Creative Writing 232: Fiction: Writing About Work
Class Schedule
Monday, April 8th - ECLIPSE & THE SUBLIME
‘Total Eclipse’ by Annie Dillard – optional reading
Excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s journals – optional reading
Class viewing of the eclipse, led by TAs
EXTRA CREDIT ECLIPSE ASSIGNMENT
Due: Friday, April 12th at 5pm
Length: 2-4 pages
This assignment is simple and open-ended: tell me what it was like to watch the eclipse. What details did you notice? Be as specific as possible. How did the people around you react? How did your friends talk about it afterwards?
You can complete this assignment in sentences and paragraphs, or as a list, or in any other way that makes sense to you. The point is to compile your notes and observations, so that if, months or years from now, you want to write a story that includes a solar eclipse, you’ll be able to remember vivid details about it.
In your report, reflect on Woolf and Dillard’s writings about their viewings of a solar eclipse. How did their thoughts shape or influence your experience and expectations?
The first thing to say is that I do not believe in astrology. Yet there I was, reading that eclipse-season chaos is a very real phenomenon, that everything that takes place is fated, destined, and extremely karmically important. Sure, I thought.
And then I got rejected from a job I badly wanted. My landlord in New York kicked out my subletter. I lost my wallet. I was offered another job, here in Ohio, but not my partner; my partner learned his job back in New York was no longer waiting for him; and then, in a final black dash, his grandmother died.
All that week it rained, long and hard and nasty. Chilly spring days blustered in, gusty winds shaking the bare trees, hail stinging my face as I ran past plowed fields. The black dirt turned over, waiting. The earth open like a jaw.
D and I, we kept losing things; things kept going wrong. Eclipse-season chaos is a very real phenomenon. When my mother pulled up in her sedan on Saturday it was all we could do not to run into her arms. Protect us, I wanted to say. I don’t know what’s happening, protect us.
Now I must sketch out the Eclipse. [This from Woolf, on a Thursday in June 1927]
Monday afternoon, we drove to a wheat field full of bright little seedlings. The rains had stopped and the clouds lifted; the thermometer touched seventy degrees. We parked on white pebbles, spread our tartan blanket on the grass beside the seedlings, and commenced to watch.
The sun was smudged. Right away we saw it. The sun had a black bite missing. Was that my thought or Annie Dillard’s? Hadn’t she written something like this? It had been a year or two since I had read ‘Total Eclipse’ from her collection Teaching a Stone to Talk, and I couldn’t remember. After it was over, I went back to the essay, and found she had written: A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky. When I read that, I was relieved. It hadn’t looked like sky to me; it had looked like darkness.
It grew, that black smudge, and the sun changed into a toy moon, a fat crescent that might hang above a baby’s bed. Then it slivered. We munched strawberries and peered through our glasses and waited. Was it growing darker? We debated. Did we want brie? No, not now.
A red pick-up truck slowed before us. We all tensed; surely we were on private land. A weathered man rolled down his window and shouted, You couldn’t pick a better place to watch the eclipse! We relaxed, laughed, waved; he pulled into the neighboring driveway.
Even when the sun was nearly gone it was still bright as day. Then, very gradually, the light dimmed. Yet this was no long yellowing twilight, but a weakening. My mom’s face was poorly lit and wrong. I averted my eyes; she looked dead. He was a platinum print, a dead artist’s version of life. (Dillard.) There was no colour. The earth was dead. (Woolf.)
Shoot. “We all look dead”—was that my thought or Dillard’s? The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph…[and] all the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. Hadn’t her essay primed me to look at the light and think dead? Isn’t this the problem with language: the way it writes itself over experience, the way another writer’s words can eclipse your own? Simply and smoothly, like that black disc, they slide over your perceptions, blocking them.
Anyway. It was getting cold. I pulled on my sweater. Across the road, the security lights flanking the farmhouse switched on. Birds quieted. The frogs picked up their chorus. It’s coming, my mom said, and then—oh my god, it’s here, it’s here. We took off our glasses.
There in the sky like a jewel hung a bright white ring with a black circle atop it. Without any discussion or hesitation at all we all stood, and threw our arms around each other, and commenced keening. From neighboring houses came screams—of delight, of terror?
It’s sublime, D said in a voice I had never heard from him before.
It’s so beautiful, my voice seemed to be saying, over and over, idiotically. It’s so beautiful. It’s—
At the very bottom of the corona, right in the wavy green spray of corona, we could see neon pink squiggles: solar flares, we thought; solar prominences, we later learned.
I kept gasping, my gaze flinging wildly from the ground to the sky. At the horizon the sky was silhouetted with the black lace of trees.
I had thought four minutes was a long time. Time, maybe, to adjust. To recalibrate. But no. Over my mom’s shoulder, too soon, not soon enough, I saw whiteness.
It’s coming back, I told her. It’s coming back.
As one, we craned to the sky. There, still, for just a moment more, was that impossible silver-black jewel that was somehow the sun, and then a single long yellow needle speared itself into our eyes.
The glasses, the glasses, my mom cried!
It’s over, D said.
It’s starting to come back, I said, looking around at the early spring wheat, slowly greening; at the horizon, now white and blue; at the sky itself, lighter by the second.
It’s coming back, I said again. It’s back.
Unlike Annie Dillard, who jumped in her car moments after totality, too unnerved to watch the sun’s strip tease out from behind the moon (One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief) I insisted we stay to watch the whole damn show. I suppose I wanted to make sure the moon completed its retreat, that we were safe again.
We had been much worse than we expected. We had seen the world dead. (Woolf.)
The man in the red pick-up rolled past. How’d you like that eclipse? he asked, as if he’d made it himself. And how’d you like that field? It’s my field, the highest in Lorain County, you sure picked a good spot!
Off he zoomed.
The next day, I found my wallet.
I found my wallet, I found another job, the subletter remained in place, the world steadied, and whether I find significance in this, or whether the astrology column simply primed me do so; whether the eclipse was a time of destiny and fate, or simply happened to align with a pile-up of minor personal crises, I cannot quite decide.
And whether the light truly went dead, or we simply experienced a four-minute parlor trick, whether the world was “wrong” or Dillard and Woolf only told me so, I also cannot say, only note that even in this “universal” and “unifying” experience, language was the pane of glass through which I peered from the house of my self.
Or—the metaphor comes to me all at once--language is like the glasses we all donned to watch the moon eat the sun. Cheap and essential, they work in a simple way: everything else is blotted out, so you know exactly where to gaze.
love this