After a light covering of snow, the prints of woodland mammals and birds can be read to rewind time. Pheasant tracks end with an imprint of wings, each indented primary feather furred with frost, recording the moment the bird took off from the ground the previous evening to fly to roost. In a Wiltshire wood that seemed utterly devoid of animal life, I once followed the prints of a brown hare right across the snow to a pool of dark water, saw the place where it drank, and, from the spacing of the prints of each padded foot, saw how fast or slow it had travelled on its way.
So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal. But winter woods teach me something else: the importance of thinking about history. They are able to show you the last five hours, the last five days, the last five centuries, all at once. They’re wood and soil and rotting leaves, the crystal fur of hoarfrost and the melting of overnight snow, but they are also places of different interpolated timeframes. In them, potentiality crackles in the winter air.
Eclipse
Long ago, when I first decided I wanted to see a total solar eclipse, I planned to do so in romantic solitude. I was in my early twenties, was inclined to think myself the centre of the universe, and imagined the eclipse to be an event in which the sun and moon – and me – would line up to provoke some deep and abiding revelation. The presence of other people would detract from the meaningfulness of it all, I thought, convinced that the best way to experience the natural world was to seek private communion with it. It’s embarrassing to recall this conviction now, because as soon as I saw my first solar eclipse I knew that the last thing I needed was to be alone as it happened.
Witnessing a total eclipse wreaks havoc on your sense of self, on rational individuality. Nineteenth-century scientists on eclipse-viewing expeditions saw them as a test of self-control. They were beset by anxiety that they might fail to maintain their objectivity in the face of the overwhelming emotions totality would bring. In the event, as the historian Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has described, their hands shook so much that many could barely record their data, and one observer was so overwhelmed by the 1871 eclipse in India he was forced to retreat to his room and plunge his head into water. Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Edinburgh Astronomer Royal, wrote in surprise that during the eclipse of 1851 it was not just the ‘volatile Frenchman’ who was ‘carried away in the impulses of the moment’ but also the ‘staid Englishman’ and the ‘stolid German’. National stereotypes aside, his concerns point to the exquisite contradiction of solar eclipses. While their paths and timings can be predicted with astonishing mathematical accuracy, their action is always to instill the very opposite of empirical description and objective science: they provoke a flood of primal awe.
Before my first eclipse I’d always been nervous of crowds. It’s not just because I’m an introvert. Growing up watching television in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s was a primer in their dangers. Political demonstrations, rock festivals, riots: all were to be feared for the same reason nineteenth-century scientists feared eclipses. That is, they made you forget yourself. Dissolving all individual rationality and restraint, coursing with uncontrollable instinct and emotion, this conception of crowds as irrational and contagiously violent entities was the legacy of European theorists like Gustave Le Bon, whose own views had been shaped by the political turmoil of late-nineteenth-century France. To him, crowds were barbarous agents of destruction. All this social history fed into the nervousness I already felt about being in groups of people. I used to spend a lot of time out on my own in woods and fields mostly because I wanted to watch wild animals, which are hard to sneak up on if you’re part of a crowd. But there were more troubling reasons behind my desire to be alone. It’s reassuring to view the world on your own. You can gaze at a landscape and see it peopled by things – trees, clouds, hills and valleys – which have no voice except the ones you give them in your imagination; none can challenge who you are. So often we see solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with nature. But it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.
There’s another way of escaping social conflict, of course, and that is to make yourself part of a crowd that sees the world the same way that you do, values the same things as you. We’re familiar with the notion that America is a land of rugged individualists, but it turns out that it has a long tradition of sociability when it comes to seeking out the sublime. As the historian David Nye has argued, groups of tourists who travelled to natural sites like the Grand Canyon or to witness awe-inspiring events like space-program launches were engaged in a distinctly American kind of pilgrimage. Their experience of the sublime supported the idea of American exceptionalism, with marvelling crowds newly assured of the singular grandeur and importance of their nation. But the millions of tourists who flocked to the total eclipse of 2017 didn’t see something time had fashioned from American rock and earth, nor something wrought of American ingenuity, but a passing shadow cast across the nation from celestial bodies above. Even so, it’s fitting that this total eclipse was dubbed The Great American Eclipse, for the event chimed with the country’s contemporary struggles between matters of reason and unreason, individuality and crowd consciousness, belonging and difference. Of all crowds the most troubling are those whose cohesion is built from fear of and outrage against otherness and difference; they’re entities defining themselves by virtue only of what they are against. The simple fact about an eclipse crowd is that it cannot work in this way, for confronting something like the absolute, all our differences are moot. When you stand and watch the death of the sun and see it reborn there can be no them, only us.
In 1999 my father and I walked on to a packed beach in Cornwall to witness the first total eclipse to cross the UK in over seventy years. We found ourselves standing between milling tour guides, eclipse-chasers, schoolchildren, camera crews, teenagers waving glowsticks, New Age travellers and folks in fancy dress. It was my first-ever eclipse. I was nervous of the people around me and still clinging to that sophomoric intuition that a revelation would only come if none of them were there. Depressingly, the sky was thick with clouds, and as the hours passed it became obvious that none of us would see anything other than darkness when totality came. But when the light dimmed, the atmosphere grew electric, and the crowd became a thing of overwhelming importance, a palpable presence in my mind. I felt a fleeting, urgent concern for the safety of everyone around me as the world rolled, and the moon too, and night slammed down on us. Though I could hardly see a hand held in front of my face, far out across the sea hung clouds tinted the eerie sunset shade of faded photographs of 1950s atomic tests, and beyond them clear blue day.
And then the revelation came. It wasn’t what I’d expected. It wasn’t focused up there in the sky, but down here with us all, as the crowds that lined the Atlantic shore raised cameras to commemorate totality, and as they flashed, a wave of particulate light crashed along the dark beach and flooded across to the other side of the bay, making the whole coast a glittering field of stars. Each fugitive point of light was a different person. I laughed out loud. I’d wanted a solitary revelation but had been given something else instead: an overwhelming sense of community, and of what it is made – a host of individual lights shining briefly against oncoming darkness.
The experience of viewing an eclipse in a cloudy sky is not anything like seeing one in the clear. Seven years after the Cornwall eclipse, that is what I witnessed, and it is an event that still lives in the part of me where everything is in the present tense, as if it is still happening, as if it will never stop happening.
I travel with friends to see it, to a ruined city called Side on the Turkish coast. On the allotted day we find a place to stand amid drifts of sand and bushes of flowering sweet bay, in the branches of which flit scores of plump warblers snatching leggy, winged insects from their leaves and sticky flowers. Spectacled bulbuls sing. The
re is life everywhere. And slowly, over the course of an hour, the moon will move in front of the sun and eventually cover its face.
There are four of us. Three men in sneakers and T-shirts who are experts in maths and coding, and a woman wearing a straw hat and carrying a pair of binoculars who can barely add up a list of simple figures without making an elementary error. That’s me. As we pace about our small wilderness of wrecked stone and scrub I look left to where dunes have made inroads into the ruined city, heaped high upon half-buried walls. Behind them, the desert is running with sleek lizards and crested larks, pale sands crossed with myriad painted tortoise tracks. I watch the birds, idly, as we stand and wait, our little pack of people on a dune-top. Similar groups of people are everywhere, some focusing telescopes on to flat white paper to show first contact, the moment where a tiniest scoop of darkness eats into one side of the sun. It takes a long while between first and second contact – that is, when the sun is completely covered by the moon; it’s a long, steady diminution in the amount of light reaching the world. For a long while my brain tricks me. It has a vested interest in reassurance: Nothing is wrong, it says. It tells me I must be wearing reactive sunglasses, which is why I’m seeing the world changing through tinted glass. Why everything, the luggage-strap leaves of dune grass under my toes, the broken walls, bay trees, the sea in front, the mountains behind, everything’s still darkly fine. Then I remember I’m not wearing sunglasses, which hits me with the bad-dream force of an arm brought down hard across a piano keyboard, the psychological equivalent of that discordant crash as I have a fraught little struggle with my brain. Then I shiver. Surely it was absurdly hot here an hour ago? There’s a horrible old chestnut about boiling a frog to death. Put a frog in a pan of cold water and put it on the stove, and apparently the blithe amphibian will fail to notice the incremental rise in temperature until it’s dead. There’s something of that story’s creeping dread in what is now going on. I feel a strong need to warn people, to somehow jump out of the pan. Everything is changing, but our brains aren’t equipped to notice things on this scale. My eyes dance over the landscape in an automatic, anxious search for familiarity. Lots of things are familiar. Groups of people. Bushes. Sea. Walls. But though their shapes are reassuring, the content isn’t. For everything is the wrong colour, the wrong hue.
Remember those day-for-night filters they used to use filming old westerns? Watching afternoon matinees on television as a child, I assumed that night-time in America was different to night-time in England. Much later I realised it was always day, stopped down and filmed through a blue filter. So: imagine you’re watching a night scene in a Technicolor western. Maybe Gary Cooper is hiding behind a crag, rifle in hand. Doesn’t that night look strange? Now imagine the same footage with an orange, rather than a blue cast. Everything around me is washed heavy, damp and alien. The sand is dark orange, as it might be at sundown, but the sun is high in the sky. We’re all mesmerised by the refracted point-source glitter from the sea in front of us. I don’t have any grasp on the physics, but the white brilliance playing on the dark Mediterranean feels somehow far too sharp. And on the ground, right by our feet, even stranger things are happening. Where I expect to see sun-dappled shadow cast on the sand through branches – as confidently as I expect any other unacknowledged constant of the world – I am confounded: amid the shade are a perfect host of tiny crescents, hundreds of them, all moving against the sand as a wind that has come out of nowhere pushes at branches.
The backs of the swallows tracing their sinuous hunting flights over the ruins are no longer iridescent blue in the sun, but a deep indigo. They’re calling in alarm. A sparrowhawk is flying over, slipping down the sky, losing height, stymied in its search for thermals to soar upon. They’re all disappearing in the rapidly cooling air. The hawk shrugs its way north-west, falling all the while. I check the sun, again, through my eclipse glasses. All that is left of it now is a bare, fingernail curve of light. The landscape is insistently alien: short, midday shadows in a saturated world. The land is orange. The sea is purple. Venus has appeared in the sky, quite high, up to the right. And then, with a chorus of cheers and whistles and applause, I stare at the sky as the sun slides away, and the day does too, and impossibly, impossibly, above us is a stretch of black, soft black sky and a hole in the middle of it. A round hole, darker than anything you’ve ever seen, fringed with an intensely soft ring of white fire. Applause crackles and ripples across the dunes. My throat is stopped. My eyes fill with tears. Goodbye, intellectual apprehension. Hello, something else entirely. Totality is so incomprehensible for your mental machinery that your physical response becomes hugely apparent. Your intellect cannot grasp any of this. Not the dark, nor the sunset clouds on every horizon, nor the stars, just that extraordinary wrongness, up there, that pulls the eyes towards it. The exhilaration is barely contained terror. I’m tiny and huge all at once, as lonely and singular as I’ve ever felt, and as merged and part of a crowd as it is possible to be. It is a shared, intensely private experience. But there are no human words fit to express all this. Opposites? Yes! Let’s conjure big binary oppositions and grand narratives, break everything and mend it at the same moment. Sun and moon. Darkness and light. Sea and land, breath and no breath, life, death. A total eclipse makes history laughable, makes you feel both precious and disposable, makes the inclinations of the world incomprehensible, like someone trying to engage a stone in discussions about the price of a celebrity magazine.
I’m dizzy. My skin crawls. Everything’s fallen away. There’s a hole in the sky where the sun should be. I sink to the ground and stare up at the hole in the sky and the dead world about me is a perfect vision – with its ruins and broken columns – of the underworld of my childhood imagination, straight out of Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green. And then something else happens, a thing that still makes my heart rise in my chest and eyes blur, even in recollection. For it turns out there’s something even more affecting than watching the sun disappear into a hole. Watching the sun climb out of it. Here I am, sitting on the beach in the underworld, with all of the standing dead. It is cold, and a loose wind blows through the darkness. But then, from the lower edge of the blank, black disc of the dead sun, bursts a perfect point of brilliance. It leaps and burns. It’s unthinkably fierce, unbearably bright, something (I blush to say it, but here it comes) like a word. And thus begins the world again. Instantly. Joy, relief, gratitude; an avalanche of emotion. Is all made to rights, now? Is all remade? From a bay tree, struck into existence a moment ago, a spectacled bulbul calls a greeting to the new dawn.
In Her Orbit
Nathalie Cabrol was five years old when she watched the first moon landing on television. She pointed at Neil Armstrong in a snowy haze of transmission and lunar dust and told her mother that this, this, was what she wanted to do. Even before then she used to stare up at the stars in the night sky from her home in the Paris suburbs and knew questions were up there waiting for her.
Cabrol is an explorer, an astrobiologist and a planetary geologist specialising in Mars. She is the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, the nonprofit organisation based in Mountain View, California, that seeks to explore, understand and explain the origin of life in the universe. Its work has the glamour of science fiction, but it involves rigorous research and, as Cabrol told me, ‘people who are passionate enough that they can put themselves into dire straits’. That is what she does, travelling to some of the world’s most extreme and dangerous environments in search of organisms that live in conditions analogous to those on Mars. Cabrol was the chief scientist on a team testing an experimental rover in the Atacama Desert in 2002 and was instrumental in choosing the landing site on Mars for Spirit, the rover that explored the planet from 2004 to 2010; she has dived in volcanic lakes at high altitudes to study the creatures within, and designed and installed an autonomous floating robot on an Andean lake standing in for lakes on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.
I met
Cabrol on an October morning in Antofagasta, a port city of oxide-coloured high-rises and copper sculptures that sprawls between dry hills and the dark waters of the Pacific. I’d travelled to Chile to join her team for an expedition to high-altitude desert to test methods of detecting life on Mars. I’d flown from London to Madrid, and then to São Paolo, and then on to Antofagasta. I had brought a sleeping bag, altitude-sickness pills and a considerable amount of anxiety about the conditions we’d meet ahead.
Petite and slight, with short-cropped silver hair and a striking, finely carved handsomeness, Cabrol, who is fifty-four, resembles Isabella Rossellini with an otherworldly dash of David Bowie. Her eyes shine like grey-green polished granite, always emphatically outlined with eyeliner even when she is deep in the desert. She’s charismatic, warm and extremely funny but possesses an indefinable, unpredictable wildness: talking to her sometimes disconcertingly reminded me of encounters I have had with forest animals uncertain whether to flee or defend themselves. That first bright morning in Antofagasta, watching her break into peals of smoky laughter as she held up a SETI Institute flag for the camera, I realised I liked her very much.
Vesper Flights Page 8
