Ancestors of eclipse, the word, intimate a feeling of abandonment. That has captured my imagination today on #eclipse day.
At heart, eclipse is a sorrowful kind of word, rooted in “absence.” Its Ancient Greek forefather ἔκλειψις / ékleipsis means “forsake.” Even older, the Proto-Indo-European root *leikw- for “leave” hides in eclipse. This *leikw- combines with ex- and creates “leave out, fail to appear, abandon.” Eclipse.
As if the sun could abandon us.
Wait. Have you read Brian McLaren’s Life After Doom? Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature? Jeanine M. Canty’s Returning the Self to Nature?
Eclipse is a word expressing relationship among us and nature, sun, moon, all creatures. How much we love the sun, though it’s easy to forget when life is mediated by our screens.
The charlock mustard that I noticed in the marsh early today is as yellow as and as dependent on the sun as are we all, including the various small white butterflies’ larvae who feed on the mustard plant.
“Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?” Mary Oliver keeps asking. That’s from one of her essays included in Parabola, Spring 2022.
An eclipse is a poignant reminder of our interconnectedness.
Indra’s Net comes to mind. It originated in Hinduism and the deva Indra who’s associated with rain and storms, and then Buddhism took it in. It’s this beautiful infinite net hung with a single sparkling jewel at every point of connection, so there are infinite jewels. If we could look at just one of these star-bright jewels up close, we would see reflected there all of the other jewels in the net, infinite in number, and so on, as we went from jewel to jewel. It is a wonderful image of infinitely repeating interconnectedness among all creatures and creations in the cosmos.
I’d like to make a call to enter into a more mindful relationship with words, too. Anyone can explore words at etymonline.com/. It’s free and based on reliable sources.
As a pre-teen suffering from undiagnosed dyslexia, I kept failing Reader’s Digest vocabulary quizzes. I began looking up words’ roots. Knowing these helped words stay more still on the page, made reading less impossible. Pretty much daily I’m thankful to have had an early and unquenchable desire to read even when I couldn’t.
Word histories sometimes scare people because they’re called etymologies. But etymology itself has an etymology. Etymon means “true.” And while words’ definitions change (YAY!), knowing a word’s first roots is a lot like viewing the baby pictures of someone you love. You can’t get enough of how they looked when they couldn’t even talk yet and when there’s a photo of them with red spaghetti sauce smeared all over their baby face.
I say “YAY!” because words’ definitions change because humans change. That we and language are capable of change gives me grounds for hope.
Etymologies are also words’ ancestors. Once you start exploring them, you start seeing how many words are relatives of each other. Indra’s Net again. You just have to pause and make a habit of looking up words in etymonline.com/. Soon it will be a bit like eating potato chips, except healthier. One more word.
Look and see how eclipse has so many siblings. To name a few, it would hold family reunions with: delinquent, derelict, eleven, loan, relic, relinquish, reliquiae, and twelve. The Proto-Indo-European root *leikw- for “leave” or “left” forms all or part of delinquent: leave completely/(de-); derelict: leave back/(re-) completely/(de-); eleven: one left (over 10); loan: left with someone “as promise of future return”; relic: left back or behind/(re-); relinquish: leave behind/(re-); reliquiae: leave back or behind/(re-); and twelve: two left (over 10). They’re all to do with “leaving” or being “left”! It’s beginning to sound like a country song.
Searching further in the Cosmic Baby Book for Words, aka the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), we read this etymology for eclipse: “Old French eclipse, esclipse, < Latin eclīpsis, Greek ἔκλειψις, noun of action < ἐκλείπειν to be eclipsed, literally to forsake its accustomed place, fail to appear.” The ἐκλείπω / ekleípō is “I abandon, I go missing, I vanish,” from ἐκ / ek “out” and λείπω / leípō “I leave behind.”
When I learned today that eclipse has French roots from the twelfth century CE, I wondered: How might someone have felt around that time when an eclipse happened? Probably not unlike diverse people do today. One article of a zillion is here.
NASA notes that there were 250 solar eclipses during the 1100’s CE. That NASA has a FREE Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses overjoys the nerd in me. More here. The longest annular solar eclipse happened on January 16, 1116 CE, and the longest total solar eclipse occurred on July 11 that very same year, 1116 CE. The first one lasted 10 minutes and 27 seconds, and the summer one was 6 minutes and 46 seconds of eclipse.
Let’s imagine. Without a cell phone / smart phone constantly in hand, did a European in 1116 CE have an edge on interconnectedness with nature? We do have more screens between us and nature now.
But wait. Feudalism and manorialism were flourishing then, so likely I and many more would’ve been part of the 80-90% of serfs holding sickles instead, which it can be argued is where the plutocracy wants to return the world.
In fact, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America asks, “Why is there so much poverty in America?” Or, as theologian Walter Brueggemann’s work argues, Why isn’t this poverty and America’s systemic inequity the central questions of Christianity? Desmond shows “how some lives are made small so that others may grow” in the U.S., and his argument challenges us to become “poverty abolitionists.”
Resolving our divorce from nature seems central.
Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe points out how the “highly venerated Oxford English Dictionary” defines nature as “[t]he phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans.”
For emphasis, he repeats the unhealthy binary in this definition: “…as opposed to humans.”
We are brought up thinking that dictionaries set the definitions and that what we find in a dictionary is THE definition of a word. We’ve been taught to treat dictionaries as sacrosanct. But excellent lexicographers and dictionaries don’t determine words’ definitions. Humans do. Dictionaries are meant to record current uses of words. Linguist John Algeo taught me that. There’s even one dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage where word squabbles are recorded. Its tagline: “The complete guide to problems of confused or disputed usage.” In fact, here you learn that one of the most stigmatized words ever in English, “ain’t,” used to be viewed as acceptable, even preferred usage. It ain’t a lie—I did a paper on it in graduate school for John!
Akomolafe was approached by a group campaigning for a new definition of “nature” in our dictionaries, because they had noticed, as he says, “the perceived separateness between humans and nature – especially in the so-called Global North” (LinkedIn, January 23, 2024). Akomolafe argues that this illusion of separateness “has contributed in no small way to the extractive cultures that are folded into the lingering troubles of the Anthropocene.” This group asked him for his own definition, which, he says, “they’d hope might dislodge the centrality of the brutal humanism implied in the official descriptions of ‘nature’.”
Akomolafe offered this definition: “A theoretical, economic, political, and theological designation from the Enlightenment era that attempts to name the material world of trees, ecologies, animals, and general features and products of earth as separate from humans and human society, largely in a bid to position humans as masters over material forces, independent and capable of transforming the world for their exclusive ends.”
His coda? “It’s as far as I could go without waxing poetic about nature as a colonial trope for biopolitical interventions. What felt important to say was that ‘nature’ is a performative, speculative gesture, a ritual of relations that rehearses a dissociation from the world. A subjectivizing force. A lounge in the terminal of the radioactive Human.”
Thank you, Bayo Akomolafe, for this wisdom.
The etymology of eclipse starts looking anthropomorphic.
We no longer have a geocentric model of the cosmos. Isn’t it time we stopped having an anthrocentric model of ‘nature’?