The Inclined Galactic Light Pond
Bamiyan, Afghanistan
1968-1974

The Inclined Galactic Light Pond is a waking vision in 1968 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of a lake of waterlilies, inclined in air toward the low-angled sun - a disembodied lake or pond, floating slightly off the surface of the earth, shimmering in the autumnal light. This vision was in response to my despair over the slaughter then taking place in the region of Vietnam. While the vision was toward the sun in Cambridge, the lake was clearly located in distant Afghanistan. The injunction of the vision was: make this ethereal lake, there, in the high heart of Eurasia.

During the next six years, various processes and concepts surrounding the core technology of holography created the possibility for the reification of that vision in its location in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, in 1974, we placed twelve holographic plates of waterlilies and stars in the plane of our galaxy in six pits in the earth along a mile and a half axis sloping upward at a twelve degree angle from the floor of the Valley of Kushkak near Bamiyan. There, buried in the earth, are the fragments of the surface of a lake or pond in the plane of our galaxy at sunrise, during the whole year - a lake of waterlilies and stars linking the earth to its galactic context.