Invocation for John Muir

In 1849 when John Muir was eleven he sailed from Dunbar to the United States with his father. During his lifetime he devoted himself to the preservation of the Western forests. Muir profoundly shaped the very categories through which Americans understand and envision their relationships with the natural world. Muir entered into the sublime when among the forests and mountains, for him the Sierras were a Range of Light.

Someone else who was born in Edinburgh in the 1830s was James Clerk Maxwell. He discovered that electric and magnetic fields travelled through space, in the form of waves, at a speed of 3.0 × 108 m/s. He argued that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation.

There are no records of Muir and Maxwell being seen together in the same room. This film is about being very close and very far at almost the same time, among other things.