Luke Jerram’s Helios art piece recently went to Grimsby Minster and I went along to have a look.
It consists of a large inflatable sun, positioned in the crosspiece of the church, just down from the high altar. It glows with light, has moving sunspots and textures projected on it and a soundtrack. The image of the Sun is made from photographs, put together to create a realistic image of how the Sun actually is. The promotional material claims that it will leave the visitor ‘completely speechless’… and it, sort of, did.
I’m a sucker for seeing something I’ve never seen before, especially if it is free and a short stroll from my house. I went through the doors of the minster and did indeed see something I have never seen before, a large, orange beachball suspended in the middle of a dim church. I read the little spiel and sat down and tried to think or feel.. something.
The first thing I thought was, ‘well, it’s something I’ve never seen before - and now I have’. Then I was confronted by my own lack of reaction. I tried to feel something about it. I was struck that the symbol for the project has a sun symbol in the word ‘helios’, and that the sun symbol has a crown of rays, the way we usually depict the Sun. It’s odd, to see the Sun as a ball.
I went back to the spiel to see what I was missing. There was a painting of a previous Luke Jerram installation in the minster, this was a large inflatable moon. He’s also done one of the Earth and Mars. The dude really likes making inflatable celestial objects and putting them in unusual places.
Now, I love the Sun. It’s my favourite source of heat and light. I live in a country where it doesn’t (usually) scorch everything into dust and is a somewhat rare and welcome occurrence. This month has been a very sunny month and it’s been glorious (except for the fact I have to water my new turf for ages). I couldn’t connect the beachball with the Sun. Either as the metaphorical giver of light and life represented by its crown of rays, or as the literal thing my world revolves around. I just saw a beachball tethered to a ceiling. Perhaps I wasn’t in an imaginative mood, I’d painted a shed green that morning, a job which doesn’t really encourage celestial thoughts.
So I took a silly photo of myself looking like a saint and went home.
Later on, I thought I’d turn to an old favourite, Johnson’s Dictionary to get his view on the Sun. Here’s what he had to say.
1. The luminary that makes the day.
Doth beauty keep which never sun can burn,
Nor storms do turn?
Sidney.
Bid her steal into the pleached bow’r,
Where honeysuckles, ripen’d by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter.
Shakespeare.
Though there be but one sun existing in the world, yet the idea of it being abstracted, so that more substances might each agree in it, it is as much a sort as if there were as many suns as there are stars.
Locke.
By night, by day, from pole to pole they run;
Or from the setting seek the rising sun.
Harte.
Perhaps the lack of heat was the source of the problem. As ‘the luminary that makes the day’, Helios glows softly in the dim, old church - it doesn’t flood it with light and heat. It’s a realistic depiction of the Sun without the Sun’s raw power. It is a sun which doesn’t burn, which will never ripen a honeysuckle and which will neither rise nor set. I’m not really sure what Locke is saying in his quote, I feel he’s saying that the Sun can be abstracted and imagined, as every star is a sun. All I can say is that Helios abstracts the Sun till it becomes a sun, lowercase, not the impressive, named thing.
Weirdly, I was ultimately brought back to a piece of writing by a different Samuel Johnson, Samuel ‘Maggoty’ Johnson, the dancing master and household fool who wrote the play, Hurlothrumbo.
I’ve looked at the script before on this blog, but to recap, it had one of the most successful runs of the eighteenth century. Maggoty Johnson was an official fool and the published play was sold on the ridiculousness of the thing. That was what made it a success, with accounts of the truly peculiar way it was staged, but I always saw a glimpse of something else in it.
The story is about a king called Soaretherial, who is so carried away by his flights of imagination that he doesn’t notice the revolution stirring in his country and aided by the very earthy Dutch king, Lomperhomock. Hurlothrumbo is the defender of the realm and he’s torn between his duty to the impractical Soaretherial and a bribe to let the Lomperhomock in. There’s also Lord Flame, a character in love with love who often plays a scene on stilts.
How much Maggoty intended a serious reading of his play, I have no idea, but there is an unrestrained pleasure and joy in the writing that, while often reading as goofy, seems to try and reach something nebulous and wonderful through it’s sheer exuberance. The king, Soaretherial is described as this by Hurlothrumbo;
“His high-born Soul is above the Sublunary World, he reigns, he rides in the Clouds, and keeps his Court in the Horizon; He’s Emperor of the superlative Heights, and lives in Pleasure among the Gods; he plays at Bowls with the Stars, and makes a Foot-ball of the Globe; he makes that to fly far, far out of the reach of Thought.”
There are times when the play is trying to do exactly that, fly far beyond the reach of thought (and sense). The very plot pits the abstracted celestial characters against the earthy, with both the nation and Hurlothrumbo as the battlegrounds.
The Sun is a constant presence in the play. It’s a metaphor, but not a very controlled one, sometimes referring to Soaretherial, sometimes to God, sometimes to Lord Flame - but there is one tension about the Sun that is consistent, its life-giving and life destroying properties. Two courtiers are talking about the nature of their king and have the following exchange;
Dar. A poor King is arrived at Court, and Dologodelmo Oratorys high Encomiums upon the mighty Soarethereal, declares he’s like the glorious Sun, extends his Beams to all and every part of the World; and as he rides along the Meridian Course, every feeble Plant beneath him is cherished, and rises up revived.
Urlan. The Simile is not good: The Sun gives Life to the Plants that reside far off, but those that grow under him are burn’d, and scorch’d to Ashes.
The very abstracted, high nature of King Soaretherial means that he’s damaging to those closest to him. At another point of the play, he gathers the power of the Sun to inspire his troops to life, vigour and victory. A place where the Sun has the power of good.
One plot point has Soaretherial’s ally, the Spanish Prince Theorbeo, taken to a dreadful execution facility, ‘the house of burning glass’. There, he is to be stifled in a greenhouse and die, or possibly be physically burnt up by the refracted light. The Sun is potentially a killer, the tension mounts (sort of) until a cloud covers the Sun and Theorbeo is saved. Here, the Sun has great power which is easily mitigated.
In Hurlothrumbo, a character says, “When I gaze upon the Sun, I sink into myself, full of Humility”, while this is questionable, gazing at the Sun is more likely to cause blindness than humility, it touches something about how unimaginable the Sun is and how it takes a leap to even try to imagine it. Samuel ‘Maggoty’ Johnson, for all his faults and idiosyncrasies, really seems to engage with the Sun as something incredibly powerful, both actually and mythically. This was something Helios didn’t do, only reducing it to a beachball tethered to a roof.
