Strangely Violent Transit of Venus: melancholia and migraines

Was I the only one on the planet who experienced the twenty four hours around the Transit of Venus as strangely turbulent and violent?* There was a powerful chaotic energy in Sydney, the temperature plummeted it was freezing cold and the city was racked by fierce storms, coastline pounded by massive waves. The ocean beaches were closed, at Vaucluse waves crashed almost to the top of the cliffs, and at the normally placid harbour beach Balmoral, surfers dived into the waves.

It was coming from the sky, you could feel it like a magnet pulling at the filings of the living body, in an almost unbearable heavy metallic response,

and everything seemed to go wrong and wild,

pedestrians struggling down the icy streets as a cyclonic wind whipped my umbrella away and almost pushed me over.

The entire transit was visible from Sydney, yes and we felt it. In my office at the university, something  strange happened. I was looking at a facebook post of a photograph Lisa Anderson had taken of the eclipse about an hour before.

Just as I looked at the extraordinary photograph of a blinding white ball of white light , the same vision of white blinding intensity blazed through the venetian blinds! It looked exactly the same, filling the room with eerie electromagnetic rays.

Lisa Anderson 2012, Transit of Venus 

Nothing worked, the strangeness of trying to do something so simple as finding a local hotel room for the night was not I now think, so much a reflection on the local hotels, as a reflection of the extraordinary strangeness of what was happening in the skies above, pulling all energies and forces on earth out of alignment as we all succumbed to the unearthly power of Venus.

The light was eerie and the sun has never to me looked anything like it did on that day, huge silver white flare in the sky that illuminated the entire sky and air, in between the dark violence of the storms.

It felt like the Lars von Trier film, Melancholia, where the eponymous comet spins towards the earth

I could write, more critically, that it reminded me of the cinematography of the Lars von Trier film yet that implies critical detachment,  it was a closer experience than that.

By this, I mean that it had a profound and overwhelming affect, although I was aware at some points when it was happening (mainly before it happened) that it reminded me of the cinematography and the feeling of the film (which I have to say I love- I watched it on inflight movies flying back from Toronto to Sydney. 5 stars).

The transit of Venus, and her overpowering effects are a reminder of how close we are to the distant planets and galaxies we take for granted for our survival, we are part of the universe and subject to its movements in our cellular structures. Even our cells contain carbon, from dead stars, where does it come from, how did it get there? there is so much that we do not and cannot know- about our selves and who we are. Yet that day showed how much we are physically connected to the universe, and how real the other planets are.

*After writing this I went back to facebook to find the photograph of the Transit of Venus, and, instead strangely, found a comment by artist Bianca Beetson,  "Stoopid transit of venus gave me a headache I just can't shake." 

And a comment from a friend  "Must be something in the air - I have had a migraine for two days" (ie since the Transit of Venius).

So I am not alone in the way that it affected me... (though  the affects may not be exactly the same for each person of course)...Good to know one is not alone in how the planetary movements affect us on planet earth!

Ruth Skilbeck