Icarus*

Life brings us treasures, opportunities which the moment must order us to take. These are made of furtive moments, shared in passion. These only should drive our lives. Think with guts, heart being too weak and head too wise.

 

The opportunity can be planned, we can have waited for it, or it can even have been caused. There is no shame to this. And there is the opportunity "fireworks", the one which arrives when you expected everything but this. It is the moment when some say to you, " Try! ", the moment when you say to yourself " why not ? " And it is the moment when the child in you asks : " can you? ".

You have to answer : "yes" 

 

On the way to Newman, we had the only hope to find some work. No dreams whose we weren’t the dreamers. We were only in search of a place where to sleep, the time to look for and to find some work. I left an ad on this good old web site for couchsurfing. But Newman, it is not very big. There were only five" couchsurfeurs ". It means people who, in exchange for nothing and in the only name of the shared love of travel, agree to make room in their home for you and for a few nights. I wrote to all five. Nobody answered. Instead, I got a strange proposal of a hunter. 

 

The hunters, you know them. Three categories. There is the good, the bad and the one of Chantal Goya (french joke). I ignored that there were others… but take the word as symbol, as image. You end up Indiana Jones chasing the holy grail. A hunter, it is a chaser, atracker, a hooker. 

 

Ours is a eclipse harasser. A kind of crazy Indiana which found us on the web. When this kind of guy approaches you by saying " Hey, you look cute, are you interested in taking photos in the dark of an eclipse ? ". You must try reading between the lines. Reject nothing without thinking about it. 

 

Suggest to someone to pose for photos, on the Web, to a girl, leads to a great deal of suspicion. Ah… at the end of the message he speaks about Greg. Photos of couple. Well, already, that looks better. I check the link with his pictures… Shapes appear on the moon, or on the incandescent sun of eclipses… I say yes. We leave messages, we call each other and we finally make an appointment.

It is eleven o’clock, on Thursday, May 9th. 

 

The character arrives. Tornado warning, grade 4. Eugen Kamenew is in the arena, in the last corridor which separates him from his dream, from his mistress, from his heart which beats… of his eclipse. To describe him is useless. It is a man that you have to live.  Breathlessly enthusiastic, as the need to share his feelings of the world, his hopes, his dreams is imperative. He becomes enraged in his own movement.

He diverges, converges and returns to the starting point. No, he made one step. He is wearing the straw hat which he bought, a few months before, for the total eclipse of Cairns. He is like that Eugen, he goes on in small steps of giants in a world which goes too superficial. Child of another cosmos, Eugen is German. Hum… born in Kazakhstan, to a German mother and a Russian father.

 

He gives me some chocolate. Maybe you are not always very clear Eugen but you know how to speak to women…

 

He reveals us his attack plan to achieve his mission, walk on his cosmic poetry. The eclipse of this May 10th will be annular. That means it will not be total but a slender ring of fire will be visible around the moon which will be placed in front of the sun. Do you follow me ? I ignored it was possible. He wants us, the couple on his photo, to make alive this improbable meeting of the moon and the sun. This mystic meeting appointment. " The sun has an appointment with the moon. But the moon is not there and the sun waits for her. "(french song). He will not have to wait for much longer, it happens at 6h23am tomorrow.

 

We leave for the hill where he will take the photos. He takes care of the triangulation with calculations and software. He tries to find where exactly the sun will rise. Because as soon as the sun appears, already, the moon will come nibbling at it.

The Kazak-russo-german finds what he is looking for. He sticks us on a piece of rock, and goes into exile nearly two hundred meters further… question of angle.

 

Everything is ready. We just need to wait for time to go by, for the sun to surrender to the moon and for daylight to return… A barbecue, some beers will help us wait.

A sample of sleep. He is five thirty AM, the slaves of the inspirited-Eugen stretch. 

 

It is cold. 12 °.

A coffee gives us back a few hours of sleep.

6 hours. It is time to go. Japanese waited all night long, behind their cameras last generation. They cover the area. Luckily, or by calculation (our place is atypical) there is nobody on our rocks. That’s good. We hear Eugen’s whistling, which means: " it’s time."

I take off my jeans, I take off my polar jacket, I take off my vest, I take off my scarf to wear only a light dress, ideal for thirty five degrees. I repeat myself I believe in Art.

Greg wears a jacket. He is not prouder.

It’s dark. Still 12 °. We hold hands and raise our arms free as a cheer to the sun which already makes us languish.

He arrives slowly… The fireball comes loose of the earth. Almost immediately he gets hidden by the lunar gulps. The ring of fire forms. We understand suddenly why we are there. Why we raise our arms towards him. We understand the miracle of the running of cosmos, its influence on our small beings of flesh and blood. It is beautiful… and that leaves us speechless. The moon moves, comes down on the right going on crunching the sun.

 

We stay like that for long minutes, until our arms become painful and order us to lower them. We obey them slowly. We must be synchronized without looking, without turning our head. Then we count. Until twenty. Once we feel a bit rested, we will raise them again. Twenty seconds again. We count. The more the minutes pass, the more our body hates us. But we do not move. We stand firm. We are not going to waste the dream of the uncle Eugen because we are little girls! During the entire eclipse, he will make a movie, besides photos. We have to hold. I wonder if my shivers will blur the pictures. The minutes still pass by… Long. How long have we been here?

We are under the impression the Moon does not lower anymore, the sun does not rise and both like to torture us. The wind is frosty. The low beams of the sun have difficulty in overcoming it. I hear my mother saying that I should go put on a pullover. We don’t know anymore how to spend the time, to forget a little bit about us. We begin singing child songs at the top of our lungs as insane persons, but without moving. "

Did Eugen leave us there?

We dream of moving again. 

 

Finally… FINALLY! We have our signal. But our arms and our legs have died. We learn again to move painfully, very slowly. We put our clothes on, we wait for nobody, and we rush our statue bottoms in the car.

 

We discover that we stayed one hour, without moving in the cold of this Friday, May 10th, 2013. My god…. this needs some music. We begin dancing in this early morning as a bedridden invalid touched by grace. With passion.

Eugen and Lucie join us.
Our lover is conquered. Stars in the eyes.

Text copyright by Sarah Ponceblanc

.

In Greek mythology, Icarus*, attempting to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. He ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall into the sea where he drowned.