The Great Googley Eye in the Sky
“I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I am glad to know that.” - Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
We are sitting in the back yard of a tiny house in Albuquerque we have Airbnb’ed (I’m not sure that is a real verb, but let’s roll with it) for the weekend. The town is all abuzz about the balloon festival, but we wake up late as a rule, if we have the option, and so we do not see a single balloon aloft the entire weekend. We are there because Albuquerque sits directly in the path of an annular solar eclipse.
I’m in a bit of a panic, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
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I’d not witnessed a full solar eclipse since I was five years old. I remember the weird eclipse-watching cardboard boxes we made in school: the aluminum foil with the pinhole at one end, the white paper pasted on the other end, the hole you put your head through to see the whole thing.
I recall putting the box on my head; I don’t recall what things looked like inside the box. What I do remember is just after the eclipse, sitting in the kitchen with my parents, and looking to see the an image of the crescent sun projected on the wall of the kitchen opposite the glass of the window. My Dad explained what was happening, and though I still don’t fully grasp the optics involved, the image is indelible. It made a lasting memory, burning inside me to this day.
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Last year, 60 years after putting that cardboard box on my head, I read about the pair of upcoming eclipses: one in Sept 2023 (the annular ring of fire I just witnessed), one in April 2024 (the total solar eclipse next year). I obsessed over maps, over timing, over weather predictions. I joined Airbnb and learned the ropes and started shopping for cheap places to stay. My wife and I booked tiny little houses for both events.
Two days before we were to leave, my legs started feeling numb and tingling and just plain strange. It was unusual enough to be scary. I saw my general doctor first, at the very beginning, and she provided some referrals. By then things were getting worse—numbness was spreading to my arms and head—so the night before we left, my wife and I went to the ER. The docs were pretty concerned; it’s a concerning set of symptoms, and they were getting worse.
Health aside, I really wanted to see the eclipse. So I asked the doctors if I could go, or if the trip might endanger my health. They said to go for it (I think my enthusiasm for the eclipse might have swayed them). If my condition worsened, they said, seek out an ER. Enjoy the eclipse!
We went for it. A calculated risk. I was a mess, but I am glad we went.
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Eclipse day: my wife and I wake early, make coffee, and sit down at a small table in the back yard. I almost immediately stumble into the table while waving to a passing jogger, spilling our coffee. This should give you a sense of my mental state at the time. It is a cold morning, we are wearing light jackets. I am running on about three hours of sleep. We get new cups of coffee and sit down again.
The moon first touches the edge of the sun —1st contact—around 9 in the morning, and within a few minutes it’s clear the moon is taking a bite out of the sun. I had expected the moon to come in from the side, but instead it comes down over the sun from the top. Seeing this makes the mechanics of the whole thing more accessible: the sun and the moon travel along the same vertical line, the sun is moving faster than the moon, overpassing it from behind as it rises in the sky.
We settle in to watch and wait for 2nd contact, the beginning of the big show, totality, when the moon fully enters the sun’s radius, and for four minutes we will bathe in the light of the ring of fire. That would happen in about an hour. Plenty of time for me to get scared and panicky.
And suddenly I just pour all my fears and anxiety out to my wife, unbidden. She knows everything the doctors know, but she doesn’t know all the nightmare scenarios I’ve been conjuring in my head. Some seem outlandish as I say them, but not all. Some of them are real fears, and remain realistic. Spilling this all out to my wife unburdens me.
Of course, it’s easier to distract yourself when you can slap on the cardboard sun glasses and look up into the sky every few minutes to watch a spectacular demonstration of celestial mechanics in the sky above you. And, we have leftover hash brown smothered in green chili to nosh on while we wait (it’s so good).
As the moon covers more and more of the sun’s surface, my excitement at what we were witnessing eclipses my panic.
I let the sun and moon overpower my fear.
The world around us begins to darken, not to nighttime levels of darkness; it is as if the sun had been obscured by clouds.
The dogs in the neighborhood, perhaps reacting to the unaccustomed dimming, began to bark. The temperature drops noticeably.
Minutes before 2nd contact, the official beginning of the totality of the eclipse, only the top of the sun is covered, and the bottom half of the sun turns into a curving yellow line that resembles a happy face. Is this an omen?
2nd contact, and the totality begins. The smiley face sun soon morphs into something even more extraordinary.
“It looks like a giant googley eye!” I tell my wife.
“I was just going to say that!” my wife replies.
It does. It looks like a giant googley eye hung in the air, just for us. It looks like a wedding ring. It looks like a hoop to jump through. It looks like a perfect circle. It looks like Dante’s circles of hell. It looks like the scary well in The Ring. It looks like the sun and moon and earth all hung along the exact same line, beads on a string, infinitely interconnected, across the ages.
It looks like a blazing forge. I take all my anxieties, all my fears, all the dark things I have just admitted to my wife an hour ago, and fling them toward the fiery circle suspended in the sky before us. I picture them instantly incinerated, nothing left but ash and bone. I burn my fear in the fire of the sun, the shadow of the moon.
For four minutes, ensorcelled by the sight in front of me, my fears are vanquished. Burnt to cinders. The ring of fire is a stunning, memory-searing sight.
3rd contact. That’s the moon leaving the circle of the sun. That happy face turns into a frowny face, at the top of the sun. Is that an omen?
The forge disappears. The beads on a string, the perfect circle, the scary well, Dante’s circles of hell, the hoop to jump through, the wedding ring, the Great Googey Eye in the sky: all gone.
My fears return.
Of course they return. We witnessed a solar eclipse, not a magic trick. I’m a sucker for magical thinking, but I know this isn’t going to save my life, buy me some time, give me some answers. We enjoy the rest of our time in Albuquerque, visiting Petroglyphs National Park, eating some excellent food, enjoying the high desert, but on Sunday I am feeling worse, not better, so I hand the keys to my wife and she drives the six hours straight from the Airbnb to the ER in the Springs (this includes a long, weird detour around Pueblo where a train had JUST derailed onto I-25).
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The ER took me straight back, no waiting. Symptoms: very numb feet, numbness and tingling spreading up my legs, and occasionally to my upper body and face. Do NOT google your symptoms if this happens to you. Trust me. Your first search will tell you that you have MS (I don’t, don’t worry), your second search will tell you that this kind of thing is common and often goes away on its own.
They were taking no chances. They STARTED with a spinal tap, to rule out the aforementioned MS, Guillain-Barre, various infections, yadayadayada. The tap wasn’t too scary; frankly it was the possibility of MS that was freaking me out.
The tap came out clean. No MS, no GBS, no anything. No diabetes. I went into the MRI tube next. Full spinal imaging, full brain scan. It was a two hour scan, and I actually fell asleep inside the tube a couple times. Nothing of note was found, other than some deterioration in my lower back and neck.
I stayed in the ER for about 30 hours. They ran every test under the sun (I was still getting test results back days after discharge, as results came in). No results accrued that explained the symptoms. They made an appointment with a neurologist for forty days later (twenty days as I type this). That’s a long wait.
I’ve pieced together what might be going on, with little further input from doctors. It’s a combination of factors. Some degenerating discs in my lower back, perhaps in my neck. Probably some ramped up anxiety thrown in there too. Not being able to see the neurologist for a follow-up has forced me to view it as a chronic condition, not an acute one, so I will learn to manage my condition, and assume it is not life threatening, or a threat to my immediate health. I’m calling it peripheral neuropathy for now.
The 30 hours I spent in the ER with no answers give me pause. I’m resigned to the idea that I may find no medical answer (the neurologist volunteered at one point that most neuropathy is considered atypical, meaning they never figure out why).
I need to live with the possibilities, in the shadow of uncertainty. I wrote recently here about the Shadowlands, after calling 911 and contemplating a trip to the hospital. I’m not dying. The shadow is not the shadow of death. It is the shadow of the recognition of your mortality.
Erik Erikson, the psychologist, pointed to a version of the shadow back in the 1950s, which I read about in my college days. He referred to it as the Integrity vs. Despair stage of life. I won’t go into detail (though feel free to follow this link), but the result, if you play your cards right, is peace, fulfillment, wisdom, acceptance. Get it wrong, and you may find bitterness and regret strewn all over the path forward.
It’s a test. Your last test. You have the rest of your life to complete it.
Good luck.
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I’ll close with this quote from Marilynne Robinson’s excellent book, Gilead, even though it is not describing an eclipse, but rather the full moon rising as the sun is setting. A full moon will always rise just as the sun is setting. I love the mechanics of this, but there is a deeper resonance as well, of being at the fulcrum of some great lever, as the universe spins around you at impossible distances and unknowable speeds. She describes this much better than I. Even now reading these words, I am moved.
“I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon.
My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I am glad to know that.” - Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
This was a longer post than usual, thanks for reading.
Peace.
Whew--beautiful writing (as ever)--and I'm worried about you now, AND can totally relate because there are days when the close-to-the-surface danger that our world can turn on a dime seems really, REALLY present and possible. Anyhoo, take care, keep us posted, and I feel like we all are due to hang out again soon, holidays be damned. :0)