EXCLIPSE Soleil cou coupé August 22, 2017: total solar eclipse. I watch calmly, from an urban perch, with naked eyes, through a cloud covering here and there perforated to reveal brief, excruciating glimpses of the sun’s body impinged upon by its minor counterpart. Flashes: a sight both there and not (suddenly too much to see) Puncturing the veil: a missed encounter—still and always coming (...Nachträglichkeit…) (...now...now...now...) • Precisely what is hidden, obscured from sight, when the moon eclipses the sun? It is merely the most obvious, the most glaring, truth that the sun disappears when the contraposing lunar orb egregiously occludes its luminous sire. Which is to say: what is occulted—remains. • All eyes turn to the sky: anxious intensity of collective heliotropism. (Desire to see the sun-god compromised, blotted out.) (The moon is a cutting edge.) • “The rational mind understands to have neutralized the ominous aspect of the eclipse. But the laws of mythic association uphold psychological truths in the face of which reason remains impotent.” itself • Calmness yesterday. Today….something like madness. Hysteria catching up to me, catching me by surprise. • Archethesis Total eclipse: the path and prize of totality: a purity (a fullness, an uncorrupted completion) against partiality. (Path of totality : recourse to purity) The negligibility of a partial eclipse: a minor catastrophe at most. The total as desideratum: completion, unity, fullness—the all. Exthesis The moon is the principle of insufficiency. In its reflective secondariness, its very light is a shadow. (The moon is cavelight.) The two, the double, the duplicitous, the doppelganger. The crescent, the sliver, the womb (the anus). A minor path to capital delirium (the path of impurity) (logic of the acéphale). The subtraction that supplements the other (uncanny logic of excess). • Germination/termination Anal contractions reverberate, the earth disgorges itself, and the moon gives birth to a monster without whose mutilation we cannot know the sacred. • • As a child I played a solitary game of afterimages. I would stare at the sun and burn my retinas, then direct the incandescent black particle in my field of vision across the horizon, imagining it to be an ocular targeting system. My aim: a blind spot. • Under the guise of an adult, I proposed marriage to a woman as we viewed a partial eclipse. • Dream (the night after the eclipse) Dark storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Soon the clouds are directly overhead. The underbelly of the clouds—where grey turns to black—is swirling and roiling, as if teeming. Hanging tendrils of cloud writhe as the wind increases. The cloudbody lights up in flashes from within: interior electricity. • A love of doubles. A double love. Under the cover of an apparent darkness. • Dream knot Logic of the eclipse: occluding mechanism that guarantees total incompletion. • …a professor’s glass eye, askew in its socket…. • Circle = perfection. Therefore: Never a circle—unless cut, ruptured, penetrated, decayed, effloresced, punctured, devoured, harrowed, incised, sacrificed. • Oneiric atmospherics …in the midst of the day, an ominous decandescence—precisely the tenebrous lighting of light’s extinction…. • As a child, whenever the occasion presented itself—on clear nights when the moon’s phase and position allowed—I would situate myself on my bed so that my head would rest in a shaft of moonlight. • Advent of the anus …the sun’s blazing corona forming an annular remainder, a diadem around the moon’s aperture… …the excremental white of the moon… …when cut, the moon also cuts… • Oedipus stares at the sun to make moons of his eyes. Jeremy Biles