Aside

The eclipse: the world as a printing surface

The eclipse: the world as a printing surface

Print.Making.Mistakes.

We Make a Mark

I almost missed the eclipse.

My husband and I had been visiting Seattle, and I have a rule about driving: I don’t like to drive when it’s dark.

It’s not a particularly interesting rule. It is simply one of those small decisions I’ve made about how I like to move through the world.

Travel, however, has a way of testing these little arrangements we make with ourselves.

We left Seattle later than I wanted. There were the inevitable things that happen when you’re trying to leave a city: one more thing to do, one more delay, one more stretch of road that takes longer than you thought it would. Eventually, there was no avoiding it.

It was dark.

For a lot of the drive.

And I was not pleased.

Then I looked up, thanks to the gentle nudging of my husband.

The eclipse was happening.

There are moments when seeing something doesn’t feel like looking at something so much as being interrupted by it.

That was how it felt.

I looked up and, for a moment, the ordinary scale of my life disappeared.

There was the road.

There was the car.

There was my husband.

There was the dark.

And there was the moon, carrying the shadow of the Earth across its face.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we did that.

We made that shadow.

This rock we live on, this thing I usually experience as the ground beneath my feet, was moving through space and leaving a mark.

The Earth had become, for a moment, an artist of sorts.

Not intentionally, I suppose. There was no hand guiding the composition. No one selected the materials. No one pulled a proof.

And yet there was an impression.

Something had come between light and surface, and the evidence of that encounter was visible from millions of miles away and by millions of people.

That thought made me think about printmaking.

One of the things I love about printmaking is the intimacy of the relationship between an object and a surface.

Something touches something else.

Pressure is applied.

Ink moves.

A surface receives.

And afterward, there is evidence that the two things met.

I’ve started noticing how often the world works this way.

We leave marks without necessarily intending to.

A footprint in wet sand.

The indentation of a chair in carpet.

A handprint on glass.

The crease left in a piece of fabric.

The impression of a button pressed against another surface.

A shadow.

We tend to think of a mark as something we make deliberately. We draw it. Paint it. carve it. Print it. Sign it.

But perhaps a mark can simply be evidence of presence.

I was there.

This touched that.

Something occupied this space.

Something blocked the light.

Something changed the surface.

The eclipse made me feel very small and very large at the same time.

Small because, obviously, I am one person sitting in a car watching an astronomical event that has nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Large because I am part of the thing making the mark.

So are you.

Every one of us is standing on the thing that is casting that shadow.

We are riding around on a planet that is leaving evidence of itself in the universe.

And I almost missed it because I didn’t want to drive in the dark.

That may be my favorite part of the story.

The thing I was trying to avoid was the very thing that allowed me to see.

Without the darkness, I might not have noticed the light.

Without the shadow, I might not have understood the mark.

And without the mistake of leaving Seattle later than planned, I might have missed the whole thing.

I’m beginning to suspect that this is one of the pleasures of looking at the world through printmaking:

You start paying attention to the evidence.

You start wondering what touched what.

What left an impression.

What disappeared but left something behind.

What seemed insignificant until you changed the light.

And every once in a while, you look up from the road and realize that the entire planet is making a print.