The Great Eclipsing of Self.
My Dear ones.
A few housekeepings: I am about to schedule a $10+ patron webchat! There’s a lot to catch up on, Up your tier to join, it’s always wonderful to spend that time. I’m also about to do a tour-photo dump to the $5 patrons. There’s also a THING coming out this month, a film, that’s for patrons only. I rarely do that, but I want to keep this one out of the public world for now. If you’re one of the free subscribers, join now. It would mean a lot to me.
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I woke up today with a flood of thoughts that I’d love to spill onto you before Ash wakes up in…a few minutes? A few hours? IT’s hard to tell. His little school in upstate NY is cancelled today because of The Great Eclipse…and the poetry of the Moon disappearing the Sun is not lost on me, today. I feel that poem in my bones. I am going through my own Great Eclipsing. More on that below. First, I posted this little tidbit to socials last night…and I wanted to share it with you.
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A moment from Ash, age 8, after having asked me to turn the music off during our long road trip to Vermont today to see the solar eclipse tomorrow…a few silent minutes pass as he stares out the window at the fields and orchards and abandoned, collapsing farmhouses and then he drops this gem on me.
“Mama…do you know what confuses me a lot?”
“What, Ash?”
“That God was fictional, and they let it happen.”
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Rhiannon Giddens, who commented on FB: “Oh man we should get our two together some time. my boy at 5 came downstairs with “mom, if all we’re gonna do is die, what’s the point of living?”
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This one too…from Michael Castle:
At 3 my son said, “Dad! Everything is in everything.”
I looked at him astonished and said yes. Then he said: ”Thank you.”
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The ‘from the mouths of babes” comments are filled with gold. (You can go read them on Insta and FB and I have a feeling y’all will have some golden ones here too. Hit me. I love this).
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The conversation with Ash was followed by an discussion (and then mild argument) about Fiction.
Ash insists that Fiction should be BANNED because it is a distraction from reality.
“Fiction doesn’t help the climate crisis” was an actual quote.
I tried offering him all the platitudes about the Power of Story and then I realized I was in a losing battle. I was like: in a way, Ash, you’re right. Fiction has fucked us up. There are lies and stories that help, and there are lies and stories that ruin things.
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The above photo of Ash is from City Hall in Downtown Burlington VT, where we’ve come to visit our friend Zoe Keating and see the Great Eclipse Today…last night she was part of a program of live music set to silent films by Georges Méliès. And it was just gorgeous. (You can enjoy some of Méliès’ work on youtube, here’s the about-one-minute long “The Four Troublesome Heads”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKQRV4XKZt4
Here are some pictures from the show….
X
Ash and I finished watching the film “Spirited Away” with Ash last night and I felt that rare, beautiful falling-down-a-well feeling you can get from a piece of art that truly transports you to another compartment of your soul.
We went to bed.
I woke up this morning and realized something astonishing.
I do not recognize my self.
I have come to Burlington, Vermont (a three-hour drive from my home in Woodstock, NY), on short notice to see the eclipse, and the town is going to be filled with filled with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Extra People, and not only did it not occur to me to do a ninja gig or a gathering with the community up here; I didn’t even think to being my ukulele.
My mother-self has officially eclipsed my community-rock-star self.
My global self is okay with this.
There is a lot of eclipsing going on, in general.
I have huge moves coming up in my life, entire seismic and tectonic shifts, and I’m deeply enjoying the transition, and with it comes entire self-closets being emptied and taken to the trash.
Ani was living in clip, I’ve been living in eclipse for five years.
The things that have had to stay obscured. The things that have had to stay in the box, in the closet, the Great Unpacked. That which stays in darkness.
What happens when the moon blocks out the sun.
The power of a simple, coincidental moment bringing millions of people together.
The powerlessness of human beings against the tides of nature.
Human nature.
“Nature” nature.
Compassion, forgiveness, time, the Melt.
The sun cannot eclipse the moon.
But the moon can eclipse the sun.
The beauty in the darkness. The importance of stillness. The scientists, who calculate.
The artists, who reflect the calculations.
The locked boxes at the bottom of the sea, eventually opening.
The Miyasaki creature, “No Face”, who offers gold and then ravenously and gluttonously devours the greedy who accept it. And who appears to be pure horror, but is still befriended by this little girl, because she recognizes that he’s just in pain, a lost, powerless hungry ghost.
The endless power and bravery of the wise little children of this world.
The power in acceptance.
The wonder.
The horror.
God was fictional, and they let it happen.
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So, sorry Vermont, I won’t be ninja-ing today.
I have eclipsed myself.
I’m not gonna bring the community togehter.
I’m gonna bring myself together.
I’m gonna just walk around aimlessly with my godless child and give him my full attention, like a good fuckin mom should, and I’ll also keep drawing inspiration from this BEAUTIFUL town, fantasizing giddily about my return musician-based trip, solo or with The Dresden Dolls. City Hall is beautiful. I met a woman from the Vermont Symphony. There’s Higher Ground, where the dolls have played before. We will just have to come back. I’m excited. (And this is my annoying reminder to ALL OF YOU to please get on the dolls email list because we are gonna drop some New England dates, and album news, and more).
If you’re going to be watching the eclipse, MAKE SURE YOU DON’T LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN, EVEN A SLIVER OF THE SUN, you can fuck up your eyes for life.
And make sure you take a moment to pause and feel the poetry.
You cannot photograph this, really.
This is just here for you to feel.
So let this be a moment of poem. What is eclipsing you, and what are you eclipsing.
It is always, always, always always time to change.
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If you want some beautiful music today, I have two things for you.
First, listen to Zoe’s most recent record, Snowmelt, or this one, Into the Trees, a record I still play on repeat when I’m working on something and need some gorgeous wordless looped cello music.
EXCITEMNET: She’s got a new Zoe album coming out in the fall. Get on her email list.
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The header image of this post is the album cover of one of my favorite albums of the early 1980s, and it kept me very good company throughout a lot of 10th grade.
It’s like the album equivalent of a Miyasaki film.
It takes you to a….place.
“The Sky’s Gone Out”.
Here on spotify or just stream it where you can find it.
You’re welcome.
If you want to see/hear something beautiful with your eyes/ears, our friend Maria Popova just held this gorgeous Eclipse-event in Austin last night, with tons of scientists, poets and speakers…
Consider the dazzling odds: Out of the billions upon billions of possible combinations, a planet whose sole satellite is exactly 400 times smaller than its star and exactly 400 times closer, so that each time it passes between the two, it covers the face of the star perfectly, thrusting the planet into midday night, into something surreal and sublime.
Randomness seems too small a word for the staggering improbability that is a total solar eclipse. We may call it wonder. We may call it mystery. We may just fall silent before its brutal beauty, the way it presses consciousness against the gun barrel of time. Totality transported Virginia Woolf to “the birth of the world.” Annie Dillard saw in its almost unbearable strangeness a lens on “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.” Maria Mitchell, traveling fifteen hundred miles in her Quaker gown to lead an eclipse expedition of the world’s first women astronomers, was stunned by the “inky blackness” and the flowerlike prominences around the Sun’s disc and the silver streamers its corona sent “millions of miles into space” — tendrils of the majesty and mystery of nature, touching for a blink of time the depths of human nature with raw transcendence.
On the eve of the 2024 total solar eclipse — the last in North America for twenty years, and the first to sweep so vast a portion of the continent since Maria Mitchell’s day — more than 3,000 people are gathering in person under the starlit skies of Austin’s Waterloo Greenway to reverence Earth’s most sublime communion with the cosmos. (There are still a few tickets left.)
Join us across spacetime via livestream to savor the wonder behind eclipses: the formation of the Moon and the chemistry of the Sun, gravity and relativity, tides and black holes, the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, the fate of the passenger pigeon and the historic eclipse expedition that catapulted Einstein into fame.
Illustrating the science and the stories will be poems old and new, from Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers to Hannah Emerson and Rita Dove, performed by a constellation of inspired and inspiring minds, including authors Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, and James Gleick, On Being creator Krista Tippett, Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad, multidisciplinary artist Helga Davis, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, actor Natascha McElhone, cosmologist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander, poets Marie Howe and Ellen Bass, musicians Joan as Police Woman and David Byrne, and a special surprise guest.
….and the whole stream of it is FREE and NOW UP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aj33Ya36X8
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Lastly, almost lastly….here’s a house we passed on the God-drive.
I love you all so much.
It’s all about to come together.
Perhaps.
Or maybe it feels falling apart, and we’re now better at dancing with broken legs.
xxx
Amanda
P.S. On a finishing note, enjoy this Dresden Dolls Meme.
