Crepuscular

If you're ever lacking evidence that the world is a set, that it's some elaborate and nearly-convincing ruse built to test your endurance against injustice, uncertainty, and some unconscionable proposition of inevitability (and who's testing, you might ask, and isn't the whole experiment more than a little unethical, and what the fuck, why me anyway, who does that make me in this whole ridiculous equation? ...well, never you mind about any of that), then the place to look is up. Sunbeams stretch out misleadingly from breaks in the clouds, and spread like divine fingers to the earth, or maybe like some benevolent or retributive holy gaze. I've often taken sunbeams reaching through the clouds as a meaningful representation of God, casting His beatific essence from the sky to the earth, a view supported by a wasted youth of studying comic illustrations.

But it's a fake, right? A prop? If you think about the alleged distance of the sun to the earth, not to mention the relative diameters of the bodies, then we're talking a mighty slim solid angle. These photons are clearly jetting down to the little blue globe like soldiers in a column, marching at lightspeed to cross this uniquely flyblown orb all in line. That's the story, anyway, and I call bullshit on it. It's bad enough that y'all act so unconvincingly, but at the right time of day, the awkward backlights couldn't be more obvious. What else am I supposed to think? And if it looks bad on the ground, get up in an airplane at one of the crepuscular hours, and witness, motherfucker. The sunbeams splay out from a dozen spotlights that are plugged in at various points only just barely behind the clouds, each converging at its own infinity, and not a common one. I can only believe they're quietly clicked off in sequence by the Cosmic Designers when night is designated to commence. In any case, wherever the beams finally do co-locate, it's some point a lot closer than a hundred-million-mile-distant perpetual H-bomb. As if.

I expected a more exotic explanation when I finally got around to looking this business up, some unlikely scattering event at the edges of the clouds maybe, or perhaps some ramification of being forced to shine through the dynamic array of cloud droplets. But it's nothing so complex as that. The image of sunbeams is a boring matter of perspective, more like watching the road recede infinitely before you and converge to a point than a sophisticated manipulation of the light. The counterintuitive trick is that the opening in the sky is the size of a New England county, and the sky itself is more enormous that it looks, at least a mile or two distant depending on the altitude of the phenomena. The perspective is greater than it appears, and yet, and yet...

You can spot crepuscular rays whenever light is shining down through a hole in the firmament and there are enough scatterers to make it look like a beam, and, as the word suggests, they're more likely to be observed at the right times of day. I hadn't realized it when I first thought to complain about the phenomenon, but there are anticrepuscular beams up there too, streaks of light pitched clear across the opposite horizon, that complete the other half of the surprising arc, and on rare occasions (I read), you can see the beams stretch across the length of the sky. Great, and now I'm going to be looking for them.

My favorite beams are the ones that streak out right before sunrise and just after sunset, that unitary burst, when a single ray streams vertically from just below the edge of the world, a godly claw reaching up to the sky to carve a path for the rising fireball.

Although the optical effect has grown into its definition, "crepuscular" is an unworthy word for this chunk of atmospheric beauty. It sounds, well, like crap. I can understand the motivation to attach a better significance to the way the light arcs across the sky. Jacob, it's said, could climb the ladder to heaven along these beams, and the Greeks believed (or preferred to believe) that water ascended by these illuminated staircases too. Rain had to come from somewhere, after all. I don't know if the Maori picture of roping back the sun is unique to their culture, but it's the favorite story I've found so far. If the old Polynesians had managed a more developed science of lighting before Whitey stumbled in with the muskets, then maybe they would have picked up on the multiple point sources before I did. I like the idea of lassoing flaming giant back. It's a myth with the right attitude to confront this obnoxious and glorious illusion.

[I had this post in mind before Smutty got going on about paddling the midwest in the prime of his life, but here's a bonus sunburst. His series is a great one. This is one of his photos.]