I Suspect We Have a Light
People as bodies of light.
Ways of emitting light. This is a recipe which is non-exhaustive, not at all hard-and-fast but riff-able and remixable. But with its homespun sparsity embraced, this recipe is fundamental and useful, like teaching your child a good meal to make with eggs.
A smile,
Those eyes of yours, use them,
Listening.
The formula is so addictively simple. You can use it over and over until you are afraid you might be rehashing a rehash and yet it will not wear out.
From these few ingredients I guarantee that you will be able to make light. I shall be damned if you can’t.
From the humility of the store-cupboard, the riches of the dinner table. (Off-topic, but I was reading my mother’s magazine over her shoulder; it was The Sunday Times magazine and contained an interview with a woman who was dogmatising on the essentials of throwing a successful dinner party. For a table centre-piece, she claimed, one could do worse than to position a tank of ‘live tadpoles’ for one’s guests to watch twitch about. Something to keep in mind (and up your sleeve) for your next soirée.)
When there is light in a person it almost makes me want to cry.
Furthermore, when there is a whole room of lit up—lighted?—people, it is like a chapel filled with tiny twinkling candles.1 You want to grab hold of a giant by the elbow and lead him over, encouraging him to use his massive hand to shield these lights from blowing out. He normally spends his days with his head in the clouds; it’s where it naturally reaches up to. But he agrees to help. Don’t let us be extinguished.
There are the light-givers; they are real celestial bodies, I think, who beam light.
They may have taught themselves to do this; rigged up a system with all the requisite electrical works in order to do this. You tug on a pulley hanging down behind the back of their left ear, perhaps, or flick at a light-switch wedged between their two kidneys, and they turn the light on.
They are the people who bear their hearts on their sleeves, they laugh and cry in equal measures, they are the people who ensure they listen to everyone who is trying to say something—even and especially when that person is not yet a confident orator.
When I meet these people, I am filled with the sort of emotion which leads to crying. Someone cleverer than I am may perhaps thumb through their Greek thesaurus and locate a word for me, and gloatingly present me with that word like a cat having caught a wretched mouse—a word which seems to them to mean what I am getting at.
I am thinking of an emotion which wraps around happiness and peace and contentment although also slight sadness (with or without a reason; this is situational and very much left to the discretion of the feeler, and pertains also to whether or not they prefer to intellectualise their emotions).
It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside—but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse—and heard a note of unearthly music. (Emily of New Moon (1923) by L. M. Montgomery, via Wikisource)
A bit like that. If you ever have a daughter then please purchase her that book. (Write it down somewhere just in case you ever do.)
When the inward light of people I love or love because they are near me and visibly good interacts with the light of the world then the overall effect is even more intense.
The sinking gold of the sun—with cooler diffident twilight racing hot on the sunset’s heels. The cocky little flowers bathing in the last sticky spools of sunlight, lapping it up. And out on the grass lawn, some sitting back with their legs long in front of them, or lying on their front fiddling with the grass. Or draped criss-cross all over each other, insensible of the frontiers of each other’s bodies, as happily tired as a changeling fairy-baby lowered into a crib.
And in low, worldly voices they chat to each other. Truth be told it’s just idle chatter, yes, going over some plan in the future, or reliving a party, or wondering what to cook for dinner tomorrow, or complaining about schoolwork or a paper. But the light is on. They are listening to each other and the world, although it cannot stop day turning into night, is trying ever so hard as it might to slow the process down. We none of us can interfere overmuch with nature, not even the sun. But it tries to just give them a little more time tonight. The lights are on. Our immanence is aflame!
I will cry at this. Just see if I don’t.
There was a 15-year-old girl who had no light in her at all. As I remember, in consequence she lived a very small life.
A ‘half-life’, in fact, was how her own mother described it.
She had an illness called anorexia nervosa. It made her hands so cold that nobody wanted to touch her.
This girl, let me tell you, had short mousy hair, straggly, limp, skimming her shoulders. Her skin was translucent and ectoplasmic. Mottled the colour of burst damson fruit and milk; violets and foxgloves. The only relief to her sallow complexion were her freckles, which bridged her nose like stepping-stones across a burbling stream. She also had spidery legs and she counted every calorie. Even when she had been caught out and coerced into recovery by a very officious, brusque team of medics.
These medics reckoned she was too unwell to remain in school. Accordingly, she was taken out of it. An ultimatum: you can return to school in six weeks, if and only if you have gained sufficient weight. (She returned in six months.)
They prescribed her a meal plan of three meals, two desserts, and three snacks and a pint of whole milk a day. Eat up, please. The excess, the profligacy of it all was like something out of Versailles. A menu for Marie Antoinette’s lavish dinner party. Her guests passionately exhorted to eat and eat and then eat some more.
They gave her parents exceptionally helpful advice of what to say and what not to say in order to support their pathetic daughter’s recovery and weight-restoration; an example of which is provided below for my reader’s benefit:
In her diary, during those listless days when she was bed-ridden and unoccupied, she wrote out a wish, a begging vision for her future:
One morning the sun will softly stream into the room like a gentle brook of warm milk, the golden morning like honey…
…Meals are uncomplicated affairs. You dine with a sunny bouquet of flowers and a dozy cat, draped over a crochet knit blanket. The afternoon stretches ahead expectantly, and for the first time it seems, you have the energy to do what you love again.
That was what she wanted. She was looking for the light.
And as you can tell, she wanted, very fiercely, to get better. But she was so, so, so very afraid.
She sweated at and swatted her way out of recovery in equal measure.
One week doing well—forcing herself to eat her afternoon snack, however long it took her to do so. Crying as a matter of course afterwards. The kind of crying which involves white-knuckles bitten to stop the tears, and eyes stinging, and your face contorting through a carousel of ninety expressions of burlesque ugliness.
She was, naturally, profoundly lonely.
She was not allowed to walk anywhere for a while, being too weak. She saw no one. She was shut up at home for seemingly interminable days, horizontal, sedated, conflicted.
‘You’re fading away again,’ her mother told her in the car on the way home from clinic, when the weigh-in showed a loss on the scales.
She wrote and she wept and she ate and she tried not to eat; she gained a kilogram and then recalcitrantly she lost it again; she was told off and then praised if the kilogram inched its way back; she was weighed and her vitals were taken; ECGs and blood pressure; she was probed about her mood; her words were used against her; she was told she was attention-seeking—and, ah, maybe she was!
And her mother asked a million questions all to the general tune of but how can this have happened to my daughter? Once she was the happiest little girl in the world. And she was, and she was.
IF I HAVE EVER LOVED YOU TOO INTENSELY—it was because I saw your light!
Now, think of a moth. You will be doing me a wonderful favour if you do.
In your mind’s eye, give the moth a light. It can be any kind of light. The ugliest LED strip lights, or perhaps a sputtering tallow candle, broad as a beacon in its gilt holder.
The moth flies towards this light because that is what moths do. It bumps into the hard coating of the light, because it forgets that humans are cruel with their inventions, and their light fittings are solid—and hurt upon impact. (These moths ought compare notes with the countless casualties of birds and insects who have collided with windows, failing to understand the genius of glass.)
I am the moth. I launch myself repeatedly at the light and bump into it, ouch ouch ouch. My antennae are all crumpled now.
If I have loved you oddly—if I have ever clung to your side or followed you around a room, or followed you as you moved but with only the sad eyes of a puppy, I saw your light. Reciprocally I delighted in it. (Hah—wasn’t that truly hideous?)
I was looking for your light.
For ‘No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light.’ (Luke 11:33)
The thing which saved me from a future condemned to eating disorders and depression was a desperate love of the world. I wanted to get better.
That was the single most important part of my recovery. It is the thing pharmaceuticals cannot replicate. Therapy can only make a roundabout attempt at doing so.
When the sufferer has the personal will to recover—then everything changes.
This is why people say that, ultimately, we all have to save ourselves. You cannot save another. The mother of all clichés, I know. It’s not an exact science—other people do have their parts to play. But no one can clone for us the inner desire to change, and imbue it into a capsule for swallowing.
I wanted to go and join everyone else. There was the light, bobbing about like a light on a boat at night, all at sea.
I wanted so badly to be part of whatever it is everyone else was doing when I was unwell. For years I felt behind. Like the last baby bird hobbling about in its nest, flapping its flimsy wings which as yet refused to lift it skyward. Poor critter. With time and perseverance, it will be ready; it just doesn’t know that yet—and morosely thinks itself the exception to flight.
I took so long to grow up in the end. I was the oldest one learning how to laugh, how to build strong relationships, how to go out and have fun. But one gets there in the end.
Agreeably I’ve been stupid since, and nursed several minor relapses whilst I was at university. But the love of life—real bold life, enfleshed with every emotion, with every arpeggio of climax and declension—has helped lead me back. Therefore breakfasts get made and eaten where once they might’ve been cruelly snubbed; I start over a thousand times a week. Fire, love, and truculence.
The light skitters ahead of me like a renegade ball of fireflies. Fireflies ploughing into each other like hundreds of minuscule nuclear collisions. Chasing these fireflies is the foolhardy work of a determined ginger kitten. Can’t blame the kitten, I am not much better.
So I watch with misty eyes when I take public transport. I relish the moments when someone breaks the silence and cracks a joke, or even says something quite ordinary and not remotely funny. Or in the library—having closed my book but not left my seat to leave—being quite content to watch everyone around me and their beavering industry.
The light—thankfully it always finds me.
Flashes of excited eyes; crooked grins; the radiance of an invitation discharged: ‘Please come!’; a hug given in earnest.
Now, I cannot always figure out how to be light myself. For I’m not the person, typically, to introduce people, or to dive straight in with questions, all interviewer-like, to a stranger. Although I am working on this. But, rather dejectedly, I go through a box of dud matches trying to strike a flame. Without knowing how to harness the light myself, instead what I can do is listen to those speaking to me. Listen with absolutely all my heart and mind, try to feel the stories they tell me and hope, between my efforts, that they feel in some measure adored.
There is another way of using light. (Granted, it is closely allied with subterfuge.)
One can try to reflect back the light which everywhere one sees. Some surfaces will do this; they are reflective. Sources of reflectivity can be collected and cannily pocketed for future use.
I live for those moments of light, those moments of happy light-filled people, bathing beneath the light. I hope to reflect it back in some small teaspoonful size.
The imagined chapel can look however you want, but I propose that it is a very small, Gothic one built of cold stone mortar-work, with a latticework of roses clambering over it. There is an arched wooden door with a squeaky hinge; self-effacingly, it squeaks ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ when it is opened, like an elderly gentleman who apologies for walking slowly, though he has earnt his leisure with his great age and service.