That morning of the eclipse, when the Event in question is the new moon’s crawl over the Texas sun, I sit in a mass of Event-witnessing strangers on a slat of dry riverbank. We’re all new to this, it’s a limited edition Event requiring an uncommon type of spectatorship, one of oblique orientations and an abnormal time span. A bit disoriented, we steal slight glances at each other, trying to figure out the right way to witness. I impersonate the neck angle of a solid-seeming woman. A photo taken sets off the lift of four others cameras. We form a recursive loop of casual mimicry, a circuit of telephone charades, performing our best guess at how to watch whats occurring. We take a shape, a constellation of novice bodies pulled into configuration by aberrant proximity and situation. A hive-mind of perceptual poses. I start to worry we’re too matchy-matchy. Like if one of us were to turn away we’d all miss the Event. But there’s no point individuating in the face of planetary circumstance. We attend the occasion together: Hunched up from the ground, hooked on the sky, eyes coated in the black plastic of our NASA certified eclipse glasses. Similarly mediated and similarly blinded, anonymized by lenses infused with carbon particles. Filter rich.
Black plastic concentrates the Event into a point, gets to the gist and orients us to it, obscuring the big rest of the whole not-sun world. We’ve got a world blindspot, a real narrowed vision, a fixed stare. We resign to our all-same lenses, to their cinched focal point, to the tenacity of an awareness compelled by its object. “Clever traps, which lure our attention and hold it fast” (Benjamin, WOA 63). I take them off every once in awhile to check everyone else is still there, and see that they’re unflattering on everyone. Gotta redress, the Event is pretty imperceptible to this bare face. Needing black plastic, we're becoming-medium. Eclipse is a fantastic thing taking place as a softly mumbled utterance, only pounded into visibility by conclusive black plastic.
The lenses sit in paper rims which are always blowing free from our ears, requiring a constant fingers-press to the temples. A rare woman decked out in a shirt emblazoned with tie-dyed planets thumbs at her glasses with windshield wiper gusto, a ceaseless back and forth, as if the lenses being too dark is a problem she should fix for the Event. A tic, an addiction to clarity, infinitely repeated and unconsciously embodied. We’re getting pulled into unfamiliar postures, lens gestures, compulsive limbed modes of attention. This is the orienting force of material encounters. Transperceptive co-composition.
From the ground, we go on with our seats and adjustments, while through it all the moon is scooching on down, interrupting the sun and its habit of staring hard and mean. This is a brazen thing for the moon to do here, where Sun’s always just so incessantly up there, a vigilant observer, hot surveillance from above. This Event is Texas respite, not-Texas, sunweird sky, not-sky, not a state. This not-quite-afternoon, Sun’s starting to shut its eye for the first time. I feel secret. I think I could have worn less sunblock. I take off my hat. Sun’s getting crescented, turning moon-shape. Not sure it’s a sun anymore. Not-Sun Hangs Over Not-Texas: an Event. A dad over there to my left tells his kid to check out the sun again and again, to which the kid keeps replying “dad, it’s the moon”. He’s defiant and seems to be having a bigtime Event of his own, a bloom of that special confidence that comes from getting hard evidence that adults lack some insights. The look of this thing doesn’t call up any of the suns he’s gotten to know so far, from picture books or daily skies. Unrecognized Event, he has to make sense of it as something else. He’s probably right, it’s more moon than anything, if moon is mostly crescent and we’re not in a sunned place anymore.
We look at this moon-making. Our face planes tilt toward the sky, perceptive strata stilled in a zag. Event’s delights are bending the arc of us. Most don’t look down, don't seem to care so much about the way the light is changing in the air, or how this Event is hitting down on the ground of our city. We’re crookedly installed. No casting-about, no wheeling-around, we’re singularly hooked tight and anchored up. Tilted in this interval. The Event’s a hungry lofty wrangle swarming down, an adhesive smile to which we’re just bent witness. The space between our eyes and black plastic is muggy and restricted, and all the while the moon’s biting down our sun directly from the top, morbid and corrosive. Doing sun damage. I have the momentary sense of being a completely changed person. Changed by having a head newly contoured by paper and black plastic rectangles. Changed by these facial cuts with no ray ban panache. Changed by having matching eyes with all these strangers, and this dad who doesn’t know anything, and this kid with his new cosmology that might rock the world.
The pace of this Event is troubling our ability to sit still doing nothing. If you look for too long, you’re really paying too much attention, and can’t notice the drama of it all- the fact that the moon’s consuming and we’re losing the sun. When the moon has just about done a half-block a man nearby shouts “It’s happening right now”. We peep up. Nothing happens that we can remark on. Some moon-step minutes later another witness shouts “It’s about to start!”. Nothing starts but the ripe clench of expectation. We balance on the full edge of about to. I think an infinite amount of things and not-things are about to start. We can’t quite figure out the bounds of this Event in time or space, the clip of its unfolding. It feels nothing like the taking-in of an object or a scene. We’re just partial witnesses to a hazy present that only means anything in relation to the just-before and the not-yet, the previous and next shape, the regular shapes of things in other days. I can only think of what’s happening right now in terms of moon-lengths and anticipation. Eclipse has made up a wrong type of day, clocked by extraordinarily screwey orbit hours. We’re taken along for the ride, pitched outside of the expected day-arc into a pleated time that tucks minutes together. It’s happening. Time bloated out by the unfinished shingling of sun and moon. It’s going on. We wait for a thing, uncomfortable, waiting for a spectacular thing without spectacular punctuation. This Event isn’t contained within a neat spatiotemporal envelope. It never arrives, but rather bleeds-through its peripherals in all directions, futures, pasts, swings through, meanwhiles. An interminable occasion. It’s only the folding-with of black plastic and face and stratosphere and fingers and eyes and air and universe and cardboard rims that catches this Event in the making. It’s happening and it never occurs.
Because this Event is blurry and untimely, it takes some attention to have it happen to you. Joggers are skirting through the Event, gazes fixed straight forward as always, maybe noticing something strange going on with the shadows on their legs. Maybe not. They make me second guess if anything big and global is happening right now. Maybe all that’s happening is that we’re just doing funny sunglasses on the grass. If joggers’ tracks can carve right through eclipse with no added resistance, I’m sure it’s not an Event for them. How could it be one for me? Maybe because of black plastic. Like maybe Event is just a glare you can’t look at with a bare face. The right gear is what it takes to be in it, or what it takes to remove yourself from it. The jog is happening right now too, happening through stretched nylon and carbon rubber and elastane and Oakley. Materials will snuff the occurrence of Events they can’t witness. They’ll outfit you for others, at which you’ll be a good guest. The jog and its materials impose their dress code with gravitational tugs and a prograde axial tilt, setting jogger bodies in a synchronous rotation, an elliptical path, a moony procession.
Jog is an Event not so unlike the eclipse. Event of passing by, all movement, a something going somewhere, a steady gait, step-steps toward an absence becoming. But unlike the eclipse, jog really starts and stops, due to the fact that it involves bodies and speed and trajectory in a way coherent to this planet. If we’re to say the eclipse starts when the moon touches the sun, it’s all in all maybe a four hour process that feels long like a month and a mistake, not containing anything like a climax. If we’re to say the eclipse starts at the moment of full sun-block, it’s all in all just a split-second blip, not containing any climb or descent, all climax. But if I say either of these things I’m being unnecessary about confining the Event, acting ignorant to the fact that this moment is happening far from the start of the long running lunar circuit, that this moment is happening three hours from one of the seas to which the moon has always been tidally locked. This not-afternoon in not-Texas was set in motion way back, we should have gotten here earlier with our black plastic on.
When it’s over doesn’t feel so different from when it’s going on. I’m elated by the cosmic grandeur of it all. This feels like nothing much. The wondrous cosmos, the kismet dance of sun and moon and Earth and eye looks very small and digestible way up there. All this marvel appears simple, just the prick-out of a shape from a mush-field of black plastic. I take pictures through NASA's glasses and pictures of the moonsun’s reflection on the water and pictures of the crescent shadows through the leaves. I think I do this to make sure it happened, to attest my presence, to make it matter. To keep the Event, to have it and to have it again whenever, when the sun’s back hot and alone, and it’s gotten hard to imagine it was ever moon-met. When I’ve misplaced my glasses and can no longer witness black plastic’s sight of the sky.