On Light

Sometimes, what I end up writing about is just the way the light is. And there seems to be some kind of contract that’s already in place between me and the light to say – in this notebook, which no one will ever read – what the light is like today, to get exactly the right words. I don’t know what that contract is. But it seems to underlie all the other writing. After the light, we could talk about my mother or what I’m having for dinner or Proust’s theory of translation. But the important thing is over. The light was the important thing. It remains a mystery to me why that’s the case, or where that contract came from.

–Anne Carson, in The Paris Review, April 2024

The window in my office is significantly taller than me, which feels important to consider. It’s a Georgian rectangle with a heavy white wooden frame. I read somewhere that dense softwoods like Red Deal or Pitch Pine were used in Irish architecture for durability. The softness of the material is offset by a sharp white eggshell paint although the frame’s careful ridges can’t hide gaps at the mitre joints, which seem more pronounced every time I open and shut the sash. I could be imagining this.

The true white of the frame can’t be separated from the yellow glow thrown by my desk lamp. The circular ceiling light, which looks like the Stanford Torus, is too harsh, and so I mostly write in the North-facing blue with the Anglepoise on. I suppose it helps me hide inside my office, which is walled with glass on the South side.

This morning, I am watching Storm Bram come in. I thought it was called Storm Bran, like the cereal, but was corrected by my son who texted to say the school was closing early. Thinking suddenly of Dracula, I agreed that Bram makes more sense. The wintered maple outside the window has been motionless, and I wondered for a minute if the weather warnings were a mistake. Might Bram have swerved us, I thought, and as I did so the branches were suddenly whipping across my line of sight. The new wind, strangely warm, is causing the picture on my wall to gently lift and shift. I move to close the window but sit back down with it still open.

The picture is the cover of Oxford American, Fall 2013 edition. There is a lanky male cop, or someone dressed like one, drinking hard from a juice bottle that looks like it was snatched off the kid standing beside him, who seems to be a boy, dressed in long shorts and red t-shirt. The child is holding a red balloon that partially blocks our view of his face. In the background is a row of 18-wheeler trucks, parked and driverless. The perspective of the photographer has them tilted. The sky is full ceramic blue with delicate cirrus clouds. In the tarmac space between the trucks and the humans are their shadows stretched backwards: the man’s a bow compass, and the child’s a strangely thinned-out version of his small body. Going by their turn and length, I put the scene as two o’clock on an afternoon in early autumn.

I bought the magazine ten years ago in an airport in Charlotte travelling home from a family holiday. It’s sun-bleached, and I don’t know the writers listed on the front. I framed the cover because it makes me feel in touch with the person I was when I last felt truly generative. The edition sat on my shelf for three years during my PhD, and I looked at it a lot when it caught the light through my window in the late afternoon. Same with the great sycamore right outside in Lanyon Square. The tree was always the first in the city to lose its leaves, the canary in the mine for the end of summer. The light persisting through the emptying tree seemed to suit the colours of the magazine.

As a result, I feel attached to the dynamic between the cop – whose left hand is lightly clenched suggesting he is lost in the moment of sucking down the stolen pink juice – and the gait of the child, whose total commitment to being forward facing in the face of unexpected loss suggests awe.

This autumn, I bought a new house while divorcing my partner of 14 years. I won a competitive sealed bid process by just one pound. Sitting side by side on the kitchen worktop, my son had told me that this was Bruce Wayne’s auction tactic in the Batman movies – bidding a dollar higher than the other person. I took his advice, and it worked. The estate agent, in his strangely old-fashioned and proper way, said, Remarkable, Ms Watson.

The break-up itself has been amicable, I suppose in the way that word is often rolled out to describe something non-fractious, or at least without a strong sense of blame. That made things harder, if you want to know.

Despite being preferred by artists to provide a ‘true light’, North light is bluer. This is down to the Rayleigh effect, and indirect diffused daylight coming from the sky rather than directly from the sun. The light is filtered differently. In North-facing rooms, such as my office, white paint can look cold, especially if it contains a high percentage of blue pigment, which it usually does as standard. It interacts with the light’s plenitude of shorter blue wavelengths.

The paint maker Farrow & Ball have a paint called ‘All White’ that is considered pure, with none of the blue pigment like the sort found in brilliant whites. In my old house, my former home, I used it in the North-facing bathroom and, also, on the landing, which had low levels of natural light. The effect was an unexpected warmth as though, like an aircraft marshaller, the paint snatched and channelled what reflected sun it could.

The South-facing living room was a different story, where the rules of paint and direct sunlight enable a broader spectrum of suitable paints. A pale grey in a South-facing room might look silver, even buttery, and yet the same paint in a dull kitchen might seem almost lavender as the natural North-facing light engages the paint’s base bluer pigments. Knowing where the sun will arrive to has always helped me find my bearings. In that house, the light in the living room was why I bought the house in the first place. The sun arced through the bay windows and carved a xanthic trapezium on the large oriental rug, changing the geometry across the floor across the hours. In midsummer, the light was so bright it flattened everything. I would lie on the floor while it yellowed me out.

I don’t know what that contract is. But it seems to underlie all the other writing.

Physics says that we experience our world in three dimensions through the gift of perspective. That is, we only perceive three dimensions because of light and shadow, which mimic depth and suggest volume. Without this contrast, a car driving towards us would seem like a miniature Hot Wheels Ford slowly expanding in size. Without light and shade, we simply would not recognise it as a three-dimensional object moving through space. Similarly, if by some chance a Hot Wheels Ford did suddenly begin to expand in size, without the effects of light and shadow our brains would assume the value shifts meant it was travelling closer to us, translating the increase into oncoming movement, a recession into space.

I moved house just before Halloween. We bought a pumpkin and drew a Sharpie face on it and named it Eric Cartman. The house was built in 1890, and the estate agent described it as “a great lump of a house”. In an unrelated conversation, my solicitor described it as “a giant lump of a house”. I suppose it is – a lump, I mean. It’s tall and white with five bedrooms, a sunroom, and two light-up emergency exit signs. Somehow, it has seven toilets, after the previous owner toyed with the idea of converting the space into a house of multiple occupancy. He didn’t, in the end, deciding instead to sell it. But the toilets remain, awkwardly shunted into place, most with small insufficient showers and taking up bright corners of rooms that used to be bright corners.

Blue light is inescapable when we face North. It troubles me to understand it. As if this side of the building isn’t lit by the same sun as the other side. The sun is ninety-three million miles away. How do plants only metres apart grow in entirely different directions? In my previous North-facing back garden the sunflowers practically grew sideways to get to the light. I mean, they broke themselves. Meanwhile, the clumsy giants in the front garden stood straight up like nothing was very much trouble.

My new house faces the same direction as the old one: South-facing living room. The difference is that no window in the house is North facing. It’s either South, at the front, or West along the side. In the early mornings, West light follows the rules of North light – it’s briefly cooler, and bluer. In the afternoons and evenings, though, it throws long shadows through the magnolia and bamboo. It is a softer, warmer light that piques reds and oranges. Sunsets come there, too, a wild pink seen over the roof of the house opposite that looks a little spun on its axis. The Harland and Wolff cranes post up in that direction, or I trust they do, behind the yellow witch hazel.

It’s never easy to leave any relationship because we build our lives around the other person. If a red rubber ball moves slowly towards us, without the interaction of light and shade it looks like a flat two-dimensional circle simply increasing in size. Look for three dimensions, this is how you ground yourself. In a marriage, across the years, flat circles of red incrementally become fully realised rubber balls. Everything is cast into three-dimensionality by the light of the other person.

The arrival of Storm Bram has withdrawn the light from my office. There is an old Georgian building facing the window, I think it’s full of architects. I haven’t managed to make eye contact with one yet, but I try. The building sits at a jaunty angle on the corner of Marie Heaney Square. Its pigeon-grey front door is framed by a portico with four ridged Doric columns, and on either side of the front path are two small rectangular courtyards, each with its own mossy stone bench. The courtyard on the right is entirely full of brown leaves. I mean, it is a deep ball pool of foliage, and the one on the left is entirely clean.

Last spring, two baby gulls seemed to fall out of a nest on the Georgian building’s roof. At first, they huddled in the rain against the faded black flashing. The architects were unaware. I searched what best to do in this situation, and the advice seemed to be not to do anything. I expected that their parents would scoop them back into the nest, but they didn’t. Some days, the two brown bundles seemed to dance with each other along the ridge – rangy wings clashing as they rotated and jostled between the building’s two overlarge chimneys, each with four tall pots. For two months, I watched them grow up across the square, across various sunny, freezing, wet, dry, windy, clammy, roasting Belfast days, until one bright morning they just weren’t there anymore.

Last time there was a severe storm in Ireland was January, almost a year ago. Then, it was described as a generational storm, and a first-of-its-kind emergency alert went off on people’s phones in schools and funerals and dual carriageways. I had met someone I was falling in love with and wrote a poem about the dissonance of the storm and the photographs she was sending of the undisturbed desert in Palm Springs. Where does the light fall and what sort of light? Big soft sun on orange clay hills, on the distant blue turboprop, on the migrating sparrows passing through the canyon.

Yesterday, in my new house, I framed a painting by American artist Jeremy Miranda. He explores landscape, scene, and place, and seems particularly concerned with light, the complex relationship between interior and exterior spaces, and how things vanish in pale squares and rectangles cast over cars, or arms of sofas. As someone who grew up sensitive to spaces, to atoms of changing mood and presence, I am drawn to how Miranda pays attention. His painting ‘Bending Light’ shows an open white door leading somewhere unseen – maybe a room or a hall, only part of the wooden floor is revealed. And this painting is all perspective. A parallelogram of warm light cast across the door is further broken into a unique, disrupted polygon with every line it touches – the door jamb, the thin side of the door, the long inset panels of the door, the white walls, the white sill, the white sash window frame, the window itself with its view of bare branches just touched by yellow (I imagine) early evening light. Miranda has allowed the white walls to seem vanilla custard, seem smudge grey, seem bruised. The door is opened inwards.

The light was the important thing.

Today, I would describe the light in my office as a fax of light. I would describe the light in my office as imperfectly here. I would describe the light in my office as porphyry, a loose purple-red, as looking to cling to its tight spectrum of blue, ridiculous as a blanket, as the last bat out of the river bridge rafters, as a person reaching up to me from a boat in a photograph, as a squirrel dimension, as a young woman shifting from one foot to the other on the opposite side of the road, as a tentative laugh, as a thinking things might be okay, as a version of something that happened when you were younger, a better version, even misheard, as the stupid present, as a new word in a tiger book, as a chance at remembering it all better. It’s already changing.

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