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tags:shadowdarknesslight
Author’s father has Dementia:
his relationship with the dark had changed. There was a metaphorical element to this: the world reduced and blackened, darkness began to hound him, the inevitable closure of night over day. He also demonstrated a physical sensitivity to the dark. His illness manifested in an obsession - a bodily preoccupation with darkness.
The visual transition between sunlight and shade perplexed and disoriented him — but also transfixed him.
1660s Isaac Newton turned his attention to the nature of color, and to the question of what dark might be and whether we could see in it. In experiments of prisms in direct sunlight he concluded that darkness is the absence of light.
Jean-Paul Sartre, absence depended on a positive expectation in our minds: we can only note that Pierre is absent from the cafe, it doesn’t mean that he has been sucked off the face of the earth.
NOTE
Though darkness in itself is an absence, a nothing, what we have of it is a connection with our sensory perception. This is why we can say we have a felt experience of it and that it is something.
Normal perception - in the hear and now - is indeed a case of a controlled hallucination.
Biologically: Darkness is the absence of photons in the physical spectrum as perceived by the retina.
Accounts of children in the 19th century working in mines, they never got used to darkness. “I’m scared… sometimes I sing when I’ve light but not in the dark. I dare not sing there.”
In the dark the sense of self that sustained them above ground was slipping.
David Lewis said it is only our eyes that can tell us whether it is dark or not. We cannot tell by taste, or smell.
In 2007, Marietta Schwarz wore a blindfold for 22 days and gave an account of all she ‘saw’ while having her brain activity monitored by an MRI scanner and studied by Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. She saw things. The scan showed her brain was lighting up to display the exact same activity as it would during normal vision conditions. Our brains will simply not accept that they can’t see anything: they challenge the fact of darkness; Darkness forges a new sense of what is real.
Emily Dickinson - We Grow Accustomed to the Dark The Bravest — grope a little — And sometimes hit a Tree Directly in the Forehead — But as they learn to see —
Either the Darkness alters — Or something in the sight Adjusts itself to Midnight —
Etymologies
Pitch Dark: “Pitch” is the gummy, resinous residue from the distillation of wood tar or turpentine, commonly used as waterproofing for sailing ships. Pitch largely exists in metaphor. Dark: The old English deorc is probably related to the Old High German tarchanjan meaning to conceal or hide, a mystery, a danger. But the roots are unclear. Anglo-Saxon poets used another word, calling to mind not only a biological absence but the nothingness of being separated from god.
George Szirtes The idea of total darkness is not the same as total darkness. The idea of light is not the same as light. The words expressing the idea of light or total darkness are not ideas. The words may be imagined vanishing into total darkness. The word has begun to express an idea but most of it is lost in darkness. This sentence is not total darkness. This one is
Art
Kazmir Malevich Black Square on White Ground. He left his dark contextless. The absence or concealment of light and color, often of form too - in these black works reached toward the abstract nature of darkness, returning our ability to adequately imagine, describe or prescribe it. Blacks look blacker in contrast, hence the white.
Pierre Soulages - Beyond Black, the practice of outrenoir.
It’s amusing to note that 340 centuries ago, the age of the Chauvet cave, men were painting and haven’t stopped to do so for many centuries. For Lascaux, it’s 160 – 180. They kept on painting with black in the darkest places ever: caves. It is quite shocking to think that they were descending in total darkness to use black paint.
- My pictures are poetic objects capable of receiving what each person is ready to invest.
Cupid and Psyche
Beautiful princess Psyche, who, although much admired has never found love. When puzzled her father consult an oracle, he’s informed that despite her many advantages the only husband she can expect is a winged serpent who will terrorize the world with fire.
Such a prediction is cause for consternation. So Psyche’s family casts her out, abandoning her on a mountain to wait for her dragon-mate to claim her. This is a moment of darkness of death, as Psyche wears funeral robes. Transported to Zephyrus the wind, to a new beautiful meadow, Psyche falls into a a dark sleep waking into a magnificent house.
Here she stays awaiting night. That is when her lover comes to her, in the dark, unseen. She must never try to catch sight of him in the light, he decrees. Passion, belonging, love come with the dark and out of it. But Psyche cannot live without knowing. Encouraged by her jealous sisters she becomes anxious to understand if she is bedding a monster. So she lights a candle to catch a glimpse of her strange husband. When a drop of wax falls upon the sleeping Cupid, he starts up in anger and flies away.
In the story Psyche’s contentment, physical satisfaction and spiritual fulfillment are predicated on the dark.
When men in darknesse goe, they see a bush but take if for a theefe
After dark all cats are leopards
Bede - Early Middle ages
Bede writes of the passage of a sparrow from the dark to the dark, by way of a bright hall
It seems to me… that this present life of men on earth, in comparison to the time that is unknown to us, is as if you were sitting at your dinner tables with your noblemen warmed in the hall, and… one sparrow came from the outside and quickly flew through the hall and it went out through the other. Lo! During the time that he was inside, he was not touched by the storm of the winter. But that is the blink of an eye and the least amount of time, but he immediately comes from winter into winter again.
Waxing
Scattering of light. This scattering occurs millions of times before the beam even reaches your eyes: while the sunset might look clam, the light is spilling and bouncing all over the place in a frenetic end of day dance.
Words of Dusk Words
- crepuscular
- stygian
- tenebrous
- gloaming
- gloaming
- owl-leet
- cockshut
perhaps one reason we love sunsets so much is because they dazzle briefly, the dark of night and death. They offer the possibility momentarily that dark might not fall.
In Spanish folklore, dusk is when many [duende] emerge from their hiding places to trick or terrorize humans. In Flamenco duende is ‘the edge, a wound, drawing close to the places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression’
Dusk is of [ghosts]: Umbra of shadows , meaning shades or shadows. A word that is linked with dusk, by the early 15th century it had taken on a figurative meaning, which saw it refer to darkness in a broader, more metaphorical sense: darkness of the soul alongside the falling of night.
T.S Eliot “ghosts return / Gently at twilight”
Jun’chiro Tanizaki “Have you never felt a sort of fear.. a fear in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray.”
Dark adaptation - when you transition from levels of light briefly you cannot see anything, barely making out basic shapes. Hermann Aubert in 1865, first began to explore how the eye recovers its sensitivity after exposure to bright lights. Dark adaptation might seem to resolve in moments but in fact the process can last for up to an hour. This is because the our eyes break light down into molecules of a protein called rhodopsin in order to convert it into nerve impulses which the rods recognize. [Astronomy]
NOTE
In learning a bit about amateur astronomy, there’s talk of acclimating the eyes to night in order to perceive clearly.
On [moonight] : 400,000 times fainter than direct sunlight. It is juts reflected normal, old sunlight from the dusty surface of the moon. But it seems to have its own enigmatic qualities.
It owes itself to two celestial forces of light shining in both harmony and opposition. The huge pale disc of the moon offers us a light source we can gaze on, an object of contemplation in contrast to the unapproachable fire of the sun.
In his analysis of rainbows, Aristotle proposed that dark was note merely the absence of light but a complementary force that existed in its own right, light and dark acting like salt and pepper in our understanding of the world. He suggested that when dark and light mixed together that color was produced, different doses of each creating the spectrum of the rainbow. [Supercede]d by Newton’s prism studies. shadow
Le Corbusier states, “the history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.” Architecture can be design to retain darkness. to create changes in mood or seclusion such as the medieval cloisters as an area of study with a different feel than the rest of the monastery.
Louis Kahn states “Greek architecture taught me that the column is where light is not and the space where light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light… that is the marvel of the artist.”
“In darkness, where the information is reduced, details can only be grasped one at a time in a process analogous to touch, in the darkness the eye picks up small pieces of information; a glint of light on a polished surface, the shadow of an outline. ”
The Jewish Torah explains how the world emerged from ‘the unformed and void’ with darkness over the surface of the deep’ when God separated light from dark. Similarly in Christian Genesis, the separation of light from dark begins to process of coming into being; light becomes a symbol and embodiment of God, and dark becomes a state of being excluded from God.
Claude-Nicholas Le Cat: “shadows were ‘Holes’ in light”
If you look closely at real shadows on snow, especially when the sun is low, you’ll see that their darkness is a think of unexpected color. They very well and truly blue, like the blue of a norwegian winter. This is caused by the the scattering of light particles allowing shorter rays of light to reach the eyes. The same effect, [Rayleigh scattering] - accounts for the fact that the sky appears blue on a clear day. Without the blue sky, shadows would seem eerily black, like fragments of pure darkness. When astronauts landed on the moon, the these dark shadows took them by surprise, upsetting visual cues and making it difficult for the mind to grasp this bewildering new environment.
Tanizaki “Were it not for shadow, there would be no beauty.”
Carl Sanburg - “no moon-talk at all now, only dark listening to dark.”