This post was supposed to be written around photos, but I have not managed the download/upload business yet so those will have to come later. [Which is now.]
On the way out to the Santa Fe Opera, just as the van we were riding in turned off the road, a rainbow began to appear. It stretched up from northeast of the Opera, and almost immediately, a second rainbow began to grow above it.
By the time we reached the top of the hill where the Opera house stands, the northern ends of the two rainbows were arching up across the sky. Meanwhile, to the southeast, matching paired rainbows were growing, reaching up to ultimately meet their counterparts above a sky melting gold with light dispersed through a fine rain shower.
Everyone moved to take photographs of the rainbow(s). As I also did so, not at all immune to this, I couldn't help thinking that the photographs would be the antithesis of the thing itself. The photos show bands of color, it is true, but they cannot show the way the whole thing grew from the ground up.
Nor can they show the final act of the performance of rainbowness: as the inner of the now fully-developed pair of rainbows visibly deepened in color intensity, the separate bands of color becoming differentiated so that for once I could see violet and indigo.
The whole thing was not what was visible at any moment, even if we were to ignore the partial perspectives that were always being blocked by other people. The rainbow as a whole was not even simply something I could have trapped with a video camera.
These rainbows were a process of being in place, and the tokens I captured are less than fragments of that being; rather, they serve to index my having been there along with the growth of the rainbow itself.
The rainbows, the photos, and the sense of common purpose they created among a group of strangers ("Look, take a picture from here", someone told me as I was looking at the final shimmering indigo band appear) are inseparable from the span of time that the rainbow took to develop and fade, and in turn from the place from which this unfolding was briefly visible.
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