December 1968
From artscanada, 25 (December 1968): 8. Reprinted in RW, 55–7. This article was a contribution to a special issue on light.
The first phase of the myth of light begins with God, as the maker of things visible and invisible. The primary senses of consciousness are sight and hearing, and the creation is usually thought of as starting with them. In the Bible the myth of creation begins, “God said, Let there be light.” First there is an articulate sound in the darkness of chaos, then light appears, before the sun or any agent of light is in existence. Later religion drew the inference that God himself was a word and a light shining in darkness, and that light is “Of the eternal co-eternal beam,” as Milton says.1 For Heraclitus, at the beginning of Greek philosophy, all things move upward from the moist and dark to the dry light of fire, which is also the Logos or word, the light of reason common to all men.2 Light, the condition of visibility, is also the central symbol for all knowledge and understanding. Eventually, this myth says, the created world will go back to darkness, and man will enter an eternal home of light, symbolized by a city glowing with gold and jewels. The image of this home of light is the sun, which Shakespeare sees as “Gilding the streams with heavenly alchemy,”3 alchemy being one of the symbols of the return to the Golden Age of light.
The second phase of the myth of light begins with man, which means beginning in myths of alienation and anxiety. In religion, man is thought of as “fallen,” as surrounded by darkness but provided with two lights, the light of revelation and the light of nature. With their aid he discovers a third light within himself, the wisdom which the Bible calls “the candle of the Lord,”4 the light of love which, according to Jesus, is not to be hidden under a bushel but allowed to shine clearly.5 As religious myths give way to more secular ones, around the time of the French Revolution, the inner light of man is thought of in more social terms as a buried Promethean fire, like that of a volcano, which may at any time explode and burn the world. Such a burning would, according to the Romantic poets, destroy only the darkness of slavery and superstition. Man would walk in fires unconsumed, according to Blake, like the three in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace,6 and would assume “the powers of a world of perfect light,” according to Shelley.7 In this second phase light is thought of as struggling with darkness, like a lighthouse beam, where increasing the understanding of anything is throwing light on it.
The third phase of the myth of light begins with nature, when light is studied as a part of the physical world and obeying physical laws. Here light is thought of as existing in a time–space unity, travelling at a definite speed, though a speed at which, so far as we know, nothing material can travel. It may be corpuscular or wave-like, but whichever it is it seems to disturb the old associations around the words “matter” and “substance.” It is rather a form of energy which we translate into visibility, the primordial power of a self-creating nature, which exists in the invisible form of electricity as well as in colour. It is no longer thought of as illuminating forms already in existence, but as the visible aspect of a force which unites the subject and the object in a world that in itself contains no such separation. This light is the “quarrying passion, under-towed sunlight” of Hart Crane,8 the manifesting of a world in which we are challenged by Wallace Stevens to
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor. [Credences of Summer, ll. 21–2]
The arts respond to all these phases. In the art of the first phase, light is thought of as being of the essence of the object: light and object cannot exist apart from each other. In primitive paintings, in the temples of the Acropolis glowing in the Greek sunlight, objects are simply visible: they are not “lit up.” In the art of the second phase, light is an attribute of the object: it streams in and dispels the darkness, or streams outward from its source, like the halos of saints. The window, especially the stained-glass window of the medieval cathedral, is the central architectural symbol of this conception of light: in painting it appears as “chiaroscuro,” the battle of light and darkness, where the point of diffusing light, as so often in Rembrandt, is the visual focus. In the art of the third phase, light is the energy underlying form, the form being in a sense a kind of arbitrary recreation of what light gives us directly. In Turner and the Impressionists, the sense of forms as about to be dissolved in their original light-energy is very strong. Later, representation tends to disappear altogether. The painter, from Kandinsky on, tries to escape from the perspective of a subject looking at objects, and the architect tries similarly to escape from the walled-in building, the building which symbolizes a subject set over against a world of objects instead of uniting with it.
Perhaps a fourth phase of the myth of light, in which light is once again objective, though objective in a very different way, is about to develop. If so, the contents of this issue may provide some clue to its nature.