Sun: A Triptych for the Solar Eclipse

The Greek word for eclipse, ékleipsis, means a leaving out. The word rewards a second look. Not a darkening, not an obstruction: an omission, as if the sky had skipped a word and left the reader to supply it.

This August the Moon's shadow crosses Greenland, clips the west of Iceland, and makes its one real landfall in northern Spain before giving out, at sunset, somewhere over the Balearics. Two minutes and eighteen seconds at best. It is the forty-eighth eclipse of Saros 126, a cycle that began in 1179 (Saladin was alive; so, just barely, was the idea of Latin Christendom) and will end in 2459, a date that resists being imagined at all.

Sun: Triptychs for Solar Eclipses was made for those two minutes. It holds a ten-word poem, three short videos, a drone tuned to 110 Hz, a Prolog program of exactly seventy-two lines (seventy-two eclipses; the program was formatted to match, which tells you something about the maker), plus Hjelmslev’s glossematics, Bakhtin’s chronotopes, a salvaged bronze computer, and a painter now largely forgotten named Howard Russell Butler.