Memphis, this sweet, feisty, hopeful, and sometimes heartbreaking city of ours, turns 200 in 2019. So young, by city standards; consider that Damascus and Jericho have been occupied continuously for 55 times as long, Aleppo 40 times as long. Of course, what we mean when we say that Memphis turns 200 in 2019 is that, in May 1819, Memphis was incorporated by three white men: John Overton, James Winchester, and Andrew Jackson. And when we say Memphis was discovered in 1541, by Hernando de Soto, we mean that de Soto was the first European man to cross the Mississippi River, and wander our bluffs.
Marking time in American history, and celebrating milestones like the Memphis bicentennial, can thus be a queasy business. Of course, of course there were people living and thriving here long before 1819, long before 1541. The same bluff that the offices of this magazine perch atop was occupied for thousands of years, first by the people we now call the Mississippians, builders of mounds like the ones at Chucalissa, and then by the Chickasaw Tribe. This was not some undiscovered country, some new frontier. It was someone else’s home.
...the shadowy sphere glowed blood-orange, first on the bottom scalloped edge, then more and more until the entire visible moon was deep, and juicy, and gleaming.
In late January, watching the total lunar eclipse, I thought about the people whose home this was in the longer-ago. Before people with pale skin and reddish hair like mine arrived. The eclipse on the night of January 20th was called a “Super Blood Wolf Moon,” for its size and hue and season (wolves howled at the moon more in the winter, it’s said, likely on account of hunger). The moon goes into eclipse when it’s in the shadow of Earth, and turns red from the reflection of all our earthly fire and fury reflected through the atmosphere and onto the shadow.
The night of the eclipse, my boyfriend and his son and our dogs stood outside, and stared. The sky was clear, liquid darkness punctured by stars. The full moon’s brightness gradually receded beneath a dark, round shadow, our shadow, like half a lens shutter closing. The camera strapped around my neck started acting cantankerous, confused by low light; the few photos I took were all jagged smears and darts of light against inky darkness. At some point, wanting no longer to be frustrated by technology, we set the thing aside, inside, deemed it enough simply to watch. To watch, unencumbered, unaccommodated.
While more of the moon, then all, darkened, the shadowy sphere glowed blood-orange, first on the bottom scalloped edge, then more and more until the entire visible moon was deep, and juicy, and gleaming, just the fewest whispery wisps of light escaping from the topmost sliver. And then it stayed that way: orange, umber, umbra. Magnificent.
We wondered — independently at first, then together, aloud — what it might be like to experience phenomena like this if we’d not read about the spectacle on our phones earlier, seen a schedule of the evening’s events. What this might be like if we’d no basic understanding of what we should expect to see, if the night were clear enough, and what could produce such a show. A thousand, five thousand, even a few hundred years ago, a person seeing this surely would have been inclined to read vast meaning in it, strange portents of — something.
So we stood on the porch, shivering and imagining, as far as possible, that the city lights blinked away, one by one. Imagining that there were no phones in our pockets, and no warm lamps glowing on the other side of the door, and we were here, simply here, wondering at the blood-orange shadow shining down on us.
Nothing is so simple or so certain as we tell ourselves: You think you know what the moon does, how it wanes and waxes, until one day it inserts itself over the sun (as in the solar eclipse, eighteen months ago, whose totality repositioned me in 160 seconds’ still, silent darkness), or goes and turns itself wild orange one cold January night. All the alerts and all the explanations on all the phones can’t prepare a person for magnificence like this. Once it’s happening, the hows and whys matter so vanishingly little, so not nearly as much as this, this, This. This moment, and this moon, and this earthly observation deck with these dogs and this man and his son.
