Walked down Berliner Straße in Offenbach this afternoon around sunset. And even thought everything seemed to be as brutalist grey as it ever is, a man on the corner was lit in bright orange. I stepped into his light and saw that the sun was shining down Kleiner Biergrund, a street that must have existed here for many centuries, probably before there was an Offenbach. Though I could be wrong.
The sun was setting right in a very narrow spot and I and the man were so very lucky to be in the precise place where it seemed to be setting.
It seemed to be there, because the sun we saw was there eight minutes prior. The actual star had moved on. What we basked in was some kind of curved teil of its radiation. Though obviously not a tail really, as the sun most of the time glows towards not just us, but many. But eight minutes is eight minutes.
And then it occurred to me, and maybe this is the most obvious thing for all, that when we look at the stars, we do not experience a moment in time, but the parallel experience of vastly different moments at vastly different times. Stars that appear to be next to each other are not only not necessarily on the same plane to us. Their images might also be separated by millions of years?
It’s like looking at a family picture and even though it appears that everyone is standing next to each other, some of the cousins are farmers, while others are hunters and gatherers, and others yet are emerging from the ocean. What appears to be a single moment is in fact a completely stretched and insanely wild bouquet of moments.
Now it gets somehow crazier if we realise that we are obviously so limited that even with the most sophisticated human inventions we are only able to pay attention to the stars and whatever we are able to see. But while we gaze out into the abyss, the spaces between the star cousins are not nothing. They are somehow also there, and if we were able to follow the particles or waves we are actually not able to see then they would be a melted and stretched something, varying in age… or perhaps really not, because just as the sun does not directly shine at us, the stars are also not directly shining at each other. Though they are, and they are not.
It all is beyond anything I can understand. I wonder if anyone ever conducted an experiment in which something much slower is looked at. Like a clap. Two separate claps of different volume, set apart, and yet sounding as if they were one?
Sound waves playing a journey game, or not really. It only happens when there were a listener, in the right place, at the right time.
the sun has set now. I am writing this in the dark. The screen is illuminated by a lamp that is powered by electricity which was produced with some kind of method that extracted the power of the sun. Perhaps it was happening in almost real time, perhaps by the means of motion of air, perhaps it was done by burning materials that at some point were living things growing because of and towards the sun.
The eight minute old version of it.
Or a tiny fraction of it all.