Dedicated to the Game

This is an eclipse picture,

When it comes to eclipses, I have learned to keep my expectations low. For a long time, I thought that eclipses disappointed me simply because I had been living in the wrong latitudes for eclipse viewing. Then, after living through several events directly in the shadow’s path, I revised my opinion. Eclipses are just not that interesting to begin with, no matter how many astronomers squeal, clap, and wet their pants as the moon eats the sun. I stopped going out of my way to view eclipses several years ago.

The most recent event was no different. I made no plans around it, I went out to climb for the day, and I would have forgotten it completely if my climbing partner had not mentioned it in passing as we walked to the crag.

It was a bluebird morning, so the start of the event was especially noticeable. We were traversing a broad ledge system in the high-altitude Juniper forest along the Mogollon plateau when the light began to dim.

As the sunshine faded from orange alpenglow to an evening-time pallor, an odd shape emerged from the shadows of the Juniper branches. The phenomena was so striking that it brought me to a halt while I grasped for an explanation. I stood dumbfounded for several minutes before the answer dawned on me.

The spaces between the Juniper needles turned out to be just the right size to form millions of pinhole cameras which projected images of the eclipse in all the small beams of light which filtered through the canopy. I took out my rude digital camera hesitantly. Certain phenomena defy adequate representation. To depict events like this properly, the camera would have to somehow capture the entirety of their context.

No single photograph or body of work could depict at once the magnitude of planetary movement, the peculiar minutia of the light particles’ structure, and all the associations set off by the resulting retinal impulses to produce a tingle in the observer’s brain. We could take heaps of pictures of the eclipse, but no one could get a good eclipse picture. The little black-and-white crescents cast on the rocks and dirt were the closest thing possible.

So, credit to the moon. It achieved something like the feat at the heart of a sand Mandala ceremony. In that rite, several Buddhist monks get together to cooperatively construct a complex image out of colored sand. When the project is complete, the monks sweep away the sand grains, and the image is no more.

A nihilistic interpretation of this ceremony exists, and it is another avatar of my wife’s fear about meaninglessness. No matter how hard you work, how much you invest or how careful you are, your works will be swept away in time. The heat death of the universe renders everything else irrelevant. That characterization ignores a couple of key points. The mandala has been laid down and swept away countless times before and will be reconstituted, albeit not exactly, countless times yet. An aspect of the mandala resides with the monks as much as an aspect of it resides with the sand grains.

The monks can dredge up the whole ritual as needed because it is continuous with the whole of their experience. And, since experience is inseparable from existence, the ritual process refers to the whole ball of wax, though the ball of wax is necessarily viewed from a certain perspective. To be aware of the above relationships is to be true to the single purpose of the present moment.

Anguish over meaning arises when a person abandons the single purpose of the present moment to try and see the ball of wax from the perspective of someone staring at the death of the universe. I think I understand why this maneuver is so tempting. It is akin to solipsism. It is difficult to construct a formal argument against either, (they are protected by their own absurdity, like the question, “why isn’t the moon purple?”). That quality makes them seem more solid than they are. However, both positions purport to be all about psychology, and both are positions which are impossible to hold psychologically.

Once a person concludes that experience, and therefore existence, represents nothing, or even something trivial, to us, they do not immediately fall into a coma because they have voided the motivating significance of their existence. The solipsist will continue to treat their hallucinations of other people as if those phantasms were actual people. Those who are troubled by impermanence will still recognize eclipse pictures on the rocks, and they will still find themselves motivated by their circumstances.

We’ll see what she says to this.