Eclipse Anecdote is the lowest form of evidence that medicine will consider. But stories grow out of the sick; narratives hatched from the generative eggs of endings. There is a psychological condition where people cannot be kept from looking at the sun. Night is suffocation by the planet’s weight and width. We are more like plants than we care to admit. Rain is exchanged in our hair as it is in the pine and broadleaf crowns. We hunch down; the business of water takes us into our bodies, old messages stem in the spine. A plant, a person, is the small story of a place, an anecdote of acid or lime. Larger conversations of boreal and palm contain such dialects of shadow, rock face blocking the sun. Solar complex. Solar plexus. Freudian slip. What is wrong with us gives itself away in broad daylight, in the very words that grow from hands to mouths. As in Latin, disaster: the unfavourable aspect of a star, a great or sudden misfortune.
Adam Dickinson