Meter & Light: Night
Fran Magazine: Issue #153 (a guest post by Walter Ancarrow)
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Special issue
It’s been a minute! Hi and hello. I have more updates planned in the coming weeks, but I wanted to hand this week’s magazine over to Walter Ancarrow, who longtime readers may remember I interviewed about his poetry collection Etymologies. Walter reached out to me about writing about Zain Alam’s Meter & Light: Night, an installation currently playing at The Shed. We also both happen to know Zain, but that is besides the point. What Walter sent me is beautiful and entrancing, and singular to his experience of his exhibit. Please enjoy Walter’s writing below.
On Zain Alam’s Meter & Light: Night
The adhan is annoying, nourishing, numinous, intimate, alien, familiar, cathartic, tiresome, piercing, disorienting, heartening, home-orientating. It is the unintended soundtrack to sex, heartbreak, flicking a crumb off a friend’s beard, curtains moving in the breeze, walking lonely with no other companion, cruising the corniche, wandering down Bani al-Abbas Street under the acacia trees beside your boyfriend with an ice cream in each hand. It is all that a human voice crying out for community could be.
The adhan is also spatial. It situates itself in a specific physical space, the space where one can hear the adhan, whether this be public like the markets of Alexandria or Atlantic Avenue, or private, like a bedside radio or a memory. These types of space are somewhat easy to locate: you need only to listen. But the adhan also situates itself within a hazier, intangible space, and that is the broader community of Muslims that it calls together. Whether or not any actually do come together, or agree about anything, or engage in any form of communal prayer is immaterial. It is literally immaterial. Its immateriality is why this second type of space is harder to locate but also why it is the longer lasting.
All of these ideas have been going through my head lately as I work on a series of poems based on the ways one actually hears the adhan, because although there is a set of rules in how it should be called, and while straying too far from these rules has traditionally been considered bid’ah, in reality it always sounds different due to the very spatiality of it. I owe Zain Alam’s I Am Sounding a Sacred Space (2023), which does with the adhan what Alvin Lucier did with his voice in I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), for helping me think through some knotty compositional problems I was having when writing these poems.
This more recent work of Alam’s, Meter & Light: Night — an audio-visual installation now on show at The Shed as part of Open Call: Portals — answers, or rather opens the possibility of answering, how one might locate the immaterial. One might do so through the work of patterning. A pattern has no beginning or end, or if it does this is merely the limit of its physical appearance, not its essence. It is everywhere the same and everywhere different. And while I can isolate sections of the pattern and from the sections think I understand how they repeat, never can I say I’ve captured the pattern, for the pattern is the whole thing coming together and the whole thing is what eludes me. Yet the pattern helps point me to that immaterial space.1 The adhan is a pattern. The geometric motifs of carpets and tiles are patterns. Tradition is pattern. Time is a pattern and it is the pattern Meter & Light: Night is most interested in tracing.
Accompanied by a score that begins with the adhan, a series of images repeat themselves on screen: the counting of dhikr on fingers and beads, a Quran resting on a lap, lights circling a sleeping body, a shrouded figure swaying back and forth like a metronome. The repetition of these movements, like the repetition of days or a day’s repetitions of prayer, creates a sense of time that allows the pattern to call forth from the past an experience of the present.
The video loops. One could sit in this darkened room forever, feeling time by watching it pass. But like all personal illumination, at some point the lights do have to come on. What I think I’ve learned from patterning is that in the moment and the moment-between, in the iteration and the after-iteration, which is also the iteration-anticipated, in daily rituals that are nothing themselves and add up to nothing itself, because still nothing compared to the whole in which they are part — in these one locates the immaterial. Everywhere around us there is only specifics; patterning is faith in the existence of the general.
Walter Ancarrow is the author of Etymologies and a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry.
The mihrab is an anti-pattern—in that it does not repeat and works through negation, not addition—that nevertheless complements the work of patterning. You must look into the sculpted void and have trust that you are facing, alongside everyone else, in the direction of what can’t be seen.