OBSCURE
Photographs by Isaac Bruning
Essay by R. Lynn Bruning
Obscure: A Small Town
in the Path of Totality
On April 8, 2024, the folks of our hometown wore paper glasses and looked up at the sun.
Photograph 3: I do not know these Padawans holding their light sabers so ready. Maybe I would recognize their parents. Or their aunts or uncles. I’ve read that their angels always see the face of God.
My husband, Isaac, and I moved back to Searcy, Arkansas only a few weeks before the solar eclipse and discovered a community eagerly anticipating its moment under totality. Everybody was talking about the eclipse. It was the cover story for Searcy Living. Our alma mater was planning to throw a barbeque and host an astronaut. Schools and businesses would close. A church spelled out “free eclipse parking” on their marquee, while one citizen planted several new “no trespassing” signs in his yard.
After nearly two decades Elsewhere, just in time for the excitement, we were back. Back on the small map dot where we had met and lived as newlyweds. In this town, Isaac had been born in the county hospital and had waited tables at his uncle’s steakhouse. On these roads, my dad had taught me to drive stick-shift behind the wheel of a red pickup. At this Christian high school, I had sung alto in the chorus, making goofy faces at sopranos Cara and Kat. How many songs had we three girls sung together through years of practices, performances, and daily chapel services? Eventually, Cara and Kat had traded our Southern hometown of thousands for Northeastern metros of millions.
Well, and so had I.
Given the timing of our arrival, the upcoming eclipse seemed to hold significance for Isaac and me. We didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but we paid attention. Isaac decided to mark our return by photographing Galaxy Fest, a Star Wars-themed eclipse-viewing party to be held at the Searcy Events Center.
He readied his cameras, and I prepared myself for the eclipse by rereading Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse,” an essay that, among other things, explores the limitations of human language. She writes, “The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience.” Indeed, how are we to describe all that we think and feel when we encounter that which transcends our understanding, be it light or shadow? Dillard nearly captures in prose the baffling experience of viewing a total solar eclipse, but in the end, she’s right. Either you’ve encountered the grand thing or you haven’t, and when you do find yourself standing in a path of totality—that place where heaven, for a moment, makes earth pay attention—what human utterance could possibly be adequate for the occasion?
Photograph 4: A green ball painted with alien features tops each of the wire antennae on the woman’s headband. The rest of her is pink. Pink shirt, pink hair, dark pink lipstick. On her cheek is painted a crescent moon and stars, and a catchlight sparkles in her eye. For all her decorative attire, she stands poised and solemn, like one commissioned and clutching a scroll. The next words on her lips could be, “Here am I! Send me.”
Following our move—probably to calm the noise inside my head—I listened over and over to Infinity by the vocal ensemble VOCES8. The album cover artwork depicts a skyscape of stars and swirling colors—a fair enough representation of Infinity. Of the objects I can see and name, stars are the oldest and farthest away. They seem to commune with transcendence. No wonder the ancient Israelites thought of the stars as spiritual creatures who interfaced with God.
At night, I lay beneath an unfamiliar ceiling and matched my breathing to the music’s lento tempo, mentally tracing the soprano’s ascent to an impossible octave. Several of the songs on Infinity involve simple lyrics or no proper lyrics at all, but just the interjections ah and oh and ooh. These tiny words, so lacking in specificity, are sometimes the only sounds we can make in response to the wondrous, the incomprehensible, even the terrible or frightening.
Photograph 6: Bible verses cover the two handmade signs propped against the picnic table. Next to the signs, the man with the white beard could be an Arkansan Moses, presenting his tablets to the people—Moses, who had the gall to ask the LORD for a glimpse of his glory. Sure enough, God made “all [his] goodness” pass in front of Moses but shielded the prophet until all that remained to be seen of the LORD was his back. Even so, Moses descended the mountain with a face so bright it had to be veiled. Has the man at the picnic table ever seen the back—or any other part—of God? Something must motivate him to sit with these signs at Galaxy Fest.
Oh, oh, oh were the words of my dad on his deathbed.
Dad was born on April 8, 1947, exactly seventy-seven years before Searcy experienced totality. Somehow, it seemed fitting for the moon to disrupt regular daylight on the birthday and over the ashes of a man who had such unusual bodily magnetism that wristwatches stopped keeping proper time whenever he wore them.
A type-one diabetic, he had long dreaded the amputations that so often accompany diabetes. In his later years, he had spoken to me openly about his horror at the thought of us—his family—watching his periphery get cut away, digit by limb. But Dad never ended up losing so much as a toe. Instead of a familiar disease destroying his extremities, a new one multiplied within his core. How long he had sensed the illness, I do not know, but he delayed diagnosis until the doctor paired it with a prognosis of imminent death.
What got him in the end was esophageal cancer. This was exactly the way he wanted to go, and he refused to fight it. No surgery, no chemo, no radiation. Joyful on his hospice bed, he waited through pain, starvation, and organ failure with the keen recognition that he would soon transition from his mortal body to one that was hearty enough to stand face to face with the risen Christ.
After a few weeks, Dad fell into silent sleep. During his final hours, Mom, my sisters, and I leaned over his bedside. At last, his eyes opened and grew large, fixed on something above him that the rest of us could not see. With an expression of desperate elation on his face, he raised his arms and cried, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
These are the last words I remember him saying.
What did he see or hear? What did he feel and understand? Whatever it was, I am inclined to believe it was very good—good beyond any words he could access at the time. Those moments have lingered in my memory as a close encounter with transcendence, even though the fullness of the thing my father experienced was hidden from me.
Photograph #8 They lounge on the grass in the temporary silver twilight with their bubble tea and lemonade. They are Earthlings, homesick for the universe. They are aliens, sojourning through space and time. They search the sky for answers. They await the tongues of fire and the deeper understanding.
Contemporary English speakers are relatively accustomed to hearing the word Hallelujah—thanks to George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, performed continuously since the 1700s, and Leonard Cohen’s folk-rock single, covered by hundreds of artists since 1984—but it is one of those religious words of ancient origin that might have easily fallen out of memory.
Reading the Old Testament, especially the psalms of David, a person familiar with the Hebrew language occasionally encounters a phrase that transliterates to halal-ya. In English, we read, “Praise the LORD!” but ya more specifically invokes the name by which God, speaking through the burning bush, first identified himself to Moses. In the New Testament, this halal-ya, or Hallelujah, appears only in Revelation, when “something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters, and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder” shouts Hallelujah before the throne of God.
Perhaps because of its use in this apocalyptic setting, Hallelujah seems to have adopted a sort of mystique among the church fathers. In The Apocalypse: Lectures on the Book of Revelation, scholar Joseph Seiss writes, “Anselm of Canterbury considers it an angelic word, which cannot be fully reproduced in any language of man and concurs with Augustine that the feeling and saying of it embodies all the blessedness of heaven.” Whether or not Hallelujah appears in the angels’ lexicon, I can think of no word more fitting to say in a place where folks “will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illuminate them; and they will reign forever and ever.”
And yet, if the word had been in the vocabulary of Job, who blessed the Lord while suffering through unspeakable loss, I suppose he would have said, “Hallelujah” even while buckling beneath the shadow of hell.
Photograph #9: Cape thrown back and beak askew, the silhouette could be an anthropomorphic raven or a plague doctor on his cell phone break. This living creature holds his technology aloft against a charcoal sky. Farther up, a star—or maybe Venus?—appears ahead of schedule. Higher still, is that a wheel within a wheel? And is the spirit of the living creature in the wheel?
I did not attend Galaxy Fest with Isaac, but just after midday, I walked out to the driveway and looked up. I saw it happen. I juggled my eclipse glasses and phone, attempting to document my unique angle under the traveling shadow. I felt the air cool and looked around at the untimely dusk activating the streetlights. I gaped at the white corona screaming around the hole in a sun shot through the heart.
I wish I had thought to say, “Hallelujah.”
That afternoon, Cara, the friend with whom I had sung so many songs in my youth, sent a message from New York City: “She’s gone.”
Her mother, who had recently entered hospice after a long struggle with cancer, died just after the partial eclipse took place over New York. Later, Cara would recount the visceral experience of watching daylight fade from the sky during the final hours of her mother’s life. I could not help but think of the afternoon blackout that served as the backdrop to the crucifixion of Jesus. How lost had his disciples—had his mother—felt when that daytime darkness coincided with the death of the one they had all believed to be God?
Cara’s family traveled to Searcy, their home of so many years gone by. Kat, whose father was also very sick with cancer, flew in from New Jersey to attend the funeral in the Downtown Church of Christ sanctuary, the same room where, eight years before, we had all gathered to mourn my dad’s passing. Smiling at each other through tears, Cara, Kat, and I found ourselves singing together again the old hymns we still knew by heart. During “Great is Thy Faithfulness,” my voice failed. Kat held my hand.
There is no shadow of turning with Thee…
Photograph #12: The woman wears alien antennae, and she and the man sit in camp chairs. Sunlight falls across the nose and cheeks of the young girl between them. She has antennae of her own. She is like a rosebud, both shy and bold, peeking through the leaves of the full-blown flowers around her. She fixes her attention on something outside of the frame, and her earnest expression reminds me that no one is too young to hear the voice of God. Guided by his mentor, the sleepy boy Samuel knew how to reply when God called his name, even though “word from the Lord was rare in those days.”
The God-is-dead movement that rocked the academy in the late 1960s pervaded the zeitgeist of the early seventies. An academic, my father was also a mystic bewildered to find himself living in his own times. Suddenly, in 1977, George Lucas filled the silver screen with starships, rebels, and especially the Force. Lucas may not have created Star Wars for Christian devotional use, but Dad’s first viewing was a religious experience. The film acknowledged the possibility, if only in fantasy, of an invisible power at work in the universe, even in human(oid) lives. I can imagine him, stunned in his theater seat and praying the words of Hagar: “You are a God who sees me.”
Through the years, Dad loved all the Star Wars movies, each new release reminding him of his initial encounter with the story. A few days after the premier of The Force Awakens, he transitioned to home hospice care. Though at peace with impending death, he chafed under the knowledge that he had neither the strength to catch the film at the cinema nor the time to wait for it to come out on DVD.
Isaac and I had suspended the motion of our lives in Boston to sit in the stillness of my parents’ living room, where Dad lay pale under hospital sheets and tubes. Sometimes, you needed to leave the house to clear your head. One afternoon, Isaac went to the movies. When he returned, he sat next to Dad and described to him, detail for detail, the continuing epic of Han, Leia, and Luke with a new generation of characters working to use the Force for good or ill.
Throughout Isaac’s telling, which far exceeded the length of the 138-minute movie, Dad lay rapt like a child under the spell of a bedtime story. That day, their relationship, which had theretofore been characterized by the awkward tolerance so often found between fathers and sons-in-law, transformed into something that looked much more like the bond between father and son.
Photograph 13: The man bows his shaded face over a phone, but the boy lifts his chin and cheeks to the beams. His tender profile glows against the backdrop of a blue rose tattooed across the man’s deltoid. On the bicep, Gabriel is inked in cursive. Is Gabriel the boy’s name and the man his father? Or is the boy looking up at the other Gabriel—that herald who, shining over the child Mary’s upturned face, announced both the miracle and the role she would play in it?
Isaac printed his favorite shots from Galaxy Fest and laid them out on the table. “I only took a few of the eclipse itself,” he said. “I mainly wanted to document the people of Searcy experiencing it.”
Thanks to the telescopic lens and the Internet, pristine photographs of total solar eclipses are easy enough to find, but Isaac’s photos, which show the people of this little-known town—our town—responding to the celestial wonder, are rare treasures. Years ago, Life Magazine asked three hundred people the question, “What is the meaning of life?” They published the responses in the book, The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here. Annie Dillard’s answer includes this passage: “We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.”
Studying the images, Isaac said, “When you see someone loving something, you kind of love them.”
I looked at him. I said, “That’s true.”
Photograph 15: The man’s mouth opens in a sort of smile. He wears glasses—transparent ones for seeing. Slipped behind those lenses are his eclipse glasses, shielding his eyes from the blinding light. A glare bounces off one black lens. The Lord has been known to use a light to blind a man. When Saul regained his vision, he understood that he was seeing everything for the first time.
Newly married and bored with small-town living, Isaac and I had busted out of this place to find a new life. We had gone out into the World. We had Seen a Thing or Two.
We had sought the Lord and done our best to follow his direction. But in time, we began to wonder why we felt so lost. We had—as Leonard Cohen sings—“caught the darkness.” Depression sickened us as we responded to different kinds of loss, including the death of my father, who lifted his arms and swan-dived into Infinity. But there were the other losses, too, the ones I struggle to articulate outside of the language of metaphor.
Isaac and I found ourselves at the bottom of a trench so deep we feared we might never again walk in the light of day. Yet one of the mercies God may deploy during sinister times is perspective. Down there, with your face smashed into the rock, you begin to see the earth—and your place on it—in a new way. From such an angle, even your obscure hometown (if anyone there still loves you) can begin to shine.
Indeed, we felt love emanating from our family and old friends, and we had never needed it more. “Come home,” they said. “Come home.”
So, we came home.
We traveled so far only to come full circle.
I used to sit in church pews here in Searcy and ask how the Israelites managed to have such a hard time trusting God to lead them. Was he not radiating his transcendent nature through a glory cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, for goodness’ sake?
Well, but when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, and I reasoned like a child. But when I grew up, I learned what it was to wander. Now we see but the dim glow of a star ninety-four million miles away. And, from time to time, we also experience the full shadow of the moon.
Hallelujah.
∞
References
The Bible. New American Standard Bible, Lockman Foundation, 2020.
Chisholm, Thomas O. “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” 1923. Great Songs of the Church (Revised), edited by Forrest M. McCann, Abeline Christian University Press, 1986, #147.
Cohen, Leonard. “Hallelujah.” Various Positions, Columbia Records, 1984.
--. “Darkness.” Old Ideas, Columbia Records, 2012.
Dillard, Annie. “Total Eclipse.” Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. HarperCollins, 1982, pp. 9-28.
Friend, David and the Editors of Life. The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here. Little Brown & Co, 1991.
Handel, George Frideric. “Hallelujah Chorus.” Messiah, 1741.
“Intro to Spiritual Beings.” The Bible Project, 14 Feb 2019, https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/intro-spiritual-beings/.
Seiss, Joseph A. The Apocalypse: Lectures on the Book of Revelation. Kregel Publications, 1987.
VOCES8. Infinity, Decca, 2021.
Weaver, Forrest W. “The Shadow of the Moon.” Searcy Living, vol. 24 no. 1, 2024, pp. 54-58.