In 1901, sponge divers off the island of Antikythera recovered a corroded bronze object from a Roman-era shipwreck. It took most of the twentieth century to understand what it was. The Antikythera Mechanism is a hand-cranked astronomical calculator, built in the second century BCE, capable of predicting solar and lunar eclipses through 223-lunar-month Saros cycles.
Its back face carries a spiral dial inscribed with glyphs, one for each eclipse the machine could foresee. The predictions were keyed to a specific geography, likely Rhodes or Corinth, meaning its glyphs encoded not only when an eclipse would occur but where it would be visible from. It was a localized machine, the earliest known device in which celestial recurrence was translated into a readable surface.
In August 2026, a total solar eclipse will cross continental Europe, the first totality visible there since 1999. The event belongs to Saros 126, a sequence of seventy-two eclipses unfolding between 1179 and 2459, of which the 2026 eclipse is the forty-eighth.
The Antikythera was a situated instrument. Its glyphs encoded eclipses as they would be seen from a particular stretch of the Mediterranean, and a reader in Alexandria or Massalia would have had to correct for parallax or accept that the dial was lying to them by a small, knowable amount.
Sun removes the longitude and keeps the cycle. Its grid is deliberately placeless: seventy-two variants stand against seventy-two eclipses with no geography binding any one variant to any one totality path. What anchors a given reading is not where the reader is on the earth, but whether the variant happens to contain the word now.
Eighteen of the seventy-two require a present body; fifty-four can be read from anywhere, including from no particular time at all. The Antikythera localized celestial recurrence by latitude. The grid localizes it by utterance.
The hinge between the two machines is the deictic cell, which does, in language, what the geographic calibration did in bronze: it ties the system to a here, but lets the reader supply the coordinates.
Sun
Timed to this recurrence, Sun: Triptychs for Solar Eclipses is structurally isomorphic to the Antikythera machine, built from words rather than bronze, and deliberately placeless where the Antikythera was bound to a longitude.
It presents a ten-word system-poem alongside three short videos: Aperture, Augury, Apparition, and frames the poem as resolving a grammatical fault in a 2011 precursor.
Read together, the two poems form a fifteen-year experiment in constraint and revision. The relation between them is more layered than the Sun page suggests.
Grammar and Semantics
The later poem is the more finished object in terms of its tight grammatical structure. The earlier poem is the more ambitious one semantically.
What looks at first like a system being completed turns out, on closer reading, to be a system being narrowed, and then, on a further pass, narrowed and re-opened by the addition of a single tenth word: recursion mirrored and thematized.
Core Structure: Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs
Both poems share the same formal premise, a small grid of nouns, verbs, and adverbs, permuted across two syntactic orders, but the dimensions are not identical.
Structure of the 2011 Grid
The 2011 grid is three nouns, three verbs, three adverbs. The 2026 grid is three nouns, three verbs, four adverbs, doubled by syntax. Three times three times four times two is seventy-two. Against the seventy-two eclipses of Saros 126 this yields one poem per eclipse, one linguistic variant for each cosmic event across thirteen centuries.
From 12 to 432 to the Perfect 72
The 1:1 fit is itself the result of a second revision. An earlier published account of the 2026 grid named nine words rather than ten, and claimed 432 variants, a figure derived from reshuffling each column independently and doubling for syntax.
On audit, that count described column-permutations rather than displayed sentences. Any one selection from the grid shows a single noun, a single verb, a single adverb, in a chosen order, which gives 3 × 3 × 3 × 2 = 54, a figure that does not divide cleanly into the seventy-two members of the Saros.
The Fourth Adverb Closed the Gap
The fourth adverb closes the gap. The grid moves from 54 distinct sentences to 72, and the claim of one-poem-per-eclipse stops being approximate.
The 2011 precursor had a grammatical fault, or perhaps rather, a limitation. The first version of the 2026 grid had a counting fault. The ten-word grid has neither.
The 2011 grid reads:
interpretants / flow / rhythmically
phases / infer / conclusively
conscience / projects / vertically
[walk through / assimilate / authenticate
dichotomize/ diurnally / referentiate
refer / transfer / illuminate]
The 2026 grid reads:
apertures / align / rhythmically
apparitions / emerge / recursively
auguries / thicken / vertically
now
Singular Versus Plural Verbs in the 2011 Version
The grammatical fault the later work claims to resolve is visible at the noun column of the precursor. Interpretants and phases are plural. Conscience is singular and a mass noun.
The 2026 grid regularizes to plural across the noun row, and every column is internally consistent in category and number. The constraint, in this narrow sense, is satisfied: the machine now runs.
2011 Vocabulary
The 2011 vocabulary, interpretants, phases, conscience; flow, infer, projects; rhythmically, conclusively, vertically, is doing genuine semantic work. The nouns name three different orders of phenomenon: a sign-theoretic term from Peirce, a term from physics or temporal sequence, and a term from moral psychology.
The 2026 Vocabulary
The 2026 vocabulary, by contrast, is unified by a single phenomenon. Apertures, auguries, apparitions, grammatically similar in structure and semantically related to the solar eclipse, are three modes of one event: something appearing through an opening.
The grid is sonically bound (the triple a- in the noun row, the shared -ically ending across three of the four adverbs) and thematically sealed. It coheres because it has narrowed.
This is why the 2026 poem’s permutations hold. Not only because the parts of speech and number are regularized, but because the semantic field is small enough that any rearrangement remains plausible.
Auguries emerge rhythmically, apparitions align vertically, apertures thicken recursively. These all describe the same kind of thing.
The 2011 system poem cannot make the equivalent claim. Conscience flows conclusively and interpretants project rhythmically belong to different conceptual registers, and a reader has to do work to bridge them. That work is, arguably, what the earlier poem is for.
The Deictic Cell
Of the ten words in the grid, now, an asymmetrical savior, in an sense, is the only deictic. Following Jakobson’s account of shifters, a deictic term cannot be assigned a stable referent independent of the event of its utterance. Its meaning is constituted at the moment of speaking.
The other nine words in the grid are referentially autonomous. Apertures, thicken, recursively, each can be predicated of an event distant in time or place from the speaker. Now cannot. Its referent is the utterance-instance itself.
This makes now categorically distinct from the rest of the system. The grid is otherwise composed of what Jakobson called symbols proper: signs whose meaning is fixed by linguistic convention. Now is an indexical, a sign whose meaning is fixed by its co-occurrence with what it points to. The single deictic cell introduces, into an otherwise symbolic system, an indexical anchor.
Across the seventy-two variants, now appears in eighteen, six adverb-first, six adverb-last, distributed across the three nouns and the verb thicken. In each instance, the variant cannot be read without the reader supplying a moment of utterance.
Eighteen of seventy-two variants require presence. Fifty-four do not. The grid is split, at exactly one quarter of its outputs, into the readable-from-anywhere and the readable-only-from-here.
Anchoring Using the Word Now
The tenth word complicates that closure in a particular way. Now is the only adverb in the grid that is temporal rather than modal. Where rhythmically, vertically, and recursively describe how an action takes place, now describes when.
Pre-Norman Vocabulary
Its addition introduces a temporal axis the column previously lacked, in eighteen of the seventy-two variants (three nouns × three verbs × two syntactic orders). In six of these, now coincides with thicken, the only other pre-Norman word in the grid, marking the points at which the system’s two Germanic elements align.
English As a Split Language
English is unusual in carrying two parallel registers as a structural feature rather than a stylistic one. After 1066, Old English did not disappear under Norman French and ecclesiastical Latin. It persisted underneath them.
The result is a working diglossia that survives in modern usage. Cow is what the Saxon farmer raised, beef what the Norman lord ate. Ask is Old English; inquire and interrogate are Latin. Heart is Old English; cardiac is Greek. Womb is Old English; uterus is Latin. Death is Old English; mortality is Latin.
The pattern is consistent. The Germanic word names the thing as it is encountered, in the body, in the household, in weather. The Latinate word names the thing as it is classified, measured, or formally registered. Scientific, legal, medical, and bureaucratic English is overwhelmingly Latinate. The language of grief, hunger, sleep, fear, and touch remains Germanic.
The two registers refer to the same things and feel entirely different.
The Grid Read Through the Split
Eight of the ten words in the 2026 grid are Latinate or Greek: apertures, auguries, apparitions, align, emerge, rhythmically, vertically, recursively. They are observational and classificatory. They are the register one uses about an eclipse: the register of Saros tables, of orbital mechanics, of Howard Russell Butler painting the corona for the Hayden Planetarium.
Thicken and now are the two exceptions. They are the only cells in the grid where the language of the body breaks through the language of measurement.
Thicken, Old English þiccian, names a tactile density. Gravy thickens, fog thickens, blood thickens. To say time thickens is to import a body’s vocabulary into a category the Latinate register would handle with dilate or extend. Bakhtin’s translators chose the Germanic word, and the choice does exactly this work. It pulls chronology back into flesh.
Now operates similarly in a different mode. The other three adverbs are -ically abstractions describing manner, the how of an action. Now is deictic. It requires a body in a place at a time to mean anything at all.
The Latinate adverbs can be uttered by an observer at any distance. Now can only be uttered by someone present.
The 2011 grid, interpretants, conscience, infer, projects, conclusively, was almost entirely Latinate-abstract throughout. It stayed in the register of analysis.
The 2026 grid plants two Germanic words at structurally crucial positions, and this is what gives it phenomenological reach the earlier poem could not have.
The narrowing the essay has described, from semantic breadth to thematic focus, is also a register shift. From a poem written entirely in the language of measurement to a poem that lets the body speak in two cells out of ten.
The grid is otherwise a scientific instrument. Thicken is where the instrument touches skin.
Tracing Now Back to Proto-Indo-European
Now is also, with thicken, the only word in the system drawn from the older stratum of English: pre-Norman, monosyllabic, going back through Old English nū to Proto-Indo-European nū. The other eight words are Latinate or Greek borrowings.
It is not the only word whose weight is best measured against the Indo-European clock. In Shakespeare’s “The Time Is out of Joint,” the copula is — descended, by Derrida’s reckoning, through Sanskrit asus, Greek estin, Latin est, and German ist — has held its shape across the same five millennia.
The pairing is exact in form and opposite in function: is declares being; now fixes the instant of utterance. Both are monosyllables, both pre-Norman, both PIE.
Sounding the Grid
The grid is not only read. It is sounded. Each line is voiced above a fixed A2 drone at 110 Hz, with the letters of the chosen noun, verb, and adverb assigned to partials of that fundamental by alphabet position modulo twelve, and weighted by recurrence. The order of parsing is fixed: noun, then verb, then adverb. What changes from variant to variant is not the ground but the spectral distribution above it.
The Drone as Saros
The drone is the acoustic equivalent of the Saros. An eclipse cycle returns to the same orbital relation while the eclipse itself shifts in latitude and duration; the sounded line returns to the same A2 while redistributing emphasis across its overtone field. The system does in pitch what the grid does in syntax. It holds the law and varies the instance.
What the Lexicon Hears
The narrowing the glossary describes at the level of meaning has an acoustic register the glossary did not name. The triple a- of apertures, auguries, apparitions is not only a visual and phonetic binding. Under the rule, a maps to partial 1, the fundamental itself. Every noun in the grid begins by reinforcing 110 Hz. The first event in any sounded line is the drone returning to itself.
The shared -ically of rhythmically, vertically, recursively yields the same kind of family resemblance further up the spectrum. Rhythmically lands four times on partial 1, vertically twice, recursively not at all; each adverb closing toward the fundamental at a different distance. The variants flip in syntax and shift in semantics, but their timbral profile stays recognizable, the way three eclipses in the same Saros stay recognizable as members of one family.
The four formal axes of the work are: Order, Noun, Verb, Adverb. In French, the letters can be heard as on va: “we go” / “let’s go” — giving the formula a small hidden propulsion.
Rearranged the letters naming the word classes form nova, an anagram of sudden stellar brightness.
Thicken: Where the Instrument Touches Skin
The glossary places thicken and now outside the Latinate weather of the rest of the grid. The sounding rule places them outside it again. Thicken concentrates on partial 8, the doubled th striking the same overtone twice in succession before the line opens out. None of the other verbs do this.
Align spreads its five letters across five different partials. Emerge triples partial 5 through its three e‘s, giving it a different kind of insistence — vowel-led where thicken is consonant-led. The Old English verb has the densest consonantal attack in the grid. The body’s vocabulary enters the spectrum as percussion.
Now Has No Fundamental
The acoustic strangeness of now is exact. Its three letters map to partials 2, 3, and 11; and to no other partials at all. Now is the only word in the grid that does not touch partial 1. It does not return the line to the fundamental. It does not reinforce the drone. It plays only the higher overtones, briefly, and is gone.
This is the deictic cell heard. The eighteen variants that contain now are precisely the eighteen in which the line, at one cell, lifts off the fundamental and refuses to come back to it through that word. The other fifty-four close the loop somewhere: every Latinate adverb, every noun, the verbs align and emerge, all touch partial 1 and hand the line back to A2. Now alone leaves the drone hanging.
What the glossary calls the indexical anchor is, acoustically, an unanchoring. Now binds the line to the moment of utterance by removing it, for the length of one word, from the constant pitch the rest of the system shares. Presence is heard as a brief absence of the ground.
Louis Hjelmslev: Prolegomena to a Theory of Language
The two P-headings of Sun, Permutation and Prolegomena, are drawn, more or less directly, from Louis Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (Danish, 1943; English, 1953), the foundational text of the Copenhagen school of structural linguistics known as glossematics.
Hjelmslev’s project was to lay out, with the precision of a mathematician, the conditions under which a science of language might be possible at all: a before-saying about how meaning is generated when a finite set of invariants is rearranged according to fixed rules.
To title one section of the page Permutation and another Prolegomena, and to place the second where Hjelmslev’s standard placement would not put it, is to declare, at the level of architecture, that the work is a Hjelmslevian object, and to rotate the architecture by one position so the preface ends the work rather than introducing it.
