The Greek word for eclipse, ékleipsis, means a leaving out. It rewards a second look. Not a darkening, not an obstruction, but 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, when Saladin was alive and the idea of Latin Christendom just barely was, and that will end in 2459, a year no one now alive will see.

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, and a Prolog program of exactly seventy-two lines. Seventy-two eclipses; seventy-two lines. The match is no accident: the code was pared and padded until the two counts agreed. Behind all of it sit Hjelmslev's glossematics, Bakhtin's chronotopes, a salvaged bronze computer, and a painter now largely forgotten, named Howard Russell Butler.

Start with the poem. You cannot read it the way you read most poems. There is no speaker, no interior weather, no confession to lean into. What there is instead is a mechanism: a small grid of nouns, verbs, and adverbs that can be run, like a program, to generate seventy-two sentences.

The blueprint is Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics. His Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, the founding document of the Copenhagen school, set out to rebuild linguistics as something close to algebra, with a system behind the process and constants behind the fluctuation. The old humanist worry, that you cannot formalize the life of language without killing it, he took up directly and judged premature.

Anyone who has learned a second language has met such a system already. The verb to be (er, is) is the first paradigm laid before the schoolchild: I am, you are, he, she, it is, we are, you are, they are. A small grid of person and number, recited until it sticks. Recited aloud and in unison, the table takes on the cadence of liturgy. A class chanting I am, you are, he is sits close to a congregation at prayer, or children at catechism; the rhythm arrives before the sense does. For many it is an early encounter with structure as such, and the first time the shape of one language is held against the shape of another. None of this belongs to the mother tongue. In a first language the child takes the grammar in whole, instinctively, and never has to name a paradigm; the grid is a creature of the classroom, of formal instruction, of a second language met from the outside. The recitation is the process, the living run through the forms; the grid behind it is the system. Hjelmslev's algebra brackets the first and keeps the second. And the same copula, the bare is that asserts nothing but being, is the word Hamlet finds wrenched from its socket: The Time Is Out of Joint.

The grid is an abstraction made physical. It turns Roman Jakobson's two axes of language into a map you can navigate. The columns are the axis of selection, standing vertical: everything a word could be. The rows are the axis of combination, laid horizontal: what the word actually becomes in a line, grammar locked onto a rigid track. Three nouns, three verbs, four adverbs, doubled by word order. The machine yields exactly seventy-two outputs, one poem for each of the seventy-two eclipses in Saros 126, that long arc from 1179 to 2459.

The triptych works on two levels. Literally, there are three short video sequences: Aperture, Apparition, Augury. Structurally, the threefold form echoes the hinged devotional triptych of Byzantium and the Orthodox church, the portable folding altar, the "window to heaven." And it nods to Butler, the forgotten painter, who set down the eclipses of 1918, 1923, and 1925 as a painted triptych of his own.

A later adaptation, Sun: 72 Poems for 72 Solar Eclipses, was made for an open call at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its raw material was humbler: photographs of a broken card reader at Hellerup station, shot on a Nikon D200 with a Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm f/2 lens.

Also see:
Sun, listed on Artfacts
Flora Excursoria Hafniensis