Sun Shine In FoundationLook up!
"We choose the Supreme Light of the divine Sun; we aspire that it may impel our minds" - Gayatri Mantra
To stare into something that has never once looked away.
The Eye
I take the world into myself through vision, but in looking I also impose a direction, a selection, a significance, perhaps even a demand, upon the world. The Eye is an aperture through which the world enters, but the gaze is also an act by which the subject reaches outward.
I too am part of the world. I am the seer-visible. The body through which I perceive belongs to the same world that perception reveals to me.
I encounter the world from within it. My perception selects, organizes and gives significance to what appears.
And yet this movement does not remain entirely on my side.
I see something.
Then suddenly I realize that my act of
seeing has changed me, and the thing
I've seen has become a presence confronting me. Its being seen exposes the structure of my own
seeing.
I look at this painting and she looks back at me.
The Sun
Long before I understood it as a star, I watched its movement across the sky, oriented myself by it, measured time by it, and made it the center of my myths and rituals.
I have looked at the sun and, in looking, continually made it into something more than an object. It has become a god, a source of life, a symbol of truth, revelation, sovereignty, immortality, death. Across traditions, the sun has been made to signify whatever is imagined as the ultimate source: that which illuminates, gives life, reveals what is hidden, or stands at the center of a greater order.
I look at the source of looking.
But the sun denies me.
Its light overwhelms
the organ that receives it. The Eye, which ordinarily receives the world, encounters something it cannot
receive without being damaged. Ether and poison.
Perhaps, then, the sun is not quite a part of my world in the same sense as the things it illuminates.
And yet I cannot quite turn away from it. The gaze retreats from its source and returns to the world it illuminates.
