For caregivers, light is an energy cultivated for curing. Managed channels of electricity enable doctors to diagnose with imaging and to treat with lasers.
The greater Light of Healing beyond curing preceded and supersedes all of that. Scientists may have sought to diminish its spiritual aspects. But they are powerless to diminish its meaning in the broad arc of human existence.
A contemporary writer whose work has captured my spirit is Maria Popova. Her book, Figurings, is transformative. Her gifts continue through her weekly column in Marginalian. I recommend it to anyone interested in seeing how one writer, regularly offering her gifts and those of other artist's. She and they lift life's quality as they dissect important ideas and illuminate Many of Beauty's most exquisite details.
This week, Popova aimed the the laser of her genius at the subject of how we see, and cited an expert unknown to me. One with a spectacular gift and a terrible curse.
First, his gift:
"No one has written about what it takes to see," Popova wrote, "— and how to do the looking — more poignantly than Jacques Lusseyran (September 19, 1924–July 27, 1971) in his stirring memoir And There Was Light.
"Looking back on his blissful early childhood, Lusseyran recounts his formative enchantment with the world:
"'Light cast a spell over me. I saw it everywhere I went and watched it by the hour… flowing over the surface of the houses in front of me and through the tunnel of the street to right and left. This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing.
"There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.'"
Then, Popova reveals the curse. Lusseyran, the genius of light, had been struck blind at the age of seven.
It is the answer to stories like these, and the questions they raise, that sends me to her column every week.
We cannot look directly into the sun. But Lusseyran says he could eat it. In the summer of 2018 I photographed someone doing that. Today, I named that image "Eating the Sun".
-Erie Chapman
"Eating the Sun" - by Erie Chapman, 2018
