Mathieu Amalric in COSMOPOLIS:
“They put me in black hole until I was screaming for my eyes.”
Comments closedTag: light25
There are plans, I have read, to send humans to the south pole of the moon. That’s where the water is, and it presents a more stable communication position with Earth. The new issue it presents to human exoplanetary habitation is to do with light.
At the South Pole, the sun never rises more than seven degrees off the horizon. That means the shadows are long and deep black, and the sun will always be in people’s eyes. Moving around on the moon will mean moving from pitch black to bright white in a single step, and human eyes can’t adapt to that.
Everyone’s going to be blind on the moon.
Comments closed“Our art is one of being bedazzled by truth: The light cast on the recoiling, contorted face is true, and nothing else is.”
– Franz Kafka
I have two very early memories.
I remember being held in front of a little black and white television set and my mother saying, watch this, remember this, this is history, this is. And it was the Apollo 11 landing, Armstrong’s first foot on the moon. And the light was coarse white lines scratched into the black. I can summon fragments of that memory even now. The nature of the light.
And then, I was in some kind of toy car or cart, out behind my nan and grandad’s house, in the snow. And I was stuck. In my memory, everything has the colour of a faded Polaroid. The light was grey and blue, and the snow was white and black, and I couldn’t move, and there was no-one else around. May as well have been on the moon. Everything feels like forever when you’re tiny. Trapped forever in old light and black and white.
Comments closedI remember walking to school as a kid, in thin early morning light. There was mist. And I saw a little girl running down the path that divided the end of the street from the woodland, crying. The path twisted at the end a touch before it joined the road. She was crying, mummy, I can’t see you. Because that little twist meant you couldn’t see straight down the path to the road, and it was misty, and for some endless cold moment she couldn’t see her mother and her sibling as they moved ahead of her. The little girl was running for her life, for her safety and for everything she’d ever known. Mummy, I can’t see you. I can’t see you.
More than forty years later, I still think about that. I remember stopping and waiting to be sure that she reached the road and saw her mother before walking on to school. And, now, I think about that because my vision is getting a little misted with age, a little more like thin early morning light than noon light, and it’s more than forty years later, and I wonder when the day will come that I’m crying that I can’t see you.
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