Tag: light25

By 1901 light vessels with powerful sound signals were scattered all over the Thames and its approaches. They were often named for the channels they were anchored on, and their names are like poetry when read together, more magical than cartographic. A year into the new century, Sunk, Kentish Knock and Swin Middle all had fog sirens, and there were fog trumpets on Tongue, Black Deep, Girdler, Galloper, Nore, Long Sand and Mouse, along with the Princes and Edinburgh Channels. Bells sounded at the sea reach and on piers all the way to Southend.

THE FOGHORN’S LAMENT, Jennifer Lucy Allan

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Lights of ships moved in the fairway — a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad

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Spring light with a touch of that winter hardness in it, that bright steel edge that says “I could turn on you at any moment. Do not relax. The second you decide it’s going to be warm from now on, I will cut you.”

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That winter light with just a little mist in it, the mist that reflects the light everywhere. The air glitters. That pearly newborn morning when winter feels like the start, not the end, and anything is possible.

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It took just my first few seconds outside LAX to understand why films happened around Los Angeles. The quality of the light is astonishing. And also uncanny, because, of course, I’d seen representations of that light on film and television for my whole life. To the point, now, where I will often, near-subconsciously, appraise a film on its ability to capture that strange light, that very Los Angeles light that happens nowhere else in my experience. That light that facilitates filming but is so very hard to properly reproduce on film. A century of trying to trap that light in a can.

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“The majority of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain: they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes. What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate stages. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals towards the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain – only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.”   

– Carlo Rovelli

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Sometimes this country feels like it has a lid on it. Sometimes it’s no wonder that we are among the cruelest people on Earth. The callousness of cold people who only see the light for a few weeks of the year should never be underestimated. They used to say that the sun will never set on the British Empire because God doesn’t trust the bastards in the dark. They never understood that we live in the dark and we were to be most distrusted when we came out into the sunlight. And decided to steal it.

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In a short and opaque text entitled “On the Black Universe,” the French thinker François Laruelle extends this idea of black as a cosmological principle. Neither an aesthetics of color nor a metaphor for knowledge and ignorance, black is, for Laruelle, inseparable from the conditions of thought and its limit. Separate from “the World” we make in our own, all-too-human image, and apart from “the Earth” which tolerates our habitation of its surface, there is “the Universe” – indifferent, opaque, black: “Black prior to light is the substance of the Universe, what escaped from the World before…

Eugene Thacker

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My daughter was born at night. The new maternity ward was several floors up in the hospital, because you really want pregnant women to have to climb stairs, and very little worked properly. But the midwives and staff were wondrous.

My daughter was born, and the midwife muttered, “they’re not supposed to be able to do that,” and my new-born daughter was trying to raise her head and look around to see where she’d landed.

Not long after, it was my turn to hold her for the first time. I took her to the window. From up there, we could see all the lights of the town at night. And I held her up to the light-splashed window, and introduced her to the world, and asked it to be kind to her.

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