I’ve seen this many times since my return to the windy city. It’s one of the many sculptures in the Museum Campus, and I’m surprised that I actually got it on a blue-sky kind of day. All-too-often, Chicago is a gray and overcast place, not quite as damp as some exotic, non-bovine city like Seattle, and so not as friendly to woodlice as I’d like it, though it’s damp enough for them, if lawns and gardens and compost heaps are kept nicely moist. (Chicago is a cow-city, a post-industrial, post-social worshipper of the not-exactly-golden calf of ancient near Semitic mythology. Its weather often resembles a bolus of grass with all of the color chewed out of it.) And yet, on a day, a Saturday not that long ago, there was sunlight, and a happy smear of blue above the fluff of speeding clouds. Marilyn and Tara had been here since the previous Thursday. Cheri, Dave, and Dave’s mom, Juanita were in for the day. Corey and Mark and I were here…as if there could be anywhere else for us to go! And the sun came out. We’d made a strangely circuitous journey to the Museum Campus along the shores of Lake Michigan and found a sculpture garden full of fallen moons, strange globes, and bouncy-recycled rubber surfaces. The Field Museum of Natural History, John G. Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium loomed around us like displaced temples. Fittingly, we passed this angular up-thrust of geometry on the way to the grounds of the Adler Planetarium. There were three of them, if I recall correctly, but this is the one that drew my attention. Its proportions remind me of the featureless black monoliths featured in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: a space odyssey. I don’t know if that resemblance is intentional, but hey…the proportions are right. The only thing absent were pre-human apes scampering around, gaining enlightenment (and learning how to use weapons) while Gyorgy Legetti’s Lux Aeterna crooned in the background. I like that movie a lot, and in homage to my favorite scenes, I touched the sculpture. Nothing happened though; I didn’t learn how to turn bones into weapons, nor did I set off that alien burglar alarm that made way for a journey to Jupiter undertaken Dave Bowman, Frank Poole, and HAL-900. I did touch a piece of art, however. It was cold, as expected, and strangely insubstantial. It’s a hollow sculpture, I think, and so not nearly as impressive as the featureless black shapes that always preceded one of humanity’s dubious evolutionary leaps. As I sit writing this, I am immersed in the sound of Legetti’s haunting composition. I have come to love this sculpture because of the music I now associate with it. Now, if only I’d stopped to learn this sculpture’s name! *** As always, thank you for reading, viewing and commenting, and hopefully everyone is having a great weekend.