What is there to say about the Sun? To circle around the Sun. To imagine that the Sun is distant – to know the Sun’s distance and proximity at once.
What can I write about the Sun? What can I argue about the Sun that is not either deliberately perverse or entirely obvious. I can write of paradoxes, of the relation, for instance, between visibility and invisibility, between the bright and the obscure – and no doubt I will, but there must be other possibilities.
I can write of the Sun’s relation to the present, the elusiveness of the present, the Sun’s position both as sign of immediacy and sign of mediation (the play of light, the play of surfaces).
But it is perhaps best not to attempt to anticipate a response to the Sun, but simply, dubiously, to respond.
what about the sun’s effect on terrestrial objects? it is THE source of energy. it makes things grow. it burns things. it makes things age. it bleaches things. it’s the source of everything. no wonder it has been an object of worship.
yep – all pretty obvious things.
Obvious, but crucial. I’m trying to find means to speak about the Sun that engages a more urgent sense of intimacy, linked to climate change, etc. The Sun has always represented an origin and a limit, but in a fairly abstract way – in a way that has enabled the Sun to become the very image of abstraction (for Plato, Hegel, etc.) – but now it somehow appears different. A temporality beyond comprehension has become humanly perceptible and linked to social processes and everyday actions. In this manner, we have managed to forge a relation to the Sun that exceeds the cycle of the day and of the seasons – all the natural processes that the Sun is associated with – opening up something else – another inconceivable encounter. But also, perhaps, unsettling the possibility of regarding the Sun as simply alien and other…