Floods of Light

Black Book 114, August 1, 2023

I can’t find or follow a plot in this mess. I’m sure I had a bunch of ideas while I was stumbling around out in the world today, but at three a.m. I’m struggling to recover a single stray idea.

One of those ideas, it now occurs to me, had something to do with crop rotation as it relates to art. You know, when you’re feeling thwarted, do something radically different. Give your usual shit a rest and let it grow wild with your inattention. Fallow periods are fine, just as long as you stay busy. Read. Listen to music. Work with your hands. Take a road trip without the intention of doing any work at all, or of turning what you see and do into work.

All the other things you do when you’re not working are sort of like gravel you shovel into the rock tumbler in your head. That fucker keeps churning, keeps tumbling, even when you’re not paying any attention to it, and the obvious hope is that when you eventually get back to work the tumbler will be ready to start spitting out the gravel you shoveled in there, but wholly transformed, all polished up and almost unrecognizable and ready to serve as raw materials for inspiration.

If you’re a photographer who has a certain preoccupation or settled style, spend some time taking photographs that are nothing like the kinds of pictures you usually take. That’s always a good time to stay close to home, to document your family and friends and the place you live. Someday, I’m pretty sure, you’ll be glad you have those pictures, even if they never find their way into your ‘serious’ work. Try to shake your usual preoccupations and get lost.

“What is required to make these phantoms vanish? Light! Floods of light! Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up the lower strata of society.” (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables).

Light as security, truth, disinfectant, clarity, the banishing of darkness. Light as goodness. The light that allows us to see, the light that shows the way. The light that uncovers hidden things. All the light we cannot see. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Light as the opposite of dark, of heavy.

“Floods of light” has long been one of my verbal tics. I find myself blurting it at least a half dozen times a day. I love all the things it can mean: The world blown open, clarity, surprise, joy, rapture, revelation, rupture. Floods of light are what I’m after, what I’m looking for from the moment I get out of bed. It’s what I’m hoping for in my dreams. It’s the only way through.

Because there’s no way around it. The darkness around us is deep, and deeper and deeper we creep. Yet I still love this doomed world and all the magic it has inspired, produced, and is still capable of stirring up on a regular basis. And the floods of light are as real as the darkness, and we need them, need to find and notice and follow them.

So tonight I’m thinking about the hill of fireflies outside a little cabin on a hill in Vermont. I’m thinking about Livingston, Montana and Paradise Valley, and that otherworldly drive down out of Yellowstone into Gardiner. I’m thinking about the views out along Swingley Road. I’m thinking about the sun-dappled bridge in Beaver Creek Valley and the big spring bubbling up out of the rocks at the base of the bluffs. I’m thinking about sitting around on Sunday mornings reading and listening to Thelonious Monk, Horace Parlan, and Grant Green. I’m thinking about walking up Ninth Avenue through Hell’s Kitchen, heading for Columbus Circle, Central Park, and the Cloisters, feeling alive.

I’m thinking about that Great Camp on the island in the Adirondacks, sitting on the dock outside the boathouse or in the main room with that amazing fireplace and library, relaxing, relaxed, reading Wodehouse or maybe the essays of E.B. White, and listening to the loons echoing off the pond. I’m thinking about skipping stones in Grand Marais, eating lunch high above the ocean in Acadia National Park, lying in the back of my old Datsun pickup truck out in the range east of Livingston and dreaming my way into the staggering real-world planetarium stretched out above me in every direction.

I’m thinking about that ancient, cluttered magic shop, world famous, in a tiny, depressed village in Michigan, and the adjoining cemetery where many legendary magicians had chosen to be buried. I’m thinking about sitting outside my tent on a flat, rocky island in the North Sea, above the Arctic Circle, staying up most of the night stunned by the Northern Lights. I’m thinking about getting stuck in a snowstorm on my way back to Paris and spending the night in a train station in the mountains of Norway and talking all night with a stranger, not another soul in the place, no lights, no heat. I’m thinking about the drunk, off-duty cab driver I met in a bar in Trondheim, who insisted on driving me in the middle of the night to the cemetery outside the Nidoros Cathedral, where several generations of his family were buried, and then sitting with him in his cab at the fish market and falling asleep while listening to Neil Young as the sun was coming up.

I’m thinking about all the singing and dancing and whooping for joy, all the ecstatic moments and out-of-body experiences I’ve had, all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve loved. I’m trying to think about all of it tonight, trying to conjure those floods of light, to avoid one more night of thinking about this broken, heartbreaking world and the terrible darkness that I fear is coming for us all.

(Image: Abel Pann)