This work is an adaptation of an earlier work made for an open call at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Created from photos taken with a Nikon D200 mounted with a Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm f/2 lens.

The central poem of Sun: Triptychs for Solar Eclipses is ten words long, and almost nothing that matters about it can be reached with the usual lyric tools: There is no speaker, no interior weather, no confession to lean into.

There 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. Hjelmslev's Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, the founding document of the Copenhagen school, set out to drain linguistics of its humanist sentiment and rebuild it as something close to algebra, a system behind the process, constants behind fluctuations.

The grid is an abstraction made physical. It turns Roman Jakobson's two axes of language into a navigable map: the axis of selection (vertical), which is everything a word could be, and the axis of combination (horizontal), which is what it actually becomes in a line.

The columns are the first axis, standing vertically, offering interchangeable choices. The rows are the second, locking grammar onto a rigid track.

Three nouns, three verbs, four adverbs, doubled by word order, and the machine yields exactly seventy-two outputs — one poem for each of the seventy-two eclipses in the Saros 126 cycle, which runs from 1179 to 2459.

The three nouns are the quietest trick in the whole thing: Apertures, apparitions, auguries — openings, appearings, foretellings — all circle a phenomenon they never name.

An aperture is defined by what passes through it, an apparition by what shows itself, an augury by what is foretold; each is a frame around a vacancy.

That vacancy is the sun.

Also see:
Flora Excursoria Hafniensis