SEEING THE LIGHT : Understanding the true nature of light, says a physicist, requires not looking only throught the eyes but with the soul.
IN 1910, TWO FRENCH SURGEONS WROTE about their successful operation on an 8-year-old boy who had been blind since birth because of cataracts. When the boy’s eyes were healed, they removed the bandages, eager to discover how well the child could see. Waving a hand in front of the boy’s physically perfect eyes, they asked him what he saw. He replied weakly, “I don’t know.”* “Don’t you see it moving?” they asked. * “I don’t know” was his only reply. * The boy’s eyes were clearly not following the slowly moving hand. What he saw was only a varying brightness in front of him. He was then allowed to touch the hand as it began to move; he cried out in a voice of triumph: “It’s moving!” He could feel it move, and even, as he said, “hear it move,” but he still needed laboriously to learn to see it move. Passing through the now-clear black pupil of the child’s eye, that first light called forth no echoing image from within. The child’s sight began as a hollow, silent, dark and frightening kind of seeing. The light of day beckoned, but no light of mind replied within the boy’s anxious, open eyes.
The lights of nature and of mind entwine within the eye and call forth vision. Yet separately, each light is mysterious and dark. Even the brightest light can escape our sight.
AS PART OF WHAT I CALL “PROJECT EUREKA,” A FRIEND AND I HAVE designed and constructed a science exhibit in which one views a region of space filled with light. It is a simple but startling demonstration that uses only a carefully fabricated box and a projector whose light shines directly into it. We have taken special care to ensure that light does not illuminate any interior objects or surfaces in the box. Within the box, there is only pure light and lots of it. The question is: What does one see? How does light look when left entirely to itself?
Approaching the exhibit, I turn on the projector, whose bulb and lenses can be seen through a Plexiglas panel. The projector sends a brilliant light through optical elements into the box beside it. Moving over to a view port, I look into the box and at the light within. What do I see? Absolute darkness! I see nothing but the blackness of empty space.
On the outside of the box is a handle connected to a wand that can move into and out of the box’s interior. When I pull the handle, the wand flashes through the dark space before me, and I see it brilliantly lit on one side. The space clearly is not empty but filled with light. Without an object on which the light can fall, one sees only darkness. Light itself is always invisible. We see only things, only objects, not light.
TWO LIGHTS BRIGHTEN OUR WORLD. ONE IS PROVIDED BY THE SUN, but another answers to it--the light of the eye. Only through their entwining do we see; lacking either, we are blind.
Arguably the best-studied case of recovery from congenital blindness is the case of S.B. On Dec. 9, 1958, and Jan. 1, 1959, a blind British man, 50 years old, received cornea transplants. A boot repairman, he had lived a life that was unusually independent for a blind adult, for example going for long bicycle rides by holding onto the shoulder of a friend. He enjoyed gardening and especially any kind of work with his hands, and was a confident, cheerful and clearly intelligent man. Now, for the first time since he was 10 months old, he had complete functional use of his eyes. What did he see?
Examining him about a month after the transplants, researchers R.L. Gregory and J.G. Wallace asked him about his first visual experience following the operation. S.B. replied that he had heard his surgeon’s voice, and turning toward the sound, saw a “blur.” S.B. was unsure what the blur was but reasoned that since he had heard the voice of his physician, and knew that voices come from faces, the blur in front of him must be his doctor. Faces, even long after the operation, were “never easy,” S.B. reported. Nor were his struggles with seeing confined to faces. Gregory and Wallace’s research with S.B. (and similar research before and since) has made it clear that learning to see as an adult is not easy at all.
The researchers took S.B. to a museum of technology and science, and because he had a longstanding interest in tools, he was clearly excited at the prospect of seeing what he had only handled or heard described. Stopping at a fine screw-cutting lathe, they asked him to tell them what stood before him. Obviously upset, S.B. could say nothing. He complained that he could not see the metal being worked. Then he was brought closer and allowed to touch the lathe. He ran his hands eagerly over it with his eyes shut tight. Standing back a little and opening his eyes, he declared, “Now that I’ve felt it I can see it.”
S.B.’s slow process of learning to see continued until he died, two years later. Its slow pace and limited success disappointed him deeply, as they invariably do all such patients. In many situations S.B., like others, came to neglect sight entirely, for example by leaving the lights off at home and navigating as a blind man. In most instances, the effort to see was simply too great.
The patient awakening from surgery does not see the world as filled with the gifts of intelligible light and color, concludes M. von Siden, who studied 66 case histories of how people born blind recovered sight. The project of learning to see inevitably leads to a psychological crisis in the life of the patients, who may wind up rejecting sight. New impressions threaten the security of a world previously built upon the sensations of touch and hearing. Some decide it is better to be blind in their own world than sighted in an alien one.
Visual skills, as well as many other sensory and motor skills such as speech and walking, form during a critical window in the first years of life. If a person misses this opportunity, trying to make up for it at a later time is enormously difficult and mostly unsuccessful. In the case of the 8-year-old patient, after one of the surgeons, Moreau, had worked with the child for some months, the parents forced him to give the child over to a welfare establishment. By the following year, all that the child had learned to see under Moreau’s care was lost. Moreau’s account contains a note of exhaustion and regret that even with his full attention, he had accomplished little of permanence. The sober truth remains that vision requires far more than a functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind.
MOREAU’S CHILD CLUNG TO THOSE MODES OF KNOWING THAT WERE familiar and reassuring to him: touch, hearing, smell. To do otherwise, to see, would have required a superhuman effort. In many ways, we act like Moreau’s child. The cognitive capacities we now possess define our world, give it substance and meaning. The prospect of growth is as much a prospect of loss, and threat to security, as a bounty. One must die in order to become. Newly won capacities place us in a tumult of new psychic phenomena, and we become like Odysseus shipwrecked in a storm. Like him, we cling tenaciously to the shattered keel of the ship we originally set out upon, our only and last connection to a familiar reality. Why give it up? Do we have the strength to leave, to change? Perhaps the voices encouraging us to venture out on our own belong only to the cruel Sirens. So we close our eyes, and hold to what we know.
Besides an outer light and eye, sight requires an “inner light” that complements the familiar outer light and transforms raw sensation into meaningful perception. The light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world.
My “box of light” exhibit incites in the viewer the puzzling question: What is the nature of this invisible thing called light whose presence calls everything into view--excepting itself?
Light touches all aspects of our being, revealing a part of itself in each encounter. How have we changed this thing called light through the lights of our own consciousness? It has been treated scientifically by physicists, symbolically by religious thinkers and practically by artists and technicians. Each gives voice to a part of our experience of light. When heard together, all speak of one thing whose nature and meaning has been the object of human attention and veneration for millennia. During the past three centuries, the artistic and religious dimensions of light have been kept severely apart from its scientific study. I feel the time has come to welcome them back, and to craft a fuller image of light than any one discipline can offer.
In the mingling of nature and mind arises an understanding of the life of light.
THERE ARE LEVELS TO LIGHT, AND MORE THAN ONE MAY BE ACTIVE AT ANY one moment. Some, from the past, may be alien to us, and combining them with others that are more familiar may be disconcerting. Yet, while we may be deeply confused, our culture seems oblivious to our dilemma. One feature of scientific progress has been the segregation of levels once integrated. Values have been isolated from scientific knowledge, the photon removed from the Incarnation. This separation has had costs as well as benefits.
Traditional cultures, as well as our own in its early history, were, to use the language of Cambridge anthropologist Ernest Gellner, “multistranded.” When a member of the Nilotic tribe of the Nuer in Sudan looks at a cucumber and, in complete seriousness, identifies it as a bull, he avoids entangling himself in a logical absurdity because he lives in a multistranded mental world. The strand of cucumber as a vegetable is woven into, but not confused with, the strand of cucumber as totem.
The history of the West is a history of the growing segregation of the strands of consciousness, separating the moral and spiritual from the sensual and physical, losing the unity felt by the Nilotic clansman.
Every early culture has understood its genesis and history as one woven of threads both divine and mundane to form a multidimensional mythology of creation, destruction and migration. The drama is organized in time. In Hindu cosmologies, world time is ordered into yugas, the Mayans have their katuns, the Aztecs their many ages and five “sun” periods. Among the Greeks, the poet Hesiod described the ages of man as Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron, the last our own. Even our word world stems from the Old Germanic compound wer-aldh , meaning “the life or age of man.”
Each age was associated not only with external events, but a moral order as well. The Golden Age, wrote Hesiod, was a time when men “lived like gods, carefree in their hearts, shielded from pain and misery. . . . They knew no constraint and lived in peace and abundance as lords of their lands.” After this blessed age, a second childish and unnatural race arose, followed by a third brazen race of mortals, who were a harsh, violent people. Then came the “divine race of heroes,” among whose number were Achilles and Odysseus. The fifth race of men, our own, is a tragic mingling of justice and injustice, a time of disorder, when all holy alliances between families and friends are violated, and the hallowed patterns of life are lost. Hesiod’s was a mythopoeic, multistranded history of human nature, not a chronology of purely mundane events.
The rich, psychospiritual story of our origins has only recently given way to another imagination. Since the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, the physical origins of the world have gradually disentangled themselves from its spiritual origins. Divine descriptions of the cosmos found a rival in the upstart physical explanations of astronomy and physics. With the appearance in 1859 of Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection,” the battle moved closer to home, from the realm of cold matter, planets and stars, to plants, animals and Homo sapiens.
In purging our history of the sacred, we have unwittingly lost sight of our cognitive role in history. We have neglected the minds, or mentalities, of the figures who enacted the history. At best, we give a chronology of ideas, an intellectual history, but we leave the history of their thinking (as opposed to their thoughts) untouched.
Light has lived through all ages, yugas and societies. Its transmutations exemplify a dramatic evolution in consciousness. And what has been true for peoples is also true within the course of an individual life.
IN BOTH UTICA, N.Y., AND WASHINGTON, D.C., HANGS AN ALLEGORICAL series of four works by Thomas Cole, a leader of the Hudson River School in American painting, which depict the seasons of life from infancy to old age. In the early springtime of life, an infant appears in a small boat whose shape has been sculpted into the figure of Hours. At the helm stands a radiant, angelic being who pilots the craft and her young charge out of a dark cavern into luxuriant growth bathed in a misty dawn light.
When, in the next panel, the infant has become a youth, the landscape opens up into a vast, exotic and exciting prospect. The youth, now fully animated, yearning for the multitude of dreams outspread before him, takes the helm, while his unnoticed spirit guide gestures farewell from the bank. In the third canvas, manhood, the boat is poised at the brink of a cataract. The helm is broken, the sky is dark, the light is menacing, and the now-mature soul seems utterly lost. Only from the heights at the upper left of the painting does there stream a faint light of hope in which we can make out the delicate shape of his angelic companion. The final season of life, old age, is rendered as a vast and lifeless expanse of rock and water. The figure of Hours is broken and gone. Seated, the timeworn and bearded figure certainly recognizes that his journey through life is at an end. For the first time, he sees the spirit who has accompanied him throughout. It gestures toward a brilliant field of light, his luminous future.
In these four canvases, time has become space. As if at a family reunion, or perhaps in a traditional peasant village, all the ages of man are simultaneously present. With a simple shift of one’s gaze, decades can lapse, moving from infant to grandmother, from worried father to youthful daughter, all with the turn of an eye. The full gamut of human experience is drawn into the lines of every face and into the creases of every hand. These are the images of hope and care, of perennial aspirations and the harsh knowledge of mortality, set side by side.
Cole’s cycle made a deep impression on the American public. Shortly after they were hung, a man of middling years was found viewing them alone. He had been looking a long time before remarking, “Sir, I am a stranger in this city, and in great trouble of mind. But the sight of these pictures has done me great good. They have given me comfort. I go away from this place quieted, and much strengthened to do my duty.” He had found his own life in Cole’s artistic depiction, and felt recognized. Someone had seen, and that helped.
The stations of life’s journey are objects of meditation, and these are, most notably, inner developmental stages whose character implicitly shapes the character of our knowing, not an arid outer chronology.
Only more recently have we grown certain of a similar entanglement of outer nature and the human mind. The transformations of cultures over time have had profound effects on the insights humanity has had into nature. We have seen the character of successive ages reflected in the images they have made of light. These form a sequence, not of disjointed fragments, but a whole that unfolds in time, a series of awakenings that reflects an inner development. The philosopher Heraclitus was right: “It is in changing that things find repose.”
Scientific and prescientific knowledge of light have reflected the continual metamorphosis of our inward instruments of knowing. The very existence of that transformation suggests the possibility of further evolution, individually and culturally, and the possibility of re-linking the moral and sensual, the physical and spiritual, in a fresh, unitary imagination.
Past change occurred with little self-consciousness. Mistakes could be left behind. But the time of unconscious change is over, as environmental and nuclear hazards daily bring home to us. We now inhabit the entire planet, and have learned the potency of our accomplishments. Future evolution must be shaped self-consciously. It is a new and dangerous technology.
What should be the nature of future knowledge? How will we see light tomorrow? From all that has gone before, a fruitful avenue seems clear. First, we will need to recognize that we are all only partly sighted creatures, and so know only a part of nature. As Novalis--who was both a poet and a mining engineer--wrote: “But it is vain to attempt to teach and reach Nature. One born blind does not learn to see though we tell him forever about colors, lights and distant forms. Just so, no one will understand nature who has not the necessary organ, the inward instrument, the specific creating instrument. . . . “
If we lack the “necessary organ, the inward instrument,” we will need to cultivate it.
PAUL CEZANNE OFTEN PAINTED THE SAME SCENE OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Standing on the bank of a river, he told his son that the motifs he saw so multiplied themselves “that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place.” What did Cezanne hope to accomplish, or see, by tirelessly reworking the same vista? As if by way of answering, he wrote: “Get to the heart of what is before you. . . . In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric through looking and working.”
The eye becomes concentric, aligned with nature, through the artist’s ceaseless action of looking and working, of struggling to see clearly a single gesture of nature’s infinitely varied repertoire, and then to paint it. In guiding the hand across a canvas, one fashions and refines fresh senses, new capacities of mind suited to seeing that which, until then, had eluded the eye. In the end, one “gets to the heart of what is before us.” Like the alchemist, whose outer actions were but an image of an inner transformation, the artist, in creating outwardly, simultaneously accomplishes an equally precious inner work: clearsight.
SITTING QUIETLY IN THE SHADE OF A TREE, A BUDDHIST MONK MEDITATES on one of the 40 traditional subjects that form the basis of Buddhist practice. At knee level before him is the earth kasina , a disk of earth alike in all outward respects to a carefully crafted mud pie. As he meditates on the earth kasina , it gradually disappears.
In its place hovers an “afterimage” that initially may last only a few minutes, but that in the end becomes as firm in the mind as the mud pie is in the shade of the tree. Following the earth kasina further leads the meditator through a series of disappearances and new appearances that, for the Buddhist adept, demarcate transitions to realms beyond everyday consciousness. Over the course of months and years, if necessary, the monk will follow the images of earth from one realm to another until he, like Cezanne, has become sufficiently clearsighted to get to the heart or essence of earth.
Among the nine other kasinas or devices (which include water, air, heat, blue, yellow, red, white and space) is the kasina of light. Every manifestation of light is potentially the occasion for the true grasping of light, be it the dappled disks of light beneath the shade of a tree or the moonbeam that furtively makes its way through a chink in the wall. Each instance offers an occasion for enlightenment, for seeing light.
The poet William Blake boldly put it this way: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
THE PHILOSOPHER SCHOPENHAUER ONCE RECORDED A REMARKABLE conversation with Goethe concerning light. Schopenhauer sensibly suggested that light is a purely subjective psychological phenomenon, and that without sight, light could not be said to exist. Goethe responded vehemently, as Schopenhauer describes it: “ ‘What,’ he (Goethe) once said to me, staring at me with his Jupiter-like eyes, ‘light should only exist in as much as it is seen? No! You would not exist if the light did not see you .’ ”
Goethe, as botanist, knew well the life-giving powers of light. In addition, he felt that light brought forth not only life but also could, through its ceaseless action, create the very organ suited to perceive it. Evolution has occurred in the context of light, and over time the body has responded with the organ of sight. Goethe phrased it this way: “The eye owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light for the light so that the inner light may meet the outer.” Light, ever active, created the eye. It sculpted an organ suited to itself the way streaming water shapes the stones over and through which it flows. Had light not “seen” man, we should never have seen the light.
What Goethe pointed to at the concrete level of human physiology is likewise true for more subtle organs of soul. Cezanne’s looking and working, the Buddhist in his meditations and Goethe through his ceaseless artistic and scientific undertakings, all aimed at birthing the “necessary organ, the inward instrument” needed to see more deeply into nature. And the opportunity for this practice is ever-present, for, as Goethe says, “Every object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ within us.”
The artist and the monk both know that through a disciplined practice, one can realize new capacities of mind. Personal growth is not only a matter of memorizing sacred texts, or of academic artistic analysis, it also requires daily labor to fashion fresh, hard-won soul faculties. Every action of the hand and eye sculpts the soul.
IF EVERY CULTURE AND period has thought so variously about light, and if quantum theory has stripped light of its naively imagined attributes, then what of certainty is left to the nature of light at the end of this evolution? Everything. True artists and scientists are not searching to grasp knowledge as an object, but rather as event. The moment of critical importance is the moment pointed to by Goethe, the moment of insight. For millennia, one can see the sun rise and never notice the rotation of the earth. We can wake each morning for 60 years to the glow of the dawn and never see light. Why? Because one rushes past the immediate offerings of the senses to what we suppose to be the hidden, enduring primary objects of reality. The habits of our culture, the dogmas of our education constrain our sight.
Knowledge is not an object to be traded like chattel, but an epiphanous moment to be cherished. Too often we bypass epiphanies for a currency more ready to hand, for an abstract notion, an old insight in new dress, an equation whose characters could reveal, but which, in fact, we allow to go unread. These are the stones of knowing instead of the bread, they are idols instead of gods. Epiphanous knowing presupposes organs for insight, inward instruments; new knowing requires new instruments. We each possess the rudiments of every organ, but we deny them the nurturing they need, we neglect the daily work in whose light they might grow and flourish.
Over millennia, cultures have embraced and discarded countless images of light. And in a single lifetime, we have lived within and shed successive understandings of light. Through research, artistic practices and quiet contemplation, light’s elusive being constantly re-creates itself in our mind’s eye, offering fresh epiphanies to every generation. When seen with a thousand eyes, light will finally rest with us in the haven we have made.
Seeing light is a metaphor for seeing the invisible in the visible, for detecting the fragile garment that holds our planet and all existence together. Once we have learned to see light, surely everything else will follow.
