How to Control Time

My friends, 

The solstice is nigh once again, a moment in a year of moments when the collective acknowledges LIGHT. It is about to change, to stop retreating south and far and begin the journey back to warm our faces and brighten our afternoons. My job is all about light, and it's nice that something so subtle as a day becoming marginally longer and/or brighter has been accurately traced for at least 7,000 years. A site in southern Egypt called Nabta Playa has standing stones apparently placed by nomadic cattle herders to mark the summer solstice in a spot on the planet exactly on the Tropic of Cancer. These stones on the solstice cast no shadow at all at noon. Scientists are quick to point out that there were likely lots of "calendars" of a sort around the planet. No one "discovered" the solstice. For those early Egyptians the flooding of the Nile was the significant rhythmic event and being able to predict that somewhat must have been helpful. Light, shadow, no shadow, floods. Ah, the simple precarious flow state of agrarian nomads...

My last missive to you all invoked Pat Metheny. He played guitar on one of my all-time favorite albums --"Shadows and Light." (Multiple geniuses on stage, live, improvising. Repeated listenings are mandatory). And, come to think of it, a couple missives ago I wrote about the Talking Heads album, "Remain in LIght." A couple days ago I was making the case to a friend that one of the greatest unsung albums of the last twenty years is "Ray of Light" -- a fantastical production by the gentleman William Orbit guiding Madonna in a tangent of creativity outshining anything else she ever recorded. IMHO. And skipping backwards a few blogs, I referenced an album called "Where the Light Is," a live recording of John Mayer in concert. "Blinded by the Light" I saw played live in New Jersey when I was a freshman. Thanks Bruce. And yesterday when I was working out, "Turn on your Love Light" pushed me through the last bits of selected suffering. Thank you Jerry and the boys. The Grateful Dead has been music for training for over forty years. Well, is there a theme here? Or is it just me? Is noticing light just my curse and blessing? And what is this overlap with music? 

Let's back up a moment. The word solstice comes from the Latin words for "sun" and "standing still." Nothing stands still in regard to time. Nothing. Shepherds 7000 years ago, Neolithic man in Britain, understood this and built clocks based on changing celestial light. Ok, calendars may be more accurate. Stonehenge is a circle of bluestone megaliths dating to around 5000 years ago and had various roles and rituals according to archaeologists, but it is clearly an astronomical calendar. The summer and winter solstices are precisely indicated by the positions of the stones and the rising sun. When I was five, my brothers and I clambered all over these on a grey afternoon. 

And my mum, an amateur artist, painted a large canvas which hangs in my living room today. Stonehenge is a clock that ticks every six months.

Today, the most accurate time keeper is an optical lattice clock, a complex laser-driven mechanism based on wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum. It is accurate to within one second every 15 billion years or just less than a one second deviation since the Big Bang. It is so accurate that moving it a couple inches closer to the floor changes the time based on Einstein's theory of relativity -- earth's mass distorts time. But who cares about that amount of precision? Well, astrophysicists, but that's for another discussion.

So, attention to the changes of light? That's the music playing here. Light has mattered since prehistory. Pure light. Subtle light. Light itself. The persistence of our collective attention to light for millennia and how it marks time passing and how it is the beauty that we understand with our eyes is nothing less than divine. My obsession is to try and reintroduce humans to that subtlety and its power by hanging objects that control light on the wall of your home. The human animal is spectacularly sensitive to light input. Studies prove that we can perceive the single photon generated when an electron moves up or down a shell in an atom. We can literally see down to an atomic scale. These are aspects of life and being without peer. This sensitivity is truly magical.

The solstice, time, light, the artists and musicians who celebrate these, our headlong pitch of each day from dawn until dusk... What to do? The answer is written above -- Turn on Your Love Light. Dial up that. The solstice is a time to celebrate. The Holiday of Lights. A menorah. The lights on the tree. We are united by our experience of light and time changing relentlessly. The only response that makes any sense is to celebrate these things. To quote Pig Pen, "Turn on your love light and leave it on..."

We are all one people -- us, Brits, sub Saharans -- spinning around on this orb we call home. Hug your family and share your attention with everyone you can reach. This is an invitation for the solstice. A tradition 7000 years old is to see brighter days ahead. 

Peace and love my friends. We are lucky to have met. 

Bruce R. MacDonald

P.S. I want to share with you that all these missives would not happen without the skill and devotion of Sarah Vogelsang-Card. She is the photographer of nearly everything you see. She is a constant in my world of art-making and communication to all of you. She has been a part of this for over sixteen years in the gallery and her support is priceless. Thank you sweet woman for the focus. And a big Hallelujah, please, from all you readers. Sarah with an h. Sarah the fifth. Sarah the co-conspirator. Only she can take these photographs. Bless you. 

P.P.S. Accepting time requires paying respect for those who leave us in the middle of contributing to making a better world. I feel the loss in the last year of Peter Schjeldahl and Roger Angell and George Booth and Lee Bontecou. They are titans. Their art remains. I am comforted in their exit of this plane knowing that their successors are born this year. Time is a relentless cycle. Our bodies, fragile and temporary... 

P.P.S.S. How do we control time? Well, we can move that clock closer to the floor, or we can sing and dance and teach and write and make art to be around when we are not. BEAUTY is timeless.