Totality and Abandonment

You might think a total solar eclipse would have no colour.

I might.

The word "eclipse" comes from ancient Greek ekleipsis, "a forsaking, quitting, abandonment." The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on colour.

There are times when you read just the right thing at just the right time and it hits your brain at just the right angle, and you see something in a new light that makes previously disparate and sharp-edged shards turn into a seamless whole. Then there are times when you think you might have read just the right thing at just the right time but it refuses to hit your brain at the right angle, instead sitting on the surface, knocking politely. Anne Carson's essay "Totality: The Colour of Eclipse" is one of the latter.

Drastic analogies abound in the literature of totality; also typical at this blasted moment, to turn to thoughts of kissing and marrying. Many mythological explanations of eclipse involve copulation or the hope of it.

I have never seen an eclipse, partial or total. These days I suppose the actual event is unnecessary, as one can experience something like it by googling pictures off the internet. But I doubt it would be the same. I wonder if it would make a difference to my comprehension of this essay, which otherwise appears to be making several contradictory statements. Such as: eclipses lack colour so intensely that the lack becomes a colour; eclipses equal abandonment by the sun; eclipses are marriage and coupling; spouses are colour. So: eclipses are both the absence and presence of a partner? Is the coupling referred to simply that initial moment of totality when all reason is obliterated? Is it that moment when you see someone and think, for a moment, "this one"? What happens when the eclipse passes and normal life, with colour and the sun, resumes?

And isn't it odd that something meaning abandonment should take on the overtones of a new presence, of a mating? In which case, who is abandoning, and who is being abandoned?

I wonder if third angles were in her [Virginia Woolf's] mind that day, as she wandered over Bardon Fell in both the company of her husband, Leonard, and her lover Vita Sackville-West. To judge from the observations in her diary (June 30), she was watching Vita all the day, watching Vita watch her husband, Harold Nicolson... watching how marriage was going with Vita....

Four people, three couplings. I wonder if Harold and Leonard knew. Do you think they did? Did they have their own affairs? Was it right or wrong? Does the question even apply?

It was 1930. Marriage was going well with the Sapphic Vita, marriage was going well with the virginal Virginia. Besides that, they were enjoying their affair, looking forward to spending the weekend after the eclipse together at Long Barn (Vita's ancestral estate). Still, totality is a phenomenon that can flip one's ratios inside out. I wonder if they paused to look at each other, these mated and unmated people, on the exposed plane of an ordinary moment of that curious, heavy, historic, wrong day. Sudden feeling of oldness. Black upland wind. Bring a coat, they had been told, and a piece of smoked glass. It will get cold. It will hurt your eyes. Totality is lightless, and should be colourless, yet may intensify certain questions that hang at the back of the mind. What is a spouse after all? Will this one stay, can this one keep me alive?

Is it even a fair question? Should any one person have the burden of keeping us alive? Is that why they should stay, to assume the task of our mortality?

No, scratch that; let's begin again: is human totality as rare as the solar? Do we all get our eclipse? Do we get more than one? If you get an eclipse, are you blessed or cursed?

totality is a phenomenon that can flip one's ratios inside out.

The inversion is what is initially most shocking. The inversion, the flip, of who you thought you were. The sight of your reflection in someone else, of what they see, of what you had never seen in you. An absence of colour so intense that it becomes a colour; the absence one's self, one's rules, one's expectations becomes, instead of an absence, an obliterating overarching presence.

Sudden feeling of oldness. Black upland wind. Bring a coat, they had been told, and a piece of smoked glass. It will get cold. It will hurt your eyes.

Which? The sight of the sun's absence, the presence of wrong colours, or the sight of the absence of the self and the wrong self that replaces it? The inverted, upside-down self, with all the rules gone, and the absence of rules the new compelling rule?

Totality is lightless, and should be colourless, yet may intensify certain questions that hang at the back of the mind. What is a spouse, after all? Will this one stay, can this one keep me alive?

As it turns out. No.

Posted by Andrea at September 19, 2007 12:10 PM under Books

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