Eclipse | Figuring the Void

Thinking Around the Thing STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL THEORY ‘Clouds of Architecture’ and Other Stories Led by Dr. Ella Chmielewska Angus Henderson

Most abundant thanks to Dr. Ella Chmielewska and her delicate hand on the rudder of this unit up there in the skies.

Thanks also to the other students in the unit, for their generosity in conversation in difficult circumstances. It should be noted that this collection of work was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And of course, thank you to Sarah, and my Father, in whose bounds I breath and figure.

Contents JOURNALS 2 Journal 1: Caught Between Écorché and a Wet Place 6 Journal 2: Transgressions, Figures and Energy 10 Journal 3: Seeing Things, Zeno’s Arrow and Thickening Films 14 Journal 4: Graffiti, Annoyance and Contrapositions 18 Journal 5: Clouds, Questions and Agendas 22 A Small Note ESSAY: 26 Eclipse: Figuring the Void 40 Notes 45 List of Figures 46 Bibliography

Dorrian, Mark. “Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas as a Silent Soundwork.”’ Native Architectural Theory Review, 17(1) (Special issue: Emergence) (2012): 93-104.

Rifkin, Benjamin A., Ackerman, Michael J., and Judith Folkenberg. Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today. London: Non-Native Thames & Hudson, 2006.

Caught Between Écorché and a Wet Place

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The anatomist’s textbook is a dry thing.

Depictions of écorchés, flayed figures, subjects mid-dissection, such as those in the illustrations in Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Anatomia del corpo humano, through Bidloo’s Ontleding des menschelyken lichams Thesaurus Fig. 2 and Ruysch’s idiosyncratic anatomicus primus1, portray subjects of dryness; scrubbed clean, skin cut with immense ease, as if the dissector were merely peeling a satsuma. Whilst there are exceptions, such as Vesalius’s écorchés, where the flesh appears to approach wetness, they seem to be doing 1. I take my brief overview so of their own volition; happy of the history of anatomical depiction from Rifkin et al.’s to accommodate the anatomist Human Anatomy. Benjamin A. in his thirst for knowledge Rifkin et al., Human Anatomy: (fig. 2). One of the most Depicting the Body from the iconographic of these images is Renaissance to Today (London: that of Valverde’s Flayed Man Thames & Hudson, 2006) Holding a Dagger and his Skin, who seems content to rid himself of his skin, which he holds at his eye level; dry, clean and whole (fig.1). His hide appears to have been obscuring the truth of the Fig . 3 body, lying mute below the surface.

Whilst this tactic accommodates the pragmatic concerns of an anatomical illustrator, it also suspends empathy.

Within the classical canon, the general strategy of the renderer of the legend of Apollo and Marsyas tends to take one of two forms; just before the knife begins to peel, or just after, in order to dip a toe in the gratuitous event (a similar pattern appears in depictions of Prometheus having his liver eaten by the eagle, the emblem of Zeus2). The latter is the case in Titian’s painting of the event, where Fig. 4 the artist begins to render the violence of the scene, the blood spilling 2. Consider Rubens’ Prometheus and pooling, just at the moment Bound, 1611-1618 or Jacob the knife begins to denude. Few Jordaens’ painting of the same name, c1640. In the first case depictions take place after the the eagle has just begun to first moments of flaying. One pierce the skin, and the second can imagine, if one can bear it, is imagined at almost exactly that after such time it would be the same moment. impossible to portray the image in its infinite wetness and horror. How else can Apollo be reconciled with the viewers’ image of Olympus and have sure footing as the god of the sun, healing, medicine and such enlightened arts as music and Fig. 5 poetry. Necessarily distant as the god of archery, Apollo appears to us from afar, and that is perhaps for the best, lest we still see the flecks of blood in his hair.

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Fig. 6

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The issue seems to be that it is impossible to do justice to the monstrous violence upon Marsyas and maintain the possibility of reconciliation with this god of civility.

We do not, for instance, have any canon examples of the event where we see Apollo, an hour in, taking a break from the arduous task of excoriating Marsyas’ skin; wiping the sweat dripping from his brow with his blood-sodden hands, his billowing cloak soaked as it’s dragged across the drowned ground, while the Satyr hangs, passed out from unbearable pain, unable to exist in the agony of pure wound, the skirt of his skin now hanging from his waist down to his neck.

The most powerful rendering of the event is through language - spoken or written and Dorrian offers two such examples, the List of Figures first from Ovid:

Figure 1: Valverde de Hamusco “Anatomie”: Flayed Man Holding a Dagger and his Skin in Rikin et al., Human Anatomy, 29.

As he screams, his skin is stripped off the surface of his body, and he is all one

wound: blood flows down on every side,

Figure 2: Vesalius, Muscles of the Body in Rikin et al., Human Anatomy, 73.

the sinews lie bare, his veins throb and

quiver with no skin to cover them: you

could count the entrails as they palpitate,

and the vitals showing clearly in his breast.

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His second example is a fragment of a poem by Zbigniew Herbert: . . . shaken by a shudder of disgust Apollo is cleaning his instrument only seemingly

is the voice of Marsyas monotonous

and composed of a single vowel A4

Figure 3: Jusepe de Ribera. 1637.

Apollo and Marsyas. painting.

Place: Museo e gallerie nazionali di Capodimonte. https://library. artstor.org/asset/SCALA_ARCHIVES_10310198028.

Figure 4: Titian. 1570-1575. Flaying of Marsyas. painting. Place: Kromeriz (Czech Republic), Archibishop’s Palace. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ LESSING_ART_10310120506.

Figure 5: Peter Paul Rubens.

1611-1612 CE. Prometheus Bound. Place: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ AWSS35953_35953_31697948.

Figure 6: Anish Kapoor. 2002,

When rendering events of extreme Marsyas. PVC and Steel. Installation suffering beyond any possibility of view: Tate, London. empathy, Dorrian suggests that it is necessary to transgress boundaries of perception. In eliminating the 3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book substrate of perception, such as in VI, in Dorrian, Voice, 96.

Kapoor’s un-hearable Marsyas (102), 4. Zbigniew Herbert, ‘‘Apollo and Marsyas,’’ in Dorrain, Voice, or Titian’s un-seeable rendering of 98. the event, the ‘unbounding’ (100) of the victim is mirrored. The alternative rendering is of victims objectified as écorchés or dissolved in wetness: unseeable in both forms.

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Dorrian, Mark, and Hawker, Adrian. “The Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Horse - Partial Notes on Architectural Research/teaching/ Native practice.” Journal of Architecture (London, England) 8, no. 2 (2003): 181-90.

Dorrian, Mark., and Adrian. Hawker. Metis : Urban Cartographies.

London: Black Dog Pub., 2002.

Reiser, Jesse., and Nanako. Umemoto. Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Non-Native Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. Translated by Lawrence Venuti.

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981.

Transgressions, Figures and Energy

Fig .1

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In place of honesty, metis introduced notions of guile, cunning and trickery; but also seizing the particular possibilities imminent in a certain milieu or context. (2002: 8) The work of Metis, be that research, teaching or practice, is characterised by a preoccupation with transgressing boundaries. This is explored explicitly in their essay, The Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Horse, where these three ‘zoomorphic siege engines’ (182) are mined for their transgressive potential. Already these machines of contravention are representative of their own purpose; their animalistic appearance embodying their violent delights. Whilst their express aim is to annihilate a literal boundary through violence in the case of the tortoise and scorpion, or trickery in the case of the horse - they simultaneously annihilate boundaries of animate and inanimate, of animal and automaton.

The ability of animals to employ ambiguity in order to defeat enemies is further explored in Postscript as Pretext, Metis’s introduction to their book Urban Cartographies. When citing examples of practitioners of metis, they culminate not in an architect or similar character, but with a fox and an octopus: The fox because of its ability to reverse itself, to suddenly alternate between opposing conditions. Playing dead, it tempts other creatures to approach before springing to life. The octopus because of its polymorphy, which is also polysemy. It is a “living knot” or labyrinth which can blend into its background and whose indeterminacy is epitomised in the black stain of ink which it secretes. (9) Interestingly, both animals can squeeze through holes that seem far too small, which appears to be a virtue and a practice of Metis. In their Ottawa project, long strips of drawing described as ‘appropriated urban narratives’ (52) - which fittingly cross the bounds of a double page spread - are then squeezed through a process of scaling, folding and collapsing. Through this operation the drawings ‘sediment’ (73) and their potential is dramatically unbounded in the architectural proposal.

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Fig .2

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Foxes, octopuses, horses, tortoises, scorpions, drawings, maps, Daedalus, Metis, Odysseus and John Soane seem unlikely compatriots, but they are all found in the Noah’s ark of Metis’s figures.

The figure is central to the practice of Metis, and through their work we find the criteria for the best figure to call into a situation. A figure should be ‘performative’, ‘problematising’ and the one with the most ‘possibilities’. It should be transgressive and transportive and, like Noah’s dove, it should go out and return, bearing signs of the land beyond: The good decision is the most connective: the one which extends, proliferates, ramifies, and most compellingly implicates architecture.

(11)

A figure is specific operationally, although is aspecific as a field, i.e. a figure can be anything, but it definitely does something.

For a figure to be fit for purpose and conceptually rigorous it must be almost absurdly invested with energy and meaning, demonstrated in the Ottowa project.

Metis emphasise an interest in repetition ad absurdum; the final subheading of their Postscript being ‘once more with feeling’.

This investment of energy is visualised

by Max Planck in an account of a mason who lifted a heavy block to the roof of his house, which Aldo Rossi describes in his 1981 book, A Scientific Autobiography. That this section is also cited in a publication by another architectural practice/ educator/ researcher, Reiser + Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics, is indicative of the enduring concern with investment of energy in architecture:

List of Figures Figure 1: Metis, Urban Cartographies, 67. Scan Figure 2: Metis, Urban Cartographies, 68-69. Scan

The mason was struck by the fact that expended energy does not get lost; it remains stored for many years, never diminished, latent in the block of stone, until one day it happens that the block slides off the rood and falls on the head of the passerby, killing him.

(1981:1)

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Dorrian, Mark, and Hawker, Adrian. “The Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Horse - Partial Notes on Architectural Research/teaching/ Native practice.” Journal of Architecture (London, England) 8, no. 2 (2003): 181-90.

Dorrian, Mark., and Adrian. Hawker. Metis : Urban Cartographies.

London: Black Dog Pub., 2002.

Reiser, Jesse., and Nanako. Umemoto. Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Non-Native Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. Transalted by Lawrence Venuti.

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981.

Seeing Things, Zeno’s Arrow and Thickening Films

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Images are tricky things. Dorrian’s essay, The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturization, discusses certain impossibilities in seeing something.

Always on the brink of collapse, what we might think of as a kind of ontological sight, where the real object can be seen, is rendered as extremely precarious. This is exemplified by a passage from Transparent Things, a novella by Vladimir Nabakov, which is quoted by Dorrian (emphasis added): When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines! …I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever should remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break the tension film.

Later, the discourse describes a vertiginous paranoia in relation to the aerial view, the ‘radical groundlessness’ presented by going up: It is not that we are looking simply into a void, a radical annulment in which nothing counts anymore. The problem is the opposite: that everything, all these swarming things (potentially) count, have to be attended to and cannot be let go, for what has disappeared is any criteria for assigning some more value than others.

What is characterised in both excerpts is an opening up ad infinitum: a vertigo where things loose all grounding and are erased by the act of looking. Here we encounter something akin to the paradox of Zeno’s arrow, stopped for an instant:

The third is … that the flying arrow is at rest, which result follows from the assumption that time is composed of moments …. he says that if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always in a now, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.1

1. Aristotle, Physics, 239b30

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Fig. 2

Fig. 3

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In observing the arrow, stopping it for an instant mid-flight, Zeno assumes that the arrow flies nowhere in no time, and so never really moves at all. Zeno found new relevance in the quantum age with what is termed the ‘quantum Zeno effect’, which emerged in the 20th century.

First described by Alan Turing, it is the ability to arrest the motion of a particle in a quantum-mechanical system through frequent observation. The response to the paradoxes of Zeno tend to neat mathematical solutions (infinite series, calculus, etc.) but when trying to focus on the surface of things, the human brain does not have a derivation function.

If it is our intention to focus on the surface, not to break the ‘tension film’, how can we defrock our novice status? Or how can the image-maker/surface-maker/objectinspirer give the surface a robustness; how can the ‘tension film’ be thickened?

It may be helpful to recall images or objects where we feel comfortable on the surface: frozen ponds we can skate on with surety. Here I am thinking of two series by Monet; his Waterlilies (specifically those housed in the oval rooms of Musée de l’Orangerie) and his Morning on the Seine series. Within these paintings is the ability to hold the viewer on the surface. The viewer can of course, and often does, inspect the texture of the oil, examine individual brushstrokes and even x-ray the pieces. But they can also, extraordinarily, see the painting – to let it ineffably wash over them. Through his frenzied painting, Monet has thickened the surface though layer upon layer of oil. His use of enormous panels holds the viewer at bay, discouraging them from coming too close, lest they pierce the film.

That these paintings are concerned with the surface of water and the reflection of the scene in the early morning light is not coincidental. Whilst Monet’s painting presents us with the persuasive image, other dissuasive techniques of note may be found in Libeskind’s Micromegas. The sheer plurality of objects in the drawings quickly overwhelms the viewer, and the sharpness of the subjects establish a danger in coming close, so they must stay on the surface for fear of what lies beneath.

List of Figures Figure 1: Claude Monet. 1914-1926.

The Waterlilies: Clear morning with willows; Reflections of trees; Morning with willows, installation view, room 2; south, west and north walls.

Painting. Place: Musée de l’Orangerie. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ ARMNIG_10313471082.

Figure 1: Claude Monet.

1897. Morning on the Seine near Giverny. Painting. Place: The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://library.artstor.org/asset/ SS7731421_7731421_11265949.

Figure 3: Daniel Libeskind. 1979 Micromegas. Architectural Drawing, Digital Image. https://libeskind.com/ work/micromegas/

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Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street. Tranlated by Edmund Jephcott.

Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Preface by Greil Marcus. Cambridge, Native Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Schwartz, Frederic J. “Distraction: Walter Benjamin and the Avant Garde.” In Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany, 37-100. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005 Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Non-Native London: Faber and Faber, 1997

Graffiti, Annoyance and Contrapositions

Fig. 1

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Did Benjamin consider not publishing One-Way Street? In many ways this seems like a project which is actively anti-publishing. This collection could easily be kept in a diary, pamphlet, a map.

Perhaps most convincingly, the collection would be better placed as graffiti; vertical writing on the city which was to be taken up by Jean Micheal Basquiat years later. What a lively thing that could have been: critics could simply spray their replies over Benjamin’s political thought fragments. An ahistorical thought experiment, but what if that were the case, and Benjamin had taken to writing on the city, competing with advertisements, shop signs, posters etc, what would we be left with? Potentially some photos in journals which could be long forgotten. That One-Way Street is a collection of fragments, some of which were originally partly written in newspapers and then subsequently published (2), goes some way to show that this original publication was not enough. The sheer pace of production and volume of newspapers required the ‘script to take refuge in the book’ (42).

There is a curious relationship between Benjamin’s apparent distaste for the book form, but his sheer delight in writing.

If he had never published these pieces together, then many of the issues which Benjamin confronts the reader with could be easily overcome. The irritation which one inevitably feels prickling to the surface when reading Number 13, which Greil Marcus generously comments is ‘as irritating as the people jostling you as you walk down the street’(xxii), could simply be avoided by looking away, walking past it or spraying over it. In ‘taking itself to bed in the printed book’ (42), Benjamin collates these fragments and can still antagonise the contemporary reader.

The virtue of antagonisation is 1. Eiland, Howard, and too expansive and delicate to Jennings, Michael W.. 2014. approach here, but how does Walter Benjamin : A Critical Benjamin achieve this affect? Part Life. Cumberland: Harvard of the answer seems to be found in University Press. 381 Benjamin’s preoccupation with alternative positions. Benjamin would often publish under pseudonyms such as Detlef Holtz or C. Conrad1, a rich tradition which allowed the exploration of other points of view whilst maintaining some curated 15

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

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aspects of the original author’s identity, most explicitly typified in the work of Kierkegaard. This destabilising of character which Benjamin utilised in his writing career allowed him to be nimble in One-Way Street and flit between certain viewpoints, sometimes lightly, sometimes approaching a wrecking ball. On the original front cover by Sasha Stone of the 1928 edition of Einbahnstraße, we can see this fascination with other points of view, explored both in from and content. The main body of the photomontage is made up of three points of view; on the right of the jacket one looks along the pavement of a street of shop-fronts at eye-level, on the left, an oblique aerial view onto a similarly urban street full of activity, and in the centre, we are looking up at the List of Figures only coloured element, a bold, red oneway street sign pointing off the street of Figure 1: Digital image composite shop-fronts and into the book behind, by the author with superimposed 'graffiti.' Walter Benjamin, One-Way which is repeated and echoed down and Street, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. left across the page. Within the image we by Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, see a mirror of these numerous points of Mass. and London, England: Harview; passengers on the double decker vard University Press, 2016), 24. bus, bustling pedestrians, one man paused Figure 2: Edo Bertoglio, Photomid-thought, and a dog that sits outside graph of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a shop-front, awaiting their master. This LIKE AN IGNORANT EASTER dog is reminiscent of Kafka’s short story SUIT on the set of Downtown 81.

Investigation of a Dog2. Although this was https://fineartmultiple.com/blog/ written before One-Way Street, it was not jean-michel-basquiat-graffiti-artist/ published till after, but we Figure 3: Sasha Stone, 1928. know of Benjamin’s enduring Einbahnstraße. Book Cover 2. Franz Kafka, Investigations of https://fineartmultiple.com/blog/ a Dog, trans. Michael Hofmann interest in Kafka who almost jean-michel-basquiat-graffiti-artist/ always wrote in the first(Milton Keynes: Penguin, 2018). person±animal narrative. The structure of the text itself Countering these multiple frames of view is the structure of the text itself: a single viewpoint in motion. Jennings notes in the introduction that ‘The book’s title indicates the organizing conceit of this … textual miscellany’ (1). This mix of a single viewpoint moving through space and an exploration of multiple 3. T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: simultaneous viewpoints is a Essays on Poetry and Criticism potent concoction and, in taking a (London: Faber and Faber, draft, one must be ready for both 1997) pleasure and nausea in conflicting measure. In his instruction to the critic T.S. Eliot reminds us to delve deeper at this point of possible reflux or rhapsody: And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always tend to substitute emotions for thoughts... swifly [operate] the analysis of sensation to the point of principle and defintion.3

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Dorrian, Mark. "Clouds of Architecture." In Writing on the Image : Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation. Native London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

Dorrian, Mark. Clouds of Architecture. Lecture at Taubman College, Michigan, 2 December 2010 https://vimeo.com/17819101 Dorrian, Mark. What’s Interesting? On the Ascendency of an Evaluative Term. Lecture at Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, 1 April 2015 Non-Native https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzeNHlbnx1Y

Clouds, Questions and Agendas

Fig. 1

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The question and answer session is something of a problematic child of the lecture format. An academic can prepare and practice their proliferation of postulations, they can do the tours and repeat lectures as many times as they like, but they cannot possibly predict the questions of the audience. At this point the lecturer must give an account as harsh light is shone on two concerns pertinent to the lecturer. Firstly, has the idea been communicated clearly?

Do the audience get it, and if not why?

Secondly, so what? What is the point of this, what comes after and why is this relevant?

Open to happen-stance, not to mention sabotage (the age-old ‘this is more of a comment than a question’), this sub-category of the lecture format is intensely incidental; a compound effect of the personal contexts of both the answerer and the questioner. This may be the third or fourth time that the lecturer has delivered this lecture.

Their thoughts may have settled and new ideas may have percolated to the mind’s surface, ready to transform the content of the lecture. The audience member may have a stake in the lecture, equally they may not. They may have read something that week which is still fizzing in their mind, transforming the lecture in their image. Or they may have seen an image or project that has a close proximity to the lecture and their valences are tested. What is taking form is a crucible within which lies the central question, is it interesting? The question of what’s interesting is particularly pertinent in light of the subject of this journal, Clouds of Architecture, a lecture

by Mark Dorrian at Taubman College, Michigan, which took place at the end of his period there as visiting professor.

Dorrian gave another lecture entitled What’s Interesting? On the Ascendency of an Evaluative Term, on occasion of his inauguration as Forbes Chair of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, where he interrogated this term that has gained new prevalence in a ‘post-theological’ world, particularly in the context of architectural design teaching.

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Fig. 2

Screen-grabs from Clouds of Architecture. During the Q&A, Dorrian becomes energetic; pacing, as seen above, and gesticulating, as seen below.

Fig. 3

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Clouds of Architecture certainly was interesting, a clear sign being that the Q&A section was roughly the same length as the lecture itself. In this section, Dorrian’s voice speeds up, gesticulations flourish and a few things are mentioned which really add definition to both the context and the intent of the lecture.

Initially we hear of other versions of his study; different historical threads which could have been followed. So why has this one been followed? What becomes clear in this section of the lecture is the nascent political concerns, which were only briefly touched on in the lecture itself. One question prompts Dorrian to explicitly name this concern: The contemporary transformations in the politics of air-conditioning…airconditioning at the scale of the globe is being seriously discussed… geoengineering… my rather depressing anticipation is that environmental amelioration is likely to occur in a much more depressing and unsystematic way…

I think air-conditioning is in a sense the major issue of the next 100 years, maybe 500 years, and questions in that about who’s hot and who’s cool?

List of Figures Figure 1: Diller + Scofidio, l 2002.

Blur, Lake Neuchatel, Swiss Expo 2002. https://dsrny.com/project/ blur-building?index=false&section=projects&search=blur Figure 2: Taubman College, Mark Dorrian, Clouds of Architecture. Online Lecture https://vimeo.com/17819101 Figure 3: ibid.

The lecture is transformed in this new political light, and another layer is understood which casts relief on the choices of buildings in the age of global capital, such as Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton building and Diller + Scofidio Blur building. New critique piques interest and the lecture, as it closes, also opens; like a cloud the lecture presents an aleamorphic quality, being transformed when the gaze is fixed upon it.

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A Small Note

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There is a question in that Q&A section of Clouds of Architecture by Mark Dorrain from Perry Kulper, where he asks ‘do you see other venues, other topographies … to leverage into other forms of knowledge other space-scapes to invest energy into?’

Adjacent to this is a question that has sedimented in my mind: ‘what else is up there, that may be brought to bear on the spatial imaginarium?’

It is in that spirit that I approach eclipses, and I must also note that this was a concept concurrently worked through in the context of an Architectural Design studio, Animate Matter, led by Mark Dorrian, Ana Bonet Miro and Paddi Alice Benson. To them I owe a great deal of thanks.

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Eclipses: Figuring the Void

Fig. 1

A black disc covers another disc. The disc behind, the obscured disc, is constantly radiating energy. That energy is perceived as light, heat, and mass; the disc in front is purist obsidian black, absolute shadow. These discs appear almost exactly the same size. White tendrils of light drift across the plate; auras of plasma. To the bottom right of the disc a denser, cooler plasma reaches the maximum exposure of the plate, a pure white. In the deep blackness surrounding the disc, seven spots appear. The spots only recently became visible in the cover of darkness and will very soon be obliterated by the brightness of the radiating disc which, for a period of just under seven minutes, is held at bay. These little pricks of white are not where they are supposed to be, they are minutely out of position.

They are starlight, bent out of position by that radiating disc, the sun. The sun is so heavy that it not only bends the light of the stars as it passes by, but warps spacetime, the fabric of the universe. Just before this, Bailey’s beads were seen; the sun passing through the ridges and valleys on the surface of the moon. Soon, a diamond ring will appear - a sudden brightness - and the image will be over; the onlooker’s gaze will have to cease. The image is of the solar eclipse on the 19th of May 1919, by Frank Dyson and his team in Sobral, Brazil. As the shadow of the moon passed over the surface of the earth, a very similar image was captured about an hour later off the African west coast on the island of Principe, by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. Eddington, Dyson and their teams will proceed to measure these images against comparison plates – images of the same stars in the same position when the sun is not there – and find the magnitude of their deflection. Mere millimetres on this plate will have enormous ramifications, inaugurating the era of Einstein’s 27

The time lapse sequence of a solar eclipse. Glass framed Fig. 2 photograph, taken by H. Stubington at St. Petersburg on April 17, 1912.

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relativity, and eschewing Maxwell and Newton’s fixed independent models of electromagnetism and gravity respectively, in favour of folding in a new dimension to the fabric of our being: melding space and time.

A brief cultural history of eclipses

We are familiar with the vocabulary of the skies, constantly unfolding with infinite variety by recomposing familiar elements; water and light punctuated with birds, foliage or a stray newspaper caught in the wind. Dorrian’s discussion of clouds in his essay, Clouds of Architecture1, as well as his radio essays, Clouds, explores how we interpret the clouds in the sky in their endless, edgeless variability. However, eclipses offer a new sign as their geographic-temporal infrequency evades personal and even cultural or societal familiarity2. As such, these signs pass over into the realm of deep, if not eternal, time: signs of the gods. Generally, mythic understanding of eclipses tend to fit into one of the following categories, outlined by Littmen et al.: 1. A celestial being that is generally a monster (i.e. a dragon) tries to destroy the Sun. 2. The Sun fights with the Moon.

3. The Sun and Moon make love. They discreetly hide themselves in darkness.

4. The Sun-god grows angry, sad, sick, or neglectful.3 As events of singularity, there is often a thickening of historical accounts around eclipses which can be ratified by calculations that confirm dates and locations4. Events such as Jesus’s crucifixion, or when peace was broken after five years of war between the Medes and the Lydians, can be anchored to specific dates by their reference to concurrent eclipses5. Records tend towards understanding these events as ominous signs across cultures; the holding back of the sun’s light, the cooling of the earth, the quickening of the wind, the quieting of the animals, are all seemingly incontrovertible signs that life is draining away.

In ancient China, locals would come out to bang pots and pans to ward off the dragon that was apparently eating the sun, of whom their emperor was the representative on earth6. The aforementioned eclipse that preceded the second battle of Syracuse was interpreted as such an

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ominous sign that the Athenian general, Nicias, ordered a delay in setting sail back to Athens7. This fateful decision ironically led to a disastrous defeat of the Athenian navy and the eventual death of Nicias. Knowledge of eclipses and when they would occur symbolised incredible power and either communion or cohabitation with the gods.8 The traditional understanding of the eclipse in the British context, in which we find Eddington, is indebted to the ancient Greeks. The word eclipse is derived from ἐκλείπειν, which is ‘to be eclipsed, literally to forsake its accustomed place, fail to appear’9 and understandings of eclipses tend to align with this etymology. They became canonically defined in the early modern period through Shakespeare’s Othello and King Lear, as well as in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Eclipses are depicted as a sign of malevolence; in King Lear ‘These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us’10, and in Paradise Lost the eclipse is the symbol of Lucifer’s descent from Glory.11 In the 18th century, astronomy grew into a public science and the solar eclipse moved from a cultural and religious sign to an astronomical phenomena to be observed and understood. New advances regarding the problem of longitude allowed for a more accurate predictive mapping of the path of totality, and so observations could be planned with more rigour. Edmond Halley published a map of the path of totality over England in 1715, encouraging people to time the period of totality ‘being determinable with the utmost Exactness, by the reason of the momentaneous Occultation and emersion of the luminous Edge of the Sun, whose least Part makes the Day.12’ However, at this point the predictions still had a meaningful margin of error, so the map of the track had to be corrected by around 30 kilometres for its subsequent publication after the eclipse.13 Eclipse expeditions

New, accurate mapping of territories, combined with other factors, such as the advent of tourism and the expansion of its infrastructure in the mid-19th century, allowed a new form of scientific expedition to become feasible. As large swathes of the earth’s surface opened up in the playground of the imperialist’s imagination, and as European empires violently expanded, the observation of eclipses in remote destinations became much more possible, particularly 30

owing to the growth of steam-powered transportation which allowed scientific parties to transport their bulky instruments to much of the world. This change occurred almost simultaneously with the genesis of the professional academic - in lieu of the gentleman amateur - and a flurry of eclipse expeditions that begun in the Victorian age continue to this day. Early expeditions in the 1860s focused on the phenomena on the sliver of the sun’s surface made visible during an eclipse, such as prominences, only possible because of the relative sizes of the discs of the moon and sun14. These led to enormous breakthroughs, including the discovery of helium. With advances in spectroscopic and photographic instruments, the nature of these expeditions evolved from parties of enthusiastic gentleman astronomers and avid amateurs to strictly professional expeditions. The paintings of artists such as Howard Russell Butler15 were made redundant by astrographic advancements which could take increasingly accurate images of the outer corona, normally impossible to see because of the brightness of the sun16. The eclipse was now a sign of unparalleled scientific potential, though undoubtedly they still retained their mythic potency through shear poetic persuasion. Eddington and Dyson’s dual expedition to both Principe and Sobral typify details of eclipse expeditions: When it comes to eclipse experiments, persistence is frequently rewarded with disappointment.17 This reasonably droll summation would be all too familiar to eclipse watchers, and Eddington and Dyson had experienced more difficulty than most. In fact, the dual expedition in 1919 was their third attempt at this experiment relating to the general theory of relativity, having previously been interred in Russia in 1914 on suspicion of espionage when war broke out during their first expedition. In addition to the political difficulties of the period, a constant fixture of eclipse catching is the weather. The Principe expedition had some cloud cover during the first minutes of the eclipse, obscuring all but the brightest stars, and whilst it was clear at Sobral, the air was humid in the rain season of Brazil, and the sudden shift in temperature brought on by the eclipse caused severe contraction of the silvered surface of the coelostat18, knocking the focus of the plates out by a measure that made them seemingly unusable for the purposes intended19.

31

Dyson’s expedition in Sobral. The left telescope has a large Fig.3 astrographic lens and the right, square telescope has a smaller four inch plate. This telescope is orientated to maximise the number of stars captured. In front of these are the coelostats, the larger one having caused the issues.

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In the opposite figure, which is an image of Dyson’s Sobral expedition, the arrangement of the experiment can be seen. Two astrographs are orientated on the meridian line, with coelostats mounted on brick piers to secure them, surrounded by wind brakes. Eddington’s Principe expedition had a similar set up, and his account (written to his mother) shows that the period of totality was a frenzy of activity: I did not see the eclipse, being too busy changing plates, except from one glance to make sure it had begun, and another half-way through to see how much cloud there was.20 The irony here is that Eddington, who devoted much of his life to understanding the light of the sun and distant stars, cannot take a moment to see the star ‘whose least part makes the day’, at the only time that the direct light of the sun can be seen by the human eye.

Seeing the sun

The dread of being forsaken by the sun, which has caused almost every culture to view the eclipse as a portent of evil, is brought into a contraposition by the animosity the sun shows to those who wish to directly behold it. The renaissance artist and architect, Taddeo Gaddi, caused himself permanent damage when viewing a partial eclipse in Florence in 133921. A young Isaac Newton - who also conjectured that light would be affected by gravity, although not to the same degree as Einstein – famously conducted an experiment in which he tried to see the sun directly. He consequently suffered temporary defects in his eyesight and when he closed his eyes he would behold a ‘phantasm of light & colours … as lively & vivid as when I had newly looked upon ye sun’22. The sun is only safe to look at with the naked eye when totally eclipsed, thus presenting the very limit of seeing. We are all warned as children that if we look directly at the sun we could go blind, i.e. we would stop seeing, but the eclipse hollows out the void in vision.

There is an abutment here with the myth of Medusa who, when beheld, petrified the viewer. Dorrian notes that Medusa is always depicted frontally, which is unconventional for contemporaneous Greek art. When 33

Solar Prominence visible during 1919 Eclipse. Early image captured Fig. 4 at Principe; cloud prevented the prominence being overexposed.

Antefix featuring the Head of Medusa in Terracotta, 4th Century Fig. 5 BC, Greece.

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Athena placed the head onto her shield it was given a new circular form and the image of the gorgon with her hair of snakes radiating out, looking straight at the viewer and framed by a circular device, creates a clear allusion to the unseeable sun; her hair like prominences, hissing and writhing. Perseus defeats Medusa by application of a highly polished shield, borrowed from Athena, and captures her power which is then grafted onto that shield.

Eddington too defeats unseeability by use of a mirrored surface. These extraordinary instruments allowed the capture of the most minute details, which had enormous ramifications for scientific understanding.

Scientific violence

In proving Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, this photo inaugurated the international celebrity his name still enjoys today, although slightly ironically considering Einstein’s assertion that ‘it is the duty of a scientist to remain obscure23’. Eddington, on the other hand, was positively ecclesiastic in his prolific popularisation of scientific theories. Not only an extremely gifted astronomer and theoretical physicist, his prodigious talent as a public intellectual prepared the media for the magnitude of this discovery and helped to explain the ramifications of the results. That he was popularising a Swiss-German’s theory was not incidental. At a time when European relations were fraught with tension Eddington, motivated by his religious and moral convictions as a Quaker, remained a strong supporter of Einstein, arguing for scientific international cooperation. Eddington, as well as Einstein, was a pacifist and he was willing to go to jail as a conscientious objector24, a deeply unpopular position in the time of the white feather. It was only by some clever manoeuvring on the part of his Cambridge college that Eddington’s exemption from conscription was deemed a matter of national importance. The tribunal eventually agreed to ship Eddington off to Africa, where he would have to conduct the experiment with unfamiliar faces, his colleagues having died at the front.25 The First World War had transformed cultural relations to science, which became a potent symbol of malevolence in its own right. No longer simply a mode of enquiry, scientists had proliferated, extended and intensified violence.

35

A page from the London Illustrated News, November 22, 1919, Fig. 6 explaining the Eddington experiment. Illustration by W.B. Robinson.

36

Einstein’s colleague, Fritz Haber, almost single-handedly prolonged the war by creating a method of extracting nitrogen from the air26. The invention of chlorine gas was the most visceral example of scientific violence, causing victims to drown in their own dissolving organs. In 1919, when Eddington and Einstein’s work was plastered on the front page of papers all over the world, the eclipse became weighty with hopes for political reconciliation and a return to scientific enquiry for the common good. Unfortunately this would be obliterated by the work of Niels Bohr and his contemporaries, in the image of the mushroom cloud.

Eddington’s work as a public academic brought the weight of these new advances in theoretical physics into the imagination of the layman. Here quoted is a passage from Eddington’s Gifford Lectures, which were later published as The Nature of the Physical World in a letter dated Paris June 12th, 1938 from Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem: I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second around the sun—a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this while hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles per second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies.27 For Benjamin who, in One-Way Street, stated that modern astronomy had an ‘exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe’28, this image of the eclipse, these silver salt crystals that were transformed by direct radiation from the sun and the stars of the Hyades cluster, may have seemed at first like much of the same, bearing no resemblance to ‘[t]he ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos …: the ecstatic trance [Rausch].’29 However, the dawning of the relativistic era would move beyond the visible three dimensions. The image showed, despite critics’ protestation, that light has weight. Even further, it also proved that we don’t live in some Euclidean vessel, as 37

Newton supposed30, but in non-Euclidean spacetime that thickens and slackens, bends and collapses in on itself as parallel lines converge.

It is in one of the best-known passages in One-Way Street that the figure of the eclipse is explicitly mentioned. In Attested Auditor of Books, Benjamin describes the phases of script, phases we may recognise from our own present exploration: If centuries ago [script] began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. And before a contemporary finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight. Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what city dwellers take for intellect, will grow thicker with each passing year.31 Melding religious and cosmological imagery, this passage sheds light on how these two abut one another in Benjamin’s thought, and though this cannot be fully explored here, especially in light of others more enlightened insights32, it is worth exploring momentarily.

When script takes itself to bed in the horizontal plane it aligns with some mythic understandings of eclipse as ‘the Sun-god grows angry, sad, sick, or neglectful’. When script rises, our eyes are exposed and swarms of insects are beheld - a strong parallel sequence occurs in the solar eclipse. That Benjamin decides to end his journey through this One-Way Street in a visit To The Planetarium shows how powerful cosmological imagery is in his reckoning.

In a time characterised by scientific violence and a complete re-conceptualisation of the nature of the physical world, Eddington and Dyson’s image of the 1919 eclipse operates as something of an ontological touchstone in the dynamic context of the era that could be clung to, that made solid the swarm of flies. As such, it figured in the thinking of many inter and post war thinkers in numerous fields, such as T.S. 38

Eliot, Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. Not is it relatively easy to understand - a quality not to be underestimated - the eclipse engages with powerful mythic signs that are made new virtue of its infrequency.

Figuring the void This essay cannot be encyclopaedic in its overview of the eclipse in the cultural imagination, but I will bring into orbit one final thinker active in after the atomic age: Italo Calvino. In his memo on “Lightness”33, we find that Calvino, in an effort to dispel the heaviness of living which infects his search for lightness, will often ‘look to science to sustain my visions in which all heaviness dissolves.’34 Throughout his Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures, subsequently published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, we find continuous recourse to scientific texts: I believe that this link between the formal choices of the literary composition and the need for cosmological model (or at least a general mythological framework) is present even for authors who do not explicitly declare it.35 For Calvino, the adoption of scientific images allow us to be ‘light like the bird, not like the feather’36. Eddington and Dyson’s image of the 1919 eclipse exposes a figure that invites inquiry and reverie in equal measure, with a unique imaginative potential. Within the void of blackness powerful mythic signs are found; political symbols and scientific discoveries. However, we must tip-toe around the corona, and Calvino encourages us to ‘ponder [Myths] without moving beyond the language of their image.’37 A persuasive example of this can be found in his Invisible Cities: But what enhance for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words.38 As a figure of simultaneous emptiness and opacity, eclipse offers a new potential as a mythic image which figures a void; where one can see the corona of things and fill it with weight radiated from light. Enough weight to bend light and time - and to hunt for truth.

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Notes

Photographic negative of cover image, the Principe expedition 40

Fig. 7

1 Mark Dorrian, “Clouds of Architecture,” in Writing on the Image (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 107-19.

2 Although total solar eclipses can

occur around every 18 months, it can take hundreds of years for them to appear in the same location, the umbra of the moon’s shadow rarely exceeding 250 kilometres. F. Richard Stephenson, “Historical Eclipses,” Scientific American 247, no. 4 (1982): 170-83.

3 Mark Littmann et al, Totality:

Eclipses of the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 62.

4 Jean Meeus and Fred Espenak, Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses: -1999 to 3000 (2000 BCE to 3000 CE), 2006.

5 A lunar eclipse on the 3rd of April

33 AD for the former, and a solar eclipse on the 28th of May 585 BC for the latter. Vaquero, José M, and M. Vázquez, “Solar Eclipses.”

In The Sun Recorded Through History, (New York,: Springer New York, 2019), 175-216.

6 In Our Time, “Eclipses” pro-

duced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson, BBC Radio 4, https:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ m000qmnj

7 Matthew Dillon offers an over-

view of this event as well as expanding on the eclipse in Ancient Greece. Matthew Dillon, Omens and Oracles : Divination in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 2017), 180-181.

8 Famously Christopher Colum-

bus used his knowledge of eclipses to extend power and violence in Jamaica. When the native population ceased to provide for Columbus and his crew after six months due, Columbus, consulting an almanac on board his ship, employed a lunar eclipse to cement his power. He summoned the local leaders and told them that his God was very angry, and

if they did not their would be a sign and the moon would ‘change its colour and gradually lose its light. When Columbus informed the people that his God had pardoned them on condition of their fulfilment of promises ‘they hastened to propitiate him with gifts... and from that time forward there was no want of provisions.’

Washington Irving, The life and voyages of Christopher Columbus (London: John Murray, 1830), 315-316.

9 OED Online, “eclipse, n.,” accessed May 2, 2021, https://www. oed.com/view/Entry/59362?rskey=MMPwND&result=1.

10 King Lear, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (London: Macmillan, 2007) 1.2. 83.

11 Their dread commander: He above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent Stood like a tow’r. His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appear’d Less than archangel ruin’d, and th’ excess Of glory’ obscur’d: as when the sun new ris’n Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. Dark’n’d so, yet shone Above them all th’ archangel; but his face Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows Of dauntless courage, and conside’rate pride Waiting revenge. Cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion to behold The fellows of his crime, the follo’wers rather (Far other once beheld in bliss), condemn’d Forever now to have their lot in pain.

Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, lines 589-608.

12 A fuller quotation shows the in-

tents of Halley: ‘Having found, by comparing what had formerly observed of Solar Eclipses, that the whole Shadow would fall upon England, I thought it a very proper Opportunity to get the Dimensions of the Shade ascertained 41

by Observation; and accordingly I caused a small Map of England, describing the Track and Bounds thereof, to be dispersed all over the Kingdom, with the Request of the Curios to Observe what they could about it, but more especially to note the Time of Continuance of total Darkness, as requiring no other Instrument than a Pendulum Clock, and as being determinable with the utmost Exactness, by the reason of the momentaneous Occultation and emersion of the luminous Edge of the Sun, whose least Part makes the Day.’ Dr. Edmond Halley in Jones, Henry. The Philosophical Transactions and Collections, to the End of the Year 1700, Abridg’d and Dispos’d Under General Heads, Vol. IV. Containing pt. 1, The mathematical papers; pt. 2, The physiological papers (United Kingdom: M. Mathews, 1721), 255.

the discovery of Uranus in the late 18th Century and Neptune in the 19th. A solar eclipse could be an ideal time to find a small planet close to the sun such as Mercury, or the supposed Vulcan, which astronomers believed to have found in 1859.

Kennefick, No Shadow, 29.

13 Daniel Kennefick, No Shadow

19 As Eddington’s plates were destroyed or thrown away, Dyson’s plates were later used to confirm the results by a study by Andrew Murray in 1979. Kennefick, No Shadow, 242-244.

of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 21.

14 The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun, and about 400 times the distance away from the earth, hence their almost identical apparent size.

15 Howard Russell Butler employed ‘shorthand sketching’ to quickly draft the outline of the eclipse, writing colour formulas and various values, he would then use these notes to produce large paintings which could be studied.

Laura Valenza, “Howard Russell Butler’s Notebooks: Butler’s Methodology,” Princeton university Art Museum: Transient Effects, accessed May 1, 2021, https://artmuseum.princeton. edu/transient-effects/painter-sun/ eclipse-paintings-howard-russell-butler/butlers-methods.

16 As well as this there was a keen quest for new planets, buoyed by 42

17 Kennefick, No Shadow, 9.

18 Kennifick gives a summation of the function of a Coelostat: ‘[C] oelostat mirrors were a common instrument at eclipses. The name means “sky-stopping mirror,” as its essential function is to stop the motion of the sky. The telescope remains fixed in place while the mirror at the one end rotates in such a way as to counteract the rotation of the Earth, keeping each star image at the same point on the photographic plate”.

Kennefick, No Shadow, 111.

20 Kennefick, No Shadow, 176.

21 Taddeo Gaddi’s letter to Fra

Simone Fidate states: ‘For from days not long past I have suffered, and still suffer, from an unendurable infirmity of the eyes, which has been occasioned by my own folly. For while, this year, the Sun was in eclipse I looked at the Sun itself for a long period of time, and hence the infirmity ... For I constantly have clouds before my eyes which impede the vigor of my sight.’ The validity of this letter and its impact are discussed in R. J. M. Olson and J.M. Pasachoff, “Comets, Meteors, and Eclipses: Art and Science in Early Renaissance Italy,” Meteoritics & Planetary Science 37, no. 11 (2002): 1563-578.

22 ‘I looked a very little while upon

ye sun in a looking-glass with my right eye & then turned my eyes into a dark corner of my chamber & winked to observe the impression made & the circles of colours which encompassed it & how they decayed by degrees & at last vanished. This I repeated a second & a third time. At the third time when the phantasm of light & colours about it were almost vanished, intending my phansy upon them to see their last appearance I found to my amazemt that they began to return & by little & little to become as lively & vivid as when I had newly looked upon ye sun. But when I ceased to intende my phansy upon them they vanished again. After this I found that as often as I went into ye dark & intended my mind upon them as when a man looks earnestly to see any thing wch is difficult to be seen, I could make ye phantasm return wthout looking any more upon the sun.’

Isaac Newton, “365. Newton to Locke, 30 June 1691,” in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed.

by H. W. Turnball, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 3:152–54.

tion of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. These are some of the minor difficulties. I ought really to look at the problem four-dimensionally as concerning the intersection of my world-line with that of the plank. Then again it is necessary to determine in which direction the entropy of the world is increasing in order to make sure that my passage over the threshold is an entrance, not an exit.

‘Verily it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.’

H. G. Callaway, Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World : Gifford Lectures of 1927, An Annotated Edition (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2014), 337, ProQuest Ebook Central.

24 Kennefick, No Shadow, 35.

28 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2016), 94.

29 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 94.

25 Kennefick, No Shadow, 79.

30 Kennefick, No Shadow, 39.

26 Kennefick, No Shadow, 71.

31 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 43.

27 The quote was cut short for

32 Howard Caygill chapter “Benjamin’s Natural Theology” gives an overview of the eponym, its relationship to Eddington’s Gifford Lectures and how it impacted his thoughts on Kafka.

Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons, eds., Walter Benjamin and Theology, (Fordham University Press, 2016), Fordham Scholarship Online.

23 Albert Einstein quoted in Kennefick, No Shadow, 37.

posterity, but Benjamin continues the quotation from Eddington: ‘Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a viola-

33 In “Lightness”, Calvino confesses that in an earlier draft, the

43

lecture would have been exclusively devoted to the moon. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, trans. Geoffrey Brock (United Kingdom: Penguin, 2016), 29. The moon features heavily in his Cosmicomics, particularly “The Distance of the Moon.”

Italo Calvino, The Distance of the Moon, trans. Martin McLaughlin et al, (Milton Keynes: Penguin, 2018). It is curious for us that he should devote that lecture to Lightness, as it was Eddington who showed that it the Sun only fails to collapse on itself by the radiation pressure of sunlight, i.e., the heaviest object in our solar system is held up by light itself.

Kennifick, No Shadow, 13.

34 Calvino, Six Memos, 9.

35 Calvino, Six Memos, 85.

36 Calvino, Six Memos, 19.

37 Calvino, Six Memos, 5.

38 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities,

trans. William Weaver (London: Penguin, 1997), 32.

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List of figures Cover Image: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington.

Principe, 1919. Photographic Plate. https://collection. sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/ documents/aa110074433/solarcorona-during-an-eclipse Figure 1: James Dyson. Sobral, Brazil, 1919. Photographic Plate. https://www.smithsonianmag. com/science-nature/ totalsolar-eclipse-100-years-agoproved-einsteins-generalrelativity-180972278/ Figure 2: H. Stubington. St. Petersburg, 1912.

Glass framed photograph. https://collection. sciencemuseumgroup.org. uk/objects/co509685 /glassframed-photograph-x34showing-a-time-lapse-blackand-white-prints-photographsa s t r o p h o t o g r a p h s - s o l a reclipses Figure 3: Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

Sobral, 1919. Mounted photograph. https://library.artstor. org/#/asset/26234724

Figure 4: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington.

Principe, 1919. Photographic Plate. https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/328882/view Figure 5: 4th century BC. Antefix, head of Medusa. Antefix, head of Medusa, Terracottas. Place: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://library.artstor.org/ asset/27222678.

Figure 6: London Illustrated News, November 22, 1919. https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/ science/solar-eclipse-einsteinphysics.html Figure 7: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington.

Principe, 1919. Photographic negative. https://collection. sciencemuseumgroup.org. uk/documents/aa110075246/ photograph-of-solar-eclipse

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