How do I write the light?
I value light for what it illuminates, but what happens when the light itself becomes the main show?
I wondered during our sunrise service how to put light itself into the spotlight. Outside the church window the light turned from midnight blue to purple to pink to a soft clarity that seemed to caress everything it touched, but how do I write about that without resorting to time-worn cliches? This morning the sunrise mottled the sky with rough patches of cotton-candy pink tinged with firey orange and surrounded by whiteness so soft it looked like felt--but even as I write this description, I am struck by its inadequacy. The sky didn't really look like felt or fire or cotton candy or like anything so much as light. I want to say "Just go look at it for yourself," but by the time I'd noticed the peculiar quality of the light, it was already starting to change. I can't make light sit tight or stay put while I go find the camera, and even if I could, the photograph would frame a woefully incomplete distortion of a transcendent experience. Light refuses to pose, at least for me.
An evanescent natural phenomenon that defies description: that's the light I'd like to know how to write.
1 comment:
Interesting that you speak of the light in that manner at an Easter sunrise service. In "Paradise Lost" Milton described God as light. Perhaps you and he share the same struggle, but from different perspectives. And while to him, God was light - to you, light was God.
I really miss Lit classes...
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