Eclipsed

Like a great many other people, on the 8th of April, 2024, I journeyed into the path of Totality to view a solar eclipse. This was, in truth, not simply an opportunity to view a spectacular natural event, but also a great excuse to take a road-trip to meet a dear friend. Someone who until that day I had only ever seen in the emission of light from my headset in virtual worlds.

It was inevitable that under the eerie shadow of this event we would discuss the surreality of our meatspace meeting. That the two of us who were previously solely photonic beings had now attained corporeal form. Did we even exist before this, or did nothing change? It hardly felt like a first meeting at all, for of course it really wasn’t! Much more like a reunion of two who had been apart for a long while. We can speak of dichotomies, or the notion of equal pairs of opposites, but really, it is in the interstitial space between these which we should be thinking about. That place where it is both light and dark combined or in which neither exist. If there is such a time then a solar eclipse may be it.

Claude Bragdon wrote that “Music is pure beauty, the voice of the unfettered and perpetually evanishing soul of things; architecture is that soul imprisoned in a form, become subject to the law of casualty, beaten upon by the elements, at war with gravity, the slave of man.”1 This is an eloquent and moving notion, but rather forced to fit his Theosophic beliefs. Music is neither fully unfettered, nor is architecture necessarily imprisoning, just as light (exteriorness) can blind as well as illuminate, and darkness (interiorness) can allow us to see truth. Taken further, the light of our HMDs is both freeing and falsehood, while reality exists only when it is off. This is commonly taken to be self-evident, but for some of us – myself included – it is counter to how we have come to treat the virtual spaces we inhabit, and so there is no absolute “reality” but that within each other.

The light of the eclipse, in the moments before totality and just after, is stunning; bizarre, an intensely golden time heavily saturated and deeply shadowed. At its peak the sky is dark yet the horizon light, inverted and topsy turvy. In this darkness I heard music, words from the once Top-40 hit by Bruce Cockburn, Lovers in a Dangerous Time.

1 Bragdon, C. (1910). The beautiful necessity: Seven essays on theosophy and architecture, by Claude Bragdon.

Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by
You never get to stop and open your eyes
One day you're waiting for the sky to fall
The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all

These fragile bodies of touch and taste
This vibrant skin—this hair like lace
Spirits open to the thrust of grace
Never a breath you can afford to waste

I spent a fair amount of effort composing my thoughts around these words and their relation to the event we had partaken in together, and attempted to put together a poem or short song in a similar vein in commemoration. In the realm of photons, where we both belong… in the shadow of the moon our worlds combine… travelers in a digital time… terribly bad bits and pieces, and, like Bragdon’s comparisons, forced.

Serendipitously, in an unrelated conversation, another friend of mine excitedly introduced me to Suno, a generative machine learning model for creating music. If your views on such things veer towards the negative, consider for a moment its appropriateness to this tale of bridging data and daily life, and transiting between them. It felt a natural fit, and the second song which it gave me I could not resist adding here. It is, even in its title, synthetic, but it embodies the emotions of the time in a very real way.