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Below's a small ray of the light that’s flying apart for reasons science doesn’t yet have an explanation for (too little dark matter holding things close?). A speck of the starlight that, presumably, disappears into nothing out beyond some "edge of the universe", unfathomable light years distant.
These pictures were taken a few weeks ago, in early May, as the parallelogram inched up the bathroom wall and the sun descended. The shape appears just so on the wall for only a couple weeks of the year—early in May, and again in late July—when the longer days bring direct sunlight around to enter the northwest facing window at just the right angle in late afternoon and evening.
I've observed this shape on the wall each of the five summers in this house. That sunlight comes back, precisely the same each year, was something Egyptians and Mayans (and others) derived their cosmology from, and grounded their religious faith in. Pyramids were built to capture and focus angled rays of sunlight that occurred at precise annual turns. And "sun daggers" are still found etched into rocks in the American Southwest.
The return of the parallelogram to the bathroom wall this year contained some new excitement of clarity or promise. I don't know why, maybe the mindless geometric precision streaming a quiet, Euclidian, beauty onto the wall through all the chaos in the world. But when I first saw this familiar shape splayed out and inching up, I wasn't thinking cosmology. I was standing in the bathroom—more in the mind of Melville conjuring Bartleby's wall, or Robbe-Grillet obsessing about that smashed-to-stain-on-the-wall centipede. Mundane stuff. Until I turned around to discover how the light reflected off the poster on the wall opposite. That I had not previously noticed.
The Diebenkorn seemed the perfect image to hold a geometric plane of light, and let it pass slowly over its surface. Diebenkorn's Ocean Park Series is made of recurrent executions of rectangles and triangles and parallelograms that are painted translucencies—where layers of color show through and light seems to surface and dive, and paint has been applied and worked to be translucent, so that light is transferred through depth inside the frame(s) of the painting.
I was fascinated to find the slow show of light moving across a familiar poster—two walls mirroring a random parallelogram derived out of the elements and a window's rectangle. So much precision brought into play out of everyday randomness. When I showed this picture to my daughter, when I asked her to come look at the light, she was very perplexed—"Dad, you're weird."
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