Splash No. 156 - A Theory of Light

A Theory of Light

I was re-reading my favorite book, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill recently, and stumbled upon this passage:

“We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic — the poets, the mystics, the explorers — were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.”

Ever since, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this sort of lightness in life: in my head, this radiating light is the childlike ability to see the beauty and the joy and the hope and the excitement and interest that seemed to inevitably fade away for what seems like mostly everyone. It doesn’t seem to be anyone’s fault, but a by-product of the ways we are pushed to lead our lives. I’ve personally witnessed the darkening in people in my life and in myself, seasons when gray clouds were inescapable. And yet, now I feel like I’ve found more of the light than I had since I was much younger. So maybe this process isn’t as linear as the book says, and isn’t fixed — perhaps there are ways to avoid or undo the darkening of spirit.

Offill might be onto something — perhaps the best path is to become the mystic or the poet or the explorer that the novel describes. I’m not the biggest traveler, so mystic and poet both seem like perfectly viable options. Google tells me that a mystic is “a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect.” Meanwhile, poets are artists who find new ways of seeing their world and their experience and find ways to commit it to paper or pixels. And as someone interested in both, poet-mystic seems like the perfect aspiration for me. 

As a part of my journey, I’ve started organizing my materials: stacks of poetry books to surround the incense I already had, notebooks dug up and pens re-discovered. There’s comfort in the objects, like their sheer presence will give me insight through osmosis alone. And when it doesn’t, I reach for my books to remind me of all the ways of looking at the world. Nabila Lovelace explained the process of writing poetry as “a practice of unflinching observation, radical seeing, and listening to the people and world around me.” It comes across, as she can capture time and her family through the Alabama landscape, and a poet can capture his family and upbringing through a few short lines describing what heaven would look like for Mexicans, while another can smash together his favorite singer and favorite movie to reflect on the black experience. And in each poem feels mystical in its own way — contemplation and self-surrender to the fact that the world is so much more beautiful and complex and overwhelming than the darkness lets us see. There’s unity in the shared awe that everyone has experienced at some point, which the child’s light finds in everything, and a worn thirty-one-year-old may struggle to make out.

I’m dedicated to my search for the light, for the awe, for the unity that always surrounds us but can be hard to see. I don’t know where to look but I have good guides by my side, bound in paper and resonating in my headphones and popping up in my email. I’ll listen to the poets and the mystics, and all of the people who let the light shine, sometimes without knowing it or realizing it. There’s poetry in the way the wind blew my hat into the street, in the rollerbladers skating at sunset, in the routines of the nannies at the park. There’s mysticism in the joyous playing dogs, in the bus driver’s route, in the sea of wildflowers. There’s light in places that I can’t even see and take and radiate. Not yet. But I know it’s there, and I know I must reach towards it with all my will so I can bring it into myself and reflect it out: the moon to the sun surrounding me.

And if and when I falter on my journey, my battle against the creeping darkness, I will remember what poet and mystic Kahlil Gibran said, “You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good, You are only loitering and sluggard. Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.” Even as the darkness inevitably draws across my body and my heart, I shall never be turned dark — simply waiting to be alight, once again.

Drops of the Week
 

• ALBUM - Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast - new Japanese Breakfast album! 80s vibes! fun stuff!

• ARTICLE - "Robin Wall Kimmerer: 'People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how'" by James Yeh - really intriguing interview with writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. Great quote:

  • “It’s as if people remember in some kind of early, ancestral place within them. They’re remembering what it might be like to live somewhere you felt companionship with the living world, not estrangement."

• BOOK - Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez - great poetry collection by an awesome poet! This collection includes the aforementioned Mexican Heaven poems, which are all hilarious. I also went to a workshop he hosted, which was really fun and taught new ways to think about poetry.

With each day, we can move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
 

Donate to Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta Mutual Aid Networks

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Brightly,
Nikhil