There is a strain of thought in me, related to time, and memory, which is very focused on Light.
As I come up on my first half century, my dreams are ever-more focused on the quality of light. Its nature, its intensity, its placement, its source(s). Light undergirds all things. Without it, there is nothing; even night is defined by it. On a moonless night there is starlight to fall back on.
Memory is comprised of recorded, experienced, light. We are predominantly visual creatures, humans, for a reason, and that reason is how our brain has evolved-- to record, to trap, to encode, the vibrations and waves and phenomena related to the behaviour of light. The complexity of our brains, to say nothing of human psychology, has been a staged developmental response in direct proportion to our experience of light. In previous centuries, there was less of it, and it was less within our control. Today we exist in an era of near-limitless light, our devices provide a veritable plague of it, such that our sleep patterns are altering-- again! Light pollutes our lives when our eyes are closed. Doctors specialize in "light therapy", essaying how light is recognized as integral, how types & bandwidths of it are even nutritional, to our psychological health.
Perhaps because I am older... perhaps nothing, it's certain. Being older, I am less tuned to specific devices & their use. Light has valence. I prefer a laptop with a dimmed screen. I prefer a flip-phone without a touchscreen. I prefer to experience it as completely as possible, eschewing sunglasses in direct daylight. I categorize the types of light generated within dreams. And, of course, when it comes to my art, capturing the phenomena of light, how it behaves (or how I imagine it behaves) is central to my mark-making. It's the impetus behind everything.
There is something delicious in waking, trundling to the toilet, flipping the switch, and being dazzled for perhaps a minute, then returning to darkness; as my eyes re-adjust, phosphene grains ripple their fractal arms, yellow shifting to red to green to blue in a dance of fireflies, all reflected light leaving the eye at escape velocities so far beyond calculation it dazzles the mind.
The last time I visited my mother, she gave me her 1969 edition of 'Konx Om Pax' by Crowley. Green cover, faintly purple lettering. 'Lessons In Light', or 'Light In Extension' if you listened to MacGregor Mathers. Barmy book, full of riddles, bad poetry, and hacky imitations of writing styles popular at the turn of the 20th century. I will say this for it-- and the witchy phase of my teens & twenties --it aligned with my tendency to view physics as The Undergirding Mystery Behind Everything. To me, then, the phenomena of light and its behavior, ever-elusive, ever-challenging, particluate or waveform... Light is magic.
There are many popular writers (qua Warren Ellis, cursed be his name, who honestly just filched a filched notion from Alan Moore) who fuck with the notion that Light Is Information, and said "information"-- its valence --is the base unit of reality. I recall how, in the late 90s, some canny labcoats shot a laser through a chamber of gas, then flash-froze the gas and turned off the laser. When the gas thawed, the frozen (trapped!!!) bit of sent information Unstuck Itself and passed on to the receiver. We froze light.
Fuck me if I can remember the names of the scientists or even what continent this experiment was conducted on. I could goog it but cheating does nothing for developing memory. At any rate. Light is goddamned magic. I don't believe in magic, as such, anymore. But I believe in Light. And I believe Light is anywhere we look for it. It's a miracle how it clings to human brains. An absolute marvel, and so completely taken for granted I have to write a dumb li'l blog post about it.
Turning my words into light and sending them forth.
Light is the stuff dreams are made of. Expressions of light accomplished in a light-tight box, little quantum experiments exploding into imagery, in the midst of absolute night. What was it that Crowley said, about our divinity? I'm not gonna fuck with his gendered imagery. But the Spark he's spoken of, and the Holy Guardian Angel you talk to through meditation, and all that shit? I dunno. I'm just saying there's something to all that mumbo-jumbo that I have personally experienced... And, I dunno, it's the thing that shapes how I think as much as I shape it.
I was an autodidact with PTSD when I first discovered poetry for myself, and it was a total stranger, some redheaded lady at a frozen yogurt store on the town square of Donkey Crotch, Alabama, where Jacksonville High School, no, not the one in Florida, & Jacksonville University, no, not the one in Florida, are located. She looked me over and for no reason recommended I read Arthur Rimbaud.
I had a runaway, inchoate imaginative facility, as a child, so Rimbaud had the worst possible effect on me because I went directly to the Beats: Burroughs, and Kerouac, and Ginsberg, and Kesey, and Corso-- and in the center of the chaotic patois that developed afterward, was my mind, trying to figure out how to start or end a sentence without throwing up. I spent a long time wring absolute dogshit, from handwritten to manually typed on manual typewriters to crt screens to the internet and beyond, and all of it's banal, even now. Because I learned to think through poetry, in reverse of how one should interact with language, and I wonder if it created (or, perhaps worse, made concrete) certain psychological tendencies. Chief among them was a craving for significance that would be borne out by synchronicity to confirm personal prophecies-- all which is diarrhea of the first water, to use a jeweler's term for strictly ironical and/or comical reasons.
See, this is why I don't do stand-up.
Anyway. I already hit you with the actual hard-won wisdom at the end of this blog-tunnel: dreams are quite literally light & information, proof you are alive, and capable of dreaming, deeply, in the still waters of self. Light IS the lesson.
