Wagnerian Light

FTLComm - Tisdale - Monday, July 29, 2002

Richard Wagner wrote what most consider, romantic operas, in the early nineteen century he was a fanatical nationalist and for that reason his was the favoured music of the Third Reich. It was not his fault the way his music was used and often abused for indeed this was a man who had a sense of the extreme and ever since composers have muttered that they wish they had written some of the things he had.

Last evening we approached sunset with a tattered sky from wind a few threatened storms and several layers of cloud. These pictures are with the exception of the first presented in order and as you can see before the full sunset began there were indications that what would follow would be spectacular. As we walked along our journey was interrupted as I had to stop and record the scene as it changed and as the surroundings changed the sky above.

Only three blocks from home the show had already begun and this QuickTime Virtual Reality scene of only ninety degrees of the West and North western sky were already looking like the sort of thing Wagner's music seemed to have been set in. The piece playing is Ride of Valkyrie which was used in the movie Apocalypse Now, the confusing depiction of Vietnam in the chaos that was somehow described as war. The music is what my mind heard when I looked upon this sky.

Over the park looking South (right) or East (above) the setting Sol turned the lower clouds pink. While to the West (below) the flames of light licked the water vapour setting it visually aflame. Each of us consider ourselves oblivious to time and the forces around us, we all know it isn't true but we all deny how fragile and vulnerable we are. Faced with the immensity of the sky and shafts of light streaming from millions of miles away, that denial is much more difficult.

Another glance at the bliss in the park, teenagers congregating, laughter and the lightness of life whilst above the Western sky had moved from tinges of colour to a conflagration. The picture below is actually eighteen inches wide as it is composed of three images imposed on one another to catch the burning shafts, the turbulence of wind, water and fragmented evening light.

The trees of the park have seen scenes like this before, they have seen forty years of sunsets bold ones, dull ones and ones that were shrouded in blowing snow, or the grey cloak of over burdened ice crystals and heaving fog. But like a fire, one could not pull away from that sky, the camera was pointed again and three more images combined below to capture yet another more subtle change of the golds and blues.

Mercifully the spectacle ended, there is only so much excitement a person can handle and a person who lives and works with the colour of light all day, every day this was a sky that taxed the senses. The reds fade to purples the blue dulls to black and darkness comes with the backlight of a full moon. A piece of time, a fragment of the cloth that is woven into our lives, yet a scene like this can be rivalled, only this one could be seen only once.