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In the canopy of sky
Dec. 6th, 2012 12:42 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -5. Falling through the day from 6 at midnight. Going to give the 6 a.m. planets another shot tomorrow, since it looks like tomorrow might be the only clear morning before Mercury disappears (though, as usual for weeks and weeks now, the satellite isn't showing large patches of clear sky anywhere north of Maryland. I've kept wondering whether it was really an extraordinarily cloudy November, or whether it just seemed that way because I wanted to see something in the sky.) Come to think of it, tomorrow morning would be the first time since the pump froze, seven and a half weeks ago, that I've been outside in air that cold. The forecast looks OK for next Tuesday, too, which would be opportune, since the moon will be next to Venus. On Wednesday it'll be between Mercury and the sun; it'd be nice to have a look and see if I could see it, but there's no way we've got enough horizon for that, even if the atmosphere cooperates. Mostly the forecasts are showing clouds straight through the end of Accuweather's 21-day. Accuweather has persistently had significant snow in the week before Christmas; we'll see if that holds....
Last weekend I started reading The Maytrees, which is Annie Dillard's second novel and most recent book. I forgot to take it with me to York on Monday, so after Monday's installment of Film'n'Philosophy (where we--we three--watched The Red Shoes), I went to the library to see if there was anything of hers there besides the two poetry books that I hadn't taken out yet. I turned up a book of essays in honour of a film-studies guy, which had essays by both Dillard and the first husband whose name she took (although in the essay she is married to her second husband, and by the time this book came out she would have been married to her third, I think). The one by Annie Dillard--which, it turns out, is in her collection of essays called Teaching a Stone to Talk (which is out of the library)--is called "Total Eclipse". It's an odd essay (and has nothing much overtly to do with film), in its overtly hallucinatory description of experiencing a total eclipse. It's hard not to feel like it's exaggerated, but she does say that seeing a total eclipse is a completely different thing from seeing a partial eclipse, even a near-total eclipse, in its utter strangeness, so I'm willing to take it on her word that that might be so--and so, of course, I went off to Wikipedia to look for the next total eclipse I might see. I'm surprised, actually (but this is one of those things you're surprised by and then realize it's silly to be surprised), how rare it is to find yourself in the path of a total eclipse. The next one that will pass through Canada anywhere near Toronto will be in 2024. After that, there won't be another one until sometime after Wikipedia's list runs out in 2099. (In 2017 a total eclipse will cut through the middle of the US--that will be the first total solar eclipse visible from the US since the one Dillard describes--as will the 2024 one.) The path of totality in 2024 will run through Niagara and Hamilton, and then through Lake Ontario just barely to the south of Toronto, before coming out on land again around Trenton or so and hugging the north shore of the lake and the river through to the border of Quebec. I wish it would be not just a bit further north, but a couple hundred kilometres, to run through Bancroft, because there's a west-facing cliff there that would be awesome for watching an eclipse from. (I imagine I wouldn't be the only person who thought to watch it from there, though.) Dillard points out that you want to be watching from somewhere elevated, like the hilltop she was watching from in Washington, because the first utterly strange thing that happens--she says it makes people scream when it happens--is that you see the shadow come slamming into you across the Earth at 1800 miles an hour.
The thing that I find startling about that is that the shadow comes slamming into you from the west. You think of a solar eclipse as the moon sliding in front of the sun, but the moon--like the sun and everything else in the sky from the perspective of the Earth--moves from east to west, and the eclipse moves from west to east. It's easy to work out why it moves that way: the sun crosses the sky faster than the moon does (because the moon revolves around the Earth in the same direction the Earth rotates); that's why the moon comes up later every day than it did the day before. (I will freely but shamefully admit that I did not know this prior to this year. How could I not have known this? How can anyone not know this?) So a solar eclipse happens when the sun overtakes the moon as they run in the same direction across the sky. Well, it's easy to work out, but when you start thinking about it, it's sure hard to wrap your head around. (Hell, I have a hard enough time not being surprised to remember that stars next to each other in the sky are light years, probably hundreds of light years, apart--though of course they are. Dillard says that if she didn't know that that lens cap sliding across the sun was the moon, she "could have seen the sight a hundred times and never thought of the moon once.")
Can she mean this?:
Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.
Well, I hope not, geez. (But, eh, like Nietzsche, you can mean it sometimes, and sometimes not. I mean, you'd have to be kidding yourself, you'd think, if you didn't mean it sometimes.)
I was well on my way to ordering some eclipse glasses off of Amazon today, to be sure I'd be ready for 2024, but, well, I didn't, I don't, have quite that much optimism in me today, I guess.
Speaking of Annie Dillard's two poetry books--one of them is a book of found poetry (of which she said that it's the opposite of a good trick: it looks easy, but it's actually hard). Having the idea of found poetry in my head from looking at that book in the library a week or two ago, it occurred to me a few days ago that the mucking around I do with my pictures on the computer is something like composing found poetry--I'm trying to get something accidental to look necessary. (But, eh, that's some essential part of art (in a large number of cases ... ) generally, and it's not like there's a perfectly sharp line between found poetry and not-found poetry. Even setting aside the business, which I've talked about before, of getting those form-driven accidents to look necessary--in this one I've got on the go now, I'm not so hot on those shapeless flying things, even though that is basically what I want to say there--you don't make up the words ... mostly.)
Last weekend I started reading The Maytrees, which is Annie Dillard's second novel and most recent book. I forgot to take it with me to York on Monday, so after Monday's installment of Film'n'Philosophy (where we--we three--watched The Red Shoes), I went to the library to see if there was anything of hers there besides the two poetry books that I hadn't taken out yet. I turned up a book of essays in honour of a film-studies guy, which had essays by both Dillard and the first husband whose name she took (although in the essay she is married to her second husband, and by the time this book came out she would have been married to her third, I think). The one by Annie Dillard--which, it turns out, is in her collection of essays called Teaching a Stone to Talk (which is out of the library)--is called "Total Eclipse". It's an odd essay (and has nothing much overtly to do with film), in its overtly hallucinatory description of experiencing a total eclipse. It's hard not to feel like it's exaggerated, but she does say that seeing a total eclipse is a completely different thing from seeing a partial eclipse, even a near-total eclipse, in its utter strangeness, so I'm willing to take it on her word that that might be so--and so, of course, I went off to Wikipedia to look for the next total eclipse I might see. I'm surprised, actually (but this is one of those things you're surprised by and then realize it's silly to be surprised), how rare it is to find yourself in the path of a total eclipse. The next one that will pass through Canada anywhere near Toronto will be in 2024. After that, there won't be another one until sometime after Wikipedia's list runs out in 2099. (In 2017 a total eclipse will cut through the middle of the US--that will be the first total solar eclipse visible from the US since the one Dillard describes--as will the 2024 one.) The path of totality in 2024 will run through Niagara and Hamilton, and then through Lake Ontario just barely to the south of Toronto, before coming out on land again around Trenton or so and hugging the north shore of the lake and the river through to the border of Quebec. I wish it would be not just a bit further north, but a couple hundred kilometres, to run through Bancroft, because there's a west-facing cliff there that would be awesome for watching an eclipse from. (I imagine I wouldn't be the only person who thought to watch it from there, though.) Dillard points out that you want to be watching from somewhere elevated, like the hilltop she was watching from in Washington, because the first utterly strange thing that happens--she says it makes people scream when it happens--is that you see the shadow come slamming into you across the Earth at 1800 miles an hour.
The thing that I find startling about that is that the shadow comes slamming into you from the west. You think of a solar eclipse as the moon sliding in front of the sun, but the moon--like the sun and everything else in the sky from the perspective of the Earth--moves from east to west, and the eclipse moves from west to east. It's easy to work out why it moves that way: the sun crosses the sky faster than the moon does (because the moon revolves around the Earth in the same direction the Earth rotates); that's why the moon comes up later every day than it did the day before. (I will freely but shamefully admit that I did not know this prior to this year. How could I not have known this? How can anyone not know this?) So a solar eclipse happens when the sun overtakes the moon as they run in the same direction across the sky. Well, it's easy to work out, but when you start thinking about it, it's sure hard to wrap your head around. (Hell, I have a hard enough time not being surprised to remember that stars next to each other in the sky are light years, probably hundreds of light years, apart--though of course they are. Dillard says that if she didn't know that that lens cap sliding across the sun was the moon, she "could have seen the sight a hundred times and never thought of the moon once.")
Can she mean this?:
Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.
Well, I hope not, geez. (But, eh, like Nietzsche, you can mean it sometimes, and sometimes not. I mean, you'd have to be kidding yourself, you'd think, if you didn't mean it sometimes.)
I was well on my way to ordering some eclipse glasses off of Amazon today, to be sure I'd be ready for 2024, but, well, I didn't, I don't, have quite that much optimism in me today, I guess.
Speaking of Annie Dillard's two poetry books--one of them is a book of found poetry (of which she said that it's the opposite of a good trick: it looks easy, but it's actually hard). Having the idea of found poetry in my head from looking at that book in the library a week or two ago, it occurred to me a few days ago that the mucking around I do with my pictures on the computer is something like composing found poetry--I'm trying to get something accidental to look necessary. (But, eh, that's some essential part of art (in a large number of cases ... ) generally, and it's not like there's a perfectly sharp line between found poetry and not-found poetry. Even setting aside the business, which I've talked about before, of getting those form-driven accidents to look necessary--in this one I've got on the go now, I'm not so hot on those shapeless flying things, even though that is basically what I want to say there--you don't make up the words ... mostly.)
