It is hard to explain the light here

earnest and aerobic light,
not the complacent kind.
It gets fired up by the ocean, and believes
in its own ability to reinvent

“It is hard to explain the light here,
earnest and aerobic light,
not the complacent kind.
It gets fired up by the ocean, and believes
in its own ability to reinvent
the vapid into the vatic,
the sore, serene,
torpor to fever,
temblor and squall to static.

I know you have light in other places.
I have lived in other places
and found curb to polestar endearing.
What can I say? Everywhere
dawn wears its mantle of emblem,
cuing insomniac, paperboy, baker.
Here in these fringe towns
yolked by Coast Highway and
the old mission route, El Camino Real,

we are awaken neither more beautiful
nor more true, but the light
brings the possible on particle,
seducing the muscles and liquids of your eye.
The possible weights little, tastes
like coriander or thyme,
and resembles its sister, the probable,
whose features are more sharply defined,
whose finest hour is dusk.”
—Hédi Kaddour, “Divided,” from The Paris Review 159, Fall 2001

Light Constant

Last years flowers sit in a mason jar by the desk side. A drop of sunshine falls on the elegant decay and fractures into tiny fragments. For a brief moment in time bits of light get caught between the frail stems and the brittle petals. Everything is subsumed by this burst of light and matter.

It is 1988. Miquel Barceló is in Africa. It is his first trip. In his studio in Mali he is studying light. He is drawing shadows. “The light in the desert is so intense that the things disappear, and the shadows are more intense than the things themselves…What isn’t has more intensity that what is. Because in Africa light isn’t colour. Light is much more stronger than colour. Colour is almost corroded by the light.”* In the night he paints the river. Scratching the paper to obtain the effect of light reflecting from the water. The foam still white in the thick African night.

Barceló is concerned with the passage of time.  The tomatoes, the melon, the skulls, the river, his friends– time spares no one. Each is captured in a state of inevitable transformation. In his studio back home flowers placed in a jar are slowly decomposing over time and the consummate artist doesn’t miss a thing.  Back in Africa the elephants herd is slowly moving towards the river while the skulls in the studio, with their motionless eyes, wait for the sun to go down.

Afterword: Einstein's theory of relativity states time and space aren't as constant as they appear. The only true constant is the speed of light. Time can seem to run faster or slower depending on how high you are, and how fast you are travelling. That's bad news for those who own a penthouse.

*‘The earthly cycles’ by Enrique Juncosa (An essay from Miquel Barceló: works on paper 1979-1999).

You can see Miquel Barceló's art at his fan site here. To see his paintings from Mali click the year 1988 and scroll down the page.

In Which Everything is Illuminated

On looking through the camera I often recollect the moment when I really looked at Monet’s paintings for the first time.

If it must be told, it was a dinner, in some year when I was barely in my twenties. The main attractions of the evening were mutton and beer. Being vegetarian and a borderline teetotaler my mind gladly drifted to other things. As it is the mind needs very little provocation to do so. Framed on the wall next to the entrance to the kitchen was a photocopy of one of Monet's gardens. The painting shall remain unnamed to protect the identity of all those concerned. My eyes fell upon it. Thankfully I was not under the influence.

In that unforgettable instant I had an epiphany and everything was illuminated to me. Objects appear as they are because of how light falls on them. As the nature of light in Delhi, where everything seems to exist behind a thin layer of dust, is miles apart from that of light in the Pacific Northwest, where the clouds reflect as much as they absorb, this fact gets reinforced constantly. More so when taking photographs. So one starts to read light all over again. And, in my case, fall in love with a entirely different color palette. 

However, just because something isn’t illuminated, it does not mean it is not there. As Goethe observed: Where there is much light, the shadow is deep. But more importantly if the eye does not want to see it, neither light nor glasses will help. *  Thus light can take us only this far and no further.

*German proverb