with a trace of the dashing elan which had burnished his sterling reputation before it all fell apart.

Herbie hangs up the phone and showers, magisterially proclaiming “HARK! Is that a canon I hear???” He dries himself, packs his bag, and bounds down the steps, saucily asking “HARK! Is that...a...a...canon I hear?”

In the backseat of the car service, Herbie’s preparation continues. “Hark is...that...a canon I hear?” Over and over. Herbie is laser-focused on the task. This is his last chance, and, by golly, he’s determined to ride it to a glorious come-back.

On the flight, he runs every permutation. “Hark: is that a canon I hear??” “Hark is that! A canon, I hear!”

Plane lands, Herbie gets in the cab, the driver floors it to the theater. He’ll barely arrive in time for his big entrance, but he’s more than ready, having honed the line to a thespian high sheen. “HARK is that a canon I hear!! Herbie magnificently intones. He’s back!

Cab screeches to a halt in front of the backstage door, and Herbie bounds out. The assistant director, waiting in the doorway, barks to hurry up and slip on the costume. Herbie is calm, controlled, confident, ready. Finally, the stage manager screams “Go!” and shoves Herbie on stage, into the spotlight, just as an immense explosion rocks the theater. Centerstage before the expectant crowd, Herbie hollers “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?”

So you figured that having seen twelve million eclipse photos - and possessing some scientific understanding of the process - had prepared you. But then you look up and there’s this terrifying, wrong, insanely beautiful throbbing artifact in the sky which 150 of your neurons placidly identify and categorize while your guts and toes and limbic system gasp “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?”

A surprise within the greater surprise is that you can remove your glasses during totality, because total eclipses totally block the sun (except its corona, which can’t hurt you so long as you don’t get close).

We have experience with cool sky stuff. We’ve seen meteors. Planetary conjunctions. Particularly nice sunsets. Maybe aurorae. This should be like that, only even cooler and stranger. But no. It’s rivetingly unfamiliar, and however we reach, we find nothing to compare it to. This isn’t a cooing “wow”, but a tizzying “WTF”.

And even that shouldn’t be so startling. After all, we experience other tizzying WTFs in the course of our lives. You bump into your landlord in a Malaysian grocery. Four coins fall, all of them landing on end. The Mets win the World Series. Etc.

But those things are only surprising because you’ve calculated odds and assessed outcomes - a cold, mental, abstract process propagated by the same 150 neurons which yawn at eclipses. Squarely oblivious mental accountants look up startled from their slide rules upon spotting some nerdy aberration. That's all.

The tizzying WTF of an eclipse is not propositional. You don’t have to think about it. The 150 neurons are summarily outvoted by the remaining 36 trillion cells. This is visceral, not intellectual.

It’s a whole other thing in the sky, and while it’s instantly identifiable via intellectual pattern-matching, it feels like something you weren’t supposed to see; like God revealing some bit of stagecraft; like an aberrational leaking-over from some other reality. It feels wrong, and beautiful, and we weren’t by any means prepared by a lifetime of photographs and cultural references. We falsely imagined we knew eclipses, just like Herbie felt well-prepared to speak his line.

The surprise is that we’re so surprised. There’s no other element. No mysterious smoky cloud of juju provoking all those testimonials and avowals. Just a phenomena that’s infinitely gorgeous (yet normal) and infinitely surprising (yet expected). And a tectonic reframing spurred by intense surprise - and by the heady paradox of the collision of bland expectation with the splendor of immediacy. Of actuality. With complacency dislodged and perspective unfrozen, anything is possible. We start fresh. It's a screen wipe. We are free, and have always been thus.

The canon has fired. Not “canon fire” as some empty phrase, but an actual skin-tingling gut-wallop. You are dislodged; your continuity disrupted. And in that very moment, you peer upwards to behold startling beauty. We are moved like we’re moved by great art.

I wrote here that “Art is any human creation devised to induce a reframing of perspective.” This time isn’t human, but it very much fits the bill. And, as with the best art, beauty cradles you in your vulnerable discontinuity.


To experience totality for yourself, the next eclipse is, oh god, kill me now, in fricking Portugal in 2026. This is how my life works!