Have you seen the light?

Sunlight: Robert Delauney

For sunlight to be photographed or painted it must be photographed or painted indirectly, through its effect on something. The French artist Robert Delauney had a studio in the living room of his home. He put shutters over the window to transform it into a darkroom during the day. Into the shutter he drilled a small hole. Now he was ready to study sunlight. He had prepared his canvas and ground his own colours. A tiny ray of light filtered into the room. He began to paint it, studying it, analysing its form, colours, components. He was attempting to study pure light, solar light. He had divested art of subject matter. Light was his subject. Slowly, after weeks, months, he enlarged the hole, little by little. Then he would paint the play of light on a transparent material. His canvases came to look like jewel cases and, in fact, he began to grind precious stones for the colours he used. Eventually the hole became so wide that it was no longer practical. He opened the shutters and the world of light flowed in. From the play of light in a sunbeam he began painting the explosion of light all over Paris.

William Burroughs is an author I very much admire, but that doesn't hinder my realisation that every now and again he talks shit in a very pontifical manner. Burroughs was at heart a puritan but that is a subject for another time. He once used the expression, ‘as banal as sunlight’. I find nothing banal in sunlight. Many artists have turned from the object which the light has delineated to the light itself. Edward Hopper once said that he believed there was something inhuman about himself. Rather than paint pictures of people grimacing and gesticulating, as he put it, he would rather paint sunlight on a wall, something he did very often. In fact, one of my favourite paintings of Hopper's is of an empty room with sunlight pouring in an open door. It is called Rooms by the Sea. Originally he had called it The Stepping Off Point. He was said to have changed the title because he was told it was suggestive of suicide. Hopper was prone to bleak moods and melancholy. Hopper was observer, not a participant. He reminds me of the Danish artist Wilhelm Hammershoi, another quiet observer. Hammershoi liked to paint people from behind or with their faces lowered, hidden in shade. This is another trait of Hopper's. Hopper, like de Chirico, loved views of low sunlight on buildings and the shadows they cast and a number of Hopper’s paintings remind me of de Chirico – the buildings, the street views, the low sunlight and long shadows. 

The Stepping Off Point - Hopper

            J.M.W Turner was also fascinated by sunlight until eventually his paintings became almost abstract in their play of light in different atmospheric conditions. One of his paintings was called Study of Sunlight. Others were The Sun Reflected on the Sea and Sun Rising Through Vapour.  He once said, ‘The Sun is God’  and he was a devotee of staring at the sun directly with the naked eye, which, in his time, was reputed to relax the eyes. It Turner’s case it resulted in what is known as ‘glassblower’s cataract’. Another side-effect of staring at the sun is that it would have limited his perception of the colour yellow, causing him to over-use the colour in order for him to see it as clearly as he once did. A great many of his paintings have yellow in them, lots of yellow, and for a time he was called the ‘Yellow Dwarf’. There is a cartoon of a very small Turner standing before a canvas about to paint with a large dripping mop in his hand and a bucket labelled Yellow. Turner’s fascination with the sun itself, rather than what it illuminated, occurred at the same time of William Herschel’s lecture at the Royal Society in which he argued that the sun was at the centre of the solar system, a ‘physical entity’ with ‘openings, shallows, ridges, nodules, corrugations, indentations and pores’. Herschel’s lecture caused a sensation. Not long afterwards Turner began to paint solid suns, not just impressions of bright, circular, radiating light, but what Herschel called a ‘solid globe of unignited matter’.

A lot of yellow by Turner.

These days, of course, light illuminates in more than one way. It is used to convey information. Light is any electromagnetic wave across the whole EM spectrum and includes visible light, radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. All of these things are light waves to a physicist. Each of them has a different wavelength and frequency (or colour), but they're all electromagnetic waves. A fibre-optic cable is a wire containing transparent materials that carry light. The outside of the cable contains a material that will reflect the light, keeping it moving along the length of the cable. Digital information is sent through these cables using light pulses. A strong pulse of light indicates a one, and no pulse indicates a zero. Through rapid changes in the light, you can send highly complex signals down the cable. These are most often used either for high speed internet connections, or for sending sound signals to home-entertainment systems. Usually, infrared signals are sent along these fibre optic cables since these kinds of waves spread out the least and, thereby, lose the least amount of data during transmission. Infrared can also be used without a cable. The most common everyday example of this is a remote control.

If you shatter a holographic image every piece, no matter how small, contains enough information to recreate the entire image, though with less information as the pieces get smaller. A holographic image is a standing wave pattern, or interference pattern, of light waves. In physics, of course, light is characterised as being both a particle and a wave. It is quantized into small energy packets called photons that travel through space at… the speed of light. 186,282 miles per second. That seems pretty fast but on the scale of the universe it’s slow. If the sun were suddenly to disappear, we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes, which is the length of time it takes for sunlight to reach us. A light we see from a galaxy ten million light-years away is ten million years old. The cosmic field of light is really an asynchronous flow of electromagnetic waves converging at every point to create standing wave patterns. That means, when you look up at the night sky you are looking at a field of light where everything which appears  to your eyes at that precise moment of your time is a collage of light in which every point began its journey at a different time from every other point. It is like being in a gallery which has paintings of many different periods, they might have been painted at any time within the past five hundred years but they are all appearing to you now in your present time. The photons that are emitted from every source (whether as radiation from stars, or as reflection from planets) are carrying information about the source itself – that is, its location in space and time, its colours and temperatures, its atomic and molecular composition, its speed of rotation and direction of movement. The light field is a field of information. Light carries information in its photons. David Bohm said there is meaning at every level of existence, from the quantum to the macrocosmic. ‘From this perspective,’ said Bohm, ‘the particle [i.e. electron] would seem to be gathering information about its environment and responding according to the meaning of the information.'

Have you seen the light?

Philip K. Dick believed that light carried information, that is, it literally carried information. Not that 'it was like' a signal but 'it was' a signal being sent in the form of light with a message to be received. He wasn't the only receiver. Everyone, he believed, was a potential receiver, much as any TV might potentially receive any signal. But whether or not the signal was picked up depended upon the sensitivity of the receiver and also whether the receiver tuned in or dismissed the signal as something they did not want to receive, or was not worth receiving. In this way, Dick believed he was receiving his stories, which was why his stories often related to future happenings. For instance, in Flow My Tears Dick wrote a 19-year-old girl called Kathy. As he describes her; 'She is a girl of the gutter... living a quasi-illegal existence.' The year after the book was published, he met a girl of the same age, living the same existence, 'living a life so similar to that of the girl in the novel as to frighten me... Her name - Kathy.' Dick has a theory for such things which relates to the concept of tachyons. Tachyons are theorised to be particles of cosmic origin which fly faster than light and consequently in a reversed time direction. Arthur Koestler, from whom Dick picked up the notion, speculates that they would 'carry information from the future into our present, as light and X-rays from distant galaxies carry information from the remote past into our now and here. In the light of these developments, we can no longer exclude on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive phenomena.' (Harper's, July 1974)

Dick believed this was nothing new. What was new was having a scientific framework with which to describe it. Prior to the tachyon theory the reception of these messages would have suggested a mystical contact with a transmundane or alien god who can communicate in the form of a ray of light. The blinding light of the epiphany which Saul received on the road to Damascus, for instance. The moment of illumination when the long-sought solution to a problem is suddenly revealed. We can call it many things; ESP, precognition, instinctual awareness, a message from the subconscious - which, as Dick says, suggests the question; What is the subconscious? Without the scientific framework to describe the experience he would have had to declare, 'God has shown me!' Considering the distance these units of information travel, their velocity, the contamination and signal-loss that might be experienced, it is inevitable, thought Dick, that much information is lost or misinterpreted, like the mistyping of a message when one is in a hurry or not paying complete attention to what is being transcribed. Not everyone is an adept at transduction as is a mystic or a saint.

Dick was not the only one who believed he was receiving messages or that he was writing future events. In what many people took as a typical Dalinian mystification, Salvador Dali said the points of his moustache were antennae receiving cosmic messages which inspired his painting. The neglected Arthur Machen said many of his stories contained elements which 'became real' in the future. In his autobiography he notes that after writing Three Imposters he met with people exactly like the characters he had written who offered him advice. William Burroughs believed that the purpose of a writer was to write the future and that he also was a vehicle for messages received. When Norman Mailer said of Burroughs that he was possessed of genius, Burroughs said Mailer had used the correct terminology - not that he 'was' a genius, but that he was 'possessed' by genius which might come and go as it wished. Burroughs believed that all artists had to leave themselves open to influences and that such openness was dangerous because you never knew exactly what you might be letting in. All artists, of whatever variety, for Burroughs, were vehicles of such decoding, some better at it than others. In his short essay on Hemingway, Burroughs notes that 'Hemingway wrote his life and death so closely that he had to be stopped before he found out what he was doing and wrote about that.... He who writes death as the pilot of a small plane in Africa should beware of small planes in Africa, especially in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. But it was written and he stepped right into his own writing. The brain damage he sustained... led to a hopeless depression and eventually his suicide.'

Dick came to wonder if he wasn't actually living in one of his own stories, or that by writing about his environment, his reality, he was changing it as the physicist changes the quantum event by attempting to measure it. Burroughs had a similar belief that what we posit onto the universe is reflected back to us, this proving its reality, that is, confirming our interpretation. But we put it there in the first place. Therefore, by writing it, by believing it, by thinking it, we create it - the 'creative observer' is a term frequently used by Robert Anton Wilson. Dick worried that speculation of this sort might lead to solipsism.

Dick asked the question, 'What is our subconscious?' For Jung, there was the individual unconscious consisting of unconscious events particular to the individual and relating to their lifetime, and the collective unconscious, an unconscious shared by the race and formed by many millennia of accumulated racial experience. An individual or a people might become energised by archetypes of the collective unconscious, literally receiving information from it which leads to action. Jung's notion is similar to Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. For Chardin there is the geo-sphere, the bio-sphere and the noosphere. The noosphere might be described as the realm of spirit or thought, not of collective unconsciousness but of collective consciousness. It is this greater consciousness that Chardin believes to be the evolutionary goal of humans. Rather than tachyons carrying information from great distances, might it not be that the noosphere, the collective unconscious, the morphic field, whatever you might wish to call it, is a field of information all around us, something capable of being accessed by humans and other animals, the information received being relative to the species and the abilities of that species? What of the near- death experience of the tunnel of light? When the individual dies, might it be akin to an uploading of their individual experience to the information field, to be utilized by future generations? Dick has suggested things a lot stranger. If this information field functions at the quantum level then it might be 'out of time', not subject to sequential laws as we experience them. Dick wrote: 'I feel I have been a lot of different people. Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books.' This reminds me of Nietzsche, who said, 'I am all the names in history.'

It's cosmic, man.

'I must conclude,' said Dick, 'that my or perhaps even our collective environment is only a pseudo-environment.... Maybe getting other people to read my writing I change reality by their reading it and expecting it to be like my books.' Anomalies were something Dick used in Ubik to prove to his characters their environment was not real. He then discovered the same anomalies happening to him in real life. He was in good company there. Charles Fort was a man also interested in anomalies, the anomalies that science attempts to ignore but which will not go away. There is a logical possibility that we are characters in the pseudo-environment of a computer simulation or something similar. Perhaps we are characters within a simulation, within a simulation, within... etc. Ad infinitum.  There is though, always the possibility that the beams of light which Dick experienced were repeated transient ischemic attacks, or temporary strokes. It was a stroke that finally killed him. If it was a series of small strokes, the changes to his personality suggest that the neural circuitry associated with his conscious mind was reconfigured, something which is often witnessed in a particular type of stroke when, for instance, an individual with no prior appreciation of art suddenly because obsessed with painting, taking art lessons, visiting galleries, collecting a library of art books. The same has happened with food, people never before cooking anything other than a tin of beans suddenly becoming fascinated by cooking to the point of mortgaging their homes to own restaurants. The literature on such changes is prolific. My father had a stroke which was relatively minor. It had a curious side-effect though, in that he suddenly found everything hilariously funny. One of the best laughs I have ever had in my life was when I sat beside his sick bed at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. Neither of us could say a word without the other killing themselves laughing. We got some very strange looks from the other patients and their visitors. The opposite, though, is also true. Another man in another room found everything intensely sad and upsetting. His daughter appeared one evening and said, 'I've brought you the paper.' He began bawling his eyes out. The theologian Rudolph Otto once said, 'Do we not rather experience ourselves than command ourselves?' Jean Cocteau is reported to have said on awakening every morning; 'There is nothing you can do about it: submit...' I submit and experience myself.

A friend of mine had a recipe for what he claimed was the perfect dry martini. I suspect he stole the recipe from Louis Bunuel. His recipe included sunlight. Ice would be placed in a frozen glass, four drops of Angostura Bitters would be added, a splash of Vermouth and then the gin. The crucial part was the gin. First it had to be poured separately into a glass and then the glass placed in direct sunlight in order that the sun’s rays should pass through the gin. Only then was the gin added to the main glass. Was there any reason for this? Of course, he said. The sunlight purifies the gin, the miniscule doses of radiation killing off certain toxins in the alcohol which cause the maudlin melancholy often associated with gin drinking.

I never tried his recipe. I don’t like gin.

The same friend had another theory regarding a famous painting by Vermeer. The painting was once called Woman Weighing Gold until it was realised that the balance in her hand is empty. Then the name was changed to Woman Holding Balance, or Woman Testing Balance. Not everyone agrees the balance is empty. Some believe it shows the woman weighing pearls against gold – except my friend, who believes that the scales are neither empty nor is she weighing any precious materials. Or, rather, she is weighing a precious material of a different sort. I have come around to his way of thinking. Find the best reproduction of the painting you can. Get yourself a magnifying glass. Look at the scales. There appears to be nothing on them. But there is something on them. Two areas, one on each plate of the scales, has a portion of white paint. It was once thought that these might be pearls – and some still claim they are - until cleaning of the painting revealed them to be two areas highlighted by the sun entering the room from the upper left. My friend was of the opinion that the woman is weighing sunlight. The painting behind the woman was once so dark as to be barely discernible but the same cleaning which revealed the pearls of light also revealed the image. It is a Last Judgement. Some critics took this to be a comment on the vanity of the worldly-goods on the table before the woman; the gold, silver, pearl, bracelets, bangles, chains; ‘… everything that mortal man tries to hold on to.’ But the woman is perfectly serene. There is no indication of decay, death, dissolution. She has a calm equanimity. She is - why not - well-balanced. The Last Judgement also indicates something more than apocalyptic devastation. There is a famous Dutch painting by a predecessor of Vermeer’s, Rogier van der Weyden. It is a Last Judgement which focuses on St. Michael, weighing souls. He stands with a balance in his hand and his fingers raised delicately, as though he were sipping tea, just like the woman in the Vermeer. Souls have often been associated with light – the beam of light which departs the recently deceased being their soul ascending to heaven, and also with the luminous angels. But my friend didn’t believe the light on the scales represented any of these things. The light represented light. It was as precious to Vermeer, and any painter, as the materials on the table. It was something so common as to be taken for granted but which, it goes without saying, is absolutely essential. Let there be light. Light is the condition of life. Without light no life.

Vermeer was also reliant on the particular characteristics of light for the quality of his work, which Dali called hand-painted photographs. This wasn’t just Dali pointing out the photographic verisimilitude of Vermeer’s work. He was indicating the process by which Vermeer’s painting were created. It is generally accepted now by art historians that Vermeer used a camera obscura. The camera obscura functions on the same principle as a camera and they have been popular with painters since the later part of the 16^th century. A natural optical-phenomena occurs when a small hole is made on a screen splitting a room in two, one side of which is completely dark. The image from the lit side of the room is then reproduced in the dark wall of the opposite room, upside down. The artists can then trace the image perfectly onto canvas or paper. A hand-painted photograph. I am certain Dali used the same principle by projecting photographs onto canvas and then painting them. I once heard someone call this ‘cheating’ but artists have always made use of whatever technology is available. It is not the technique that matters but the conception of the image. And speaking of conception, in various obscure branches of Catholic theology it was once stated that Mary’s virgin birth was facilitated by a beam of light. She was, quite literally, impregnated by a divine light. There are a lot of odd theories on the go these days and one of them claims that Mary’s impregnation by a beam of light indicates that she was made pregnant by aliens who routinely interfere in human affairs to guide the human race to its appointed destiny, and one of their methods is to introduce great men and women into the gene-pool every now and again, such as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and others of a less religious nature such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. According to Philip K. Dick's theory, they wouldn't have to go to the trouble of interfering with the gene-pool or introducing alien-human hybrids. They would just have to find a suitable receptacle for their light signals - Eureka! 

So much for the banality of sunlight.