Listening With The Eclipse
“In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.”
—Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”
After The Dark Side Of The Moon finishes with a bang, we gather in my parents’ backyard, Dallas, Texas, April 8, 2024. We started the album too early, so there’s still ten minutes to go until the totality of the solar eclipse. It’s a good mistake. The world has gone quiet, kind of. The oceanic hiss of distant traffic is gone. The birds are noisy though, flying back to their nests and roosts.
They’re chattering, and we are too, about the light. It’s darkening, but not in the usual way of the evening. This is what I wasn’t prepared for: the light doesn’t “darken” like all the articles said. It pixellates. It looks like a copy of a copy of a copy of my parents’ backyard, fading into this blueish metallic silver, with purple undertones. “A blue deepening,” Jason Logan calls this dusky color. “It’s a turning point that you only know after it’s turned.” Or Rebecca Solnit’s “the blue of distance.”
I also wasn’t prepared for the feeling of disorientation to slowly rise through my body. It gripped my stomach in proportion to the pixellating light, and it nearly was overwhelming. I almost couldn’t believe where I was. This was my childhood backyard, but the input didn’t match. The grass was disappearing. I was disappearing. Was this an intellectualized fear, the fear of knowing something big is about to happen? Or physiological, like the birds returning home as the sky goes weird? The fear of needing to be somewhere safe?
Then the cool breeze. It was a hot and humid day, but as the sun disappeared, the earth cooled quickly and a breeze blew through, quietly. The birds went silent as the eclipse neared totality, it was this pixellated purple around our bodies, a faded dusk all around the horizon.
And then we looked up at a black disc stealing the sun’s light. One last gasp around the edge: Baily’s beads, the sun streaming through the mountains and canyons of the moon. And there it was. Totality, a dim halo of light around a black hole in the sky. Venus to the bottom right, Jupiter revealing itself in the east. I felt humbled. I felt like I was going to fall into the hole, that it was taking all of our gravity with us. “Night night,” said my toddler daughter to the darkness and to all these adults peering into the sky.
Totality ended. Did we clap? We certainly stood astonished, grinning and energetic and maybe a little frightened at being put in our place. The eclipse continued, the moon revealing the bottom slice of the sun this time, but I remember we all left the yard and sat at the table, showing each other photos. The partial eclipse was only exciting as prelude. Annie Dillard had a similar experience:
We never looked back. It was a general vamoose, and an odd one, for when we left the hill, the sun was still partially eclipsed—a sight rare enough, and one which, in itself, we would probably have driven five hours to see. But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
It was so quiet. The neighborhood, it reminded me of the early days of the pandemic, all of us forced into the latitudes of home. But the event itself was deeply quiet too. No starting gun, as Dillard put it, for something so immense. Just this massive shape in the sky silently turning the world unrecognizable. Our apocalypses tend to be loud: wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanos; arguments, car crashes, despair, grieving. With the eclipse, I’m reminded of the true meaning of “apocalypse”: a revealing. Revealing the true nature of things, the unremitting silence of the cosmos.
A few days later, I see an extraordinary film called 32 Sounds. The filmmaker, Sam Green, calls it an “immersive documentary”: a few hundred of us gathered in a university performance hall, wearing headphones, watching the film while Green narrates live. It’s a film about what sound does to us on a body level. There’s a foley artist mimicing the sound of a tree falling in a forest. An astrophysicist rediscovering the tapes he made as a child, revealing his hopes and dreams for life. At one point, we’re all invited to touch the subwoofers at the front of the stage as the film plays disco and dub reggae. “Oh yeah,” I think as I put my hand to the vibrating speaker cone, “bass is amazing!” It’s so loud I don’t really hear it; it’s like the bass blocks my ears, a total eclipse of treble. I feel it in my stomach again.
The film opens on a stark note. We’re in the British sound archives, an immense space filled with tapes, reel-to-reels, even early recording mediums like wax cylinders. We meet the archivist in charge, and she shows Green her favorite recording. It’s of a rare Hawaiian bird. Years of clearcutting and development have decimated the population. By the middle of the 20th century, there is only one pair of mates remaining in the entire world.
A hurricane hits this Hawaiian island, and the female is killed. But come mating season, the male keeps singing, hoping to find a partner, oblivious to the fact that it is the only one of its species still alive. The recording captures this tragedy for all time, or for at least as long as the tape will play it or there are humans to hear it, to feel it. This bird, holding vigil, singing singing singing a cheery song, waiting at his listening post for someone to hear it and live with him.
Later in the film, we’re introduced to a young Annea Lockwood as she’s cheerily burning a piano. She’s all smiles and crooked teeth as the flames crackle and consume the piano’s wood behind her. Lockwood is an experimental composer, a colleague of John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Karlheinz Stockhausen. But there’s something different about her. “John Cage was a brilliant artist and a huge genius, but he was also a consummate move and shaker,” Green writes elsewhere. “And Annea Lockwood was not.” She’s a queer woman in a male-dominated field. But she’s also set apart by her deeply funny and joyous attitude. Experimental music is often somber and cold, disguising an anger or a prickliness at its inception. Lockwood’s pieces tend to start happily. Burning a piano—well, why the hell not? The piece evolved over the years: Lockwood is in her garden with pianos, encouraging plants to grow over, around, and through them like a garden gnome. She places a piano in a swampy creek, slowly sinking it as a performer plays a waterlogged sonata.
“I like playing. I don’t mean playing an instrument, I mean playing,” she says. She’s a kid grown up, full of technique and skill but in touch with the essential. Lockwood, in a t shirt, skirt, and go-go boots in 1966, is breaking glass. She’s tossing shards into a giant pile of other shards, she’s smashing a window with a brick or a piece of metal. A BBC reporter in a suit wanders into frame and asks her, “Ms. Lockwood, this is only a rehearsal. What’s the real thing going to be like?” She turns to him, radiant. No intellectualization, no tedious theory, just the excitement of breaking glass and listening to it like a symphony with an audience. After a few stiff questions, the reporter leaves, and Lockwood smiles a full body smile and goes back breaking glass. The audience at 32 Sounds gives a huge laugh, but I think they were laughing at the BBC’s incredulity. Lockwood is having fun.
She was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, not far from the swift rivers that descend from the Southern Alps. “I grew up listening closely to rivers and with a huge respect and interest in them,” she says. Years later, she started taking sound maps of rivers around the world, like the Danube and the Hudson. In 32 Sounds, we find Lockwood submerging a hydrophone into a river, ecstatic at all the aquatic sounds “dancing,” as she puts it. She makes Green’s own sound engineer remove his boom mic headphones and listen to hers, and the two are kids again, passing big-eyed wows between their faces. “I keep trying to assert, as I get older, that we are not separate from these phenomena. We are beyond entangled, we are interdependent with them. I keep trying to find more and more ways of presenting that idea to people—presenting that reality—not an idea to my mind, it’s a reality.”
Her life partner was Ruth Anderson, another experimental composer with a hearty laugh and a gleeful artistry. They passed these ideas, these realities, back and forth across decades. “Sound holds the power to increase wholeness of self and unity with others,” Anderson once said. At the end of 32 Sounds, Lockwood is alone on her back porch in upstate New York, listening to the crickets and bugs come out. A dusky color is falling all around. She seems to be deep in thought, but when Green prods her, she says she’s listening to a “delightful” bug that’s sounding out an octave above the rest. She reveals that Ruth died the previous fall, after a half century together. It’s too unbearable to listen to music yet, but the dusk chorus is just right. It reminds Lockwood of their time together, on this porch, talking or not talking, listening to the world.
But that’s not quite right. A central tenent of her artistic practice is listening with something, not to. "And it’s my sense that if I’m standing here,” Lockwood says, “I’m just one of many organisms that are listening with one another within this environment. Not even to the environment, we’re within it, and we’re all listening together, as it were. I think of sound as being an energy channel from one phenomenon to another, a sensory channel of connection that’s very strong and shows me how deeply connected we are with everything else that’s around us.”
She’s holding vigil at her listening post, listening with the world. Somewhere high above, the sun and moon and stars are with each other, with her too, moving in silence.