One Equal Light

Cosmic revolutions beget earthly revolutions in a film about the 2024 solar eclipse, ecstasy, ghosts, birth, death and the English poet and preacher John Donne.

Images shot near Niagara Falls, amid a crowd gathered in pursuit of a total solar eclipse. The figure of the English poet and preacher John Donne, who died in 1631 after rising twice from his deathbed: first to give what appeared to his audience to be the macabre spectacle of a corpse delivering its own three-hour funeral oration; then to pose in his shroud for the sculpting of a rare standing cadaver monument. In One Equal Light, an actor takes up the pose of this statue, now on display in St Paul’s Cathedral. This recalls the reenactment of a performance by Dennis Oppenheim in Maider Fortuné and Annie MacDonnell’s Communicating Vessels (2019). The link between the eclipse and the poet is as tacit as it is obvious. The sun’s sudden plunge into darkness has always been associated with the end of the world, not so much because of a symbolic resemblance as because of the conditions of its appearance and experience, which liken it to a dress rehearsal for death.  

From this experience of panic, MacDonnell and Fortuné draw inspiration from obsessions and new beginnings. The ‘equal light’ referred to by John Donne (Whitehall Sermon, 1627) paves the way for poetry at the very moment of its gloaming. Linked in the same metaphysical vertigo, different orders of reality communicate through a multitude of analogies, a redemptive return to language echoed by writer Annie Dillard when describing her own experience of totality: if ‘all those things for which we have no words are lost’, then it is good to have ‘all the world’s words at the mind’s disposal, so the mind could begin its task.’

Antoine Thirion