by Ann Wroe
The manna that fed the Israelites in the desert might have been much the same. So Dante thought, marvelling at the ‘rain of manna’ that was, in fact, far-off angels scintillating to make the light of heaven.21 God had sent light in the form of food, crumbled on the ground like hoarfrost in the low dawn sun, fading away flake by flake as that sun rose, tasting – so tiny on the fingertip! so insubstantial on the tongue! – of wafers cooked with honey. Light should taste of nothing else: infinitesimal sweetness, whiteness. Manna was white as coriander seed, said the Book of Exodus: the same tiny seeds Lucretius used to describe the minuteness of his atoms, which made up the world. Whatever else later scholars surmised manna to be – the dropping resin of the tamarisk tree, the sticky excrement of aphids, honeydew setting in white crystals on every leaf of the turkey oak – it could not have been more nourishing or more essential. Divinely, the Israelites fed on light, as plants do, there being nothing else man so hungers for.
Each morning they gathered it in baskets. Somewhat less than four litres was allotted to each family; they ascribed some weight to it, therefore, that was more than air, though less than sand. Some stooped and grubbed for it; others merely held out their hands as it fell. Ungathered manna simply melted where it lay. Carefully the Israelites compressed it with pestles in mortars, since the flyaway, flashing particles would not otherwise cohere. Then they baked it in the fire, slowly, until it rose high and white, honeycombed with the emptiness of unbounded space; until it collapsed in the teeth and fragmented in the beard, and they crunched on light.
Nothing was left for later. Manna that was stored (except one day’s worth, for the Sabbath) began immediately to rot, becoming stinking, maggoty and thick, like stagnant water. Light, once seen, never lasted, or kept the look it had had before. It had to be tasted and enjoyed in motion, as it passed – almost as if it lived and, being alive, could die.
The question at hand, though, was what its nature was. Even the same witness might give varying accounts. Dante in Paradise, surrounded by radiance both physical and intellectual – and under the guidance of his beloved, Beatrice, herself an avatar of light – described it not only as manna but also as rays, razor-sharp, and as the petals of a flower. Mostly, however, he moved among threads and filaments. He met souls (being all light) whose rays hid them ‘like a creature swathed in its own silk’. Other effects reminded him of the terrestrial night air ‘threaded thick’ with moonlight, and the moon herself girdled with rainbow webs.22
The thickness of these threads did not vary, Beatrice told him. Light was altered, and then superficially and briefly, only by the substances it mixed with and the bodies it shone through on its journey away from God. God, meanwhile, took on the image of a fabricant, not merely thinking and singing light but working and weaving it continually. Herbert, longing to reach Him, doubted he could struggle so far by the straight-slanting sunbeam that fell on the counterpane of his bed; but he hoped he might climb ‘by thy Silk twist let down from Heav’n to me’, the shining multicoloured threads that made creation patiently wound in, as if by his mother’s fingers. (Hopkins described larksong this way, ‘new-skeinèd’, as well as summer lightning, ‘the shivering of a bright riband string which had … danced back into its pleating’.) Newton noticed that the coloured fibres of some silks were prismatic, shot through with light, depending on how he viewed them. Poets could reverse the process, veining light with silk.
Whether or not creation was a web spun out by the First Cause, the whole world might be sewn through with light like a tapestry. Alles sich zum Ganzen webt, ‘All weaves itself into a whole’, as Goethe wrote of the light-swarming Night scene in Faust. Light became, to Julian of Norwich, ‘our clothing, wrapping and enfolding us’; Hopkins felt luminosity pass over him like blowing linen. Palmer recorded golden light lapping a hillside, ‘velvety and real in texture’, and was enchanted by ‘the fine meshes, the aeriel tissues, that dapple the skies of spring’. Ravilious, engraving his sun as geometrical lattices and webs, extended those webs to form trees, grass and birds flying. The nets with which Apollo hunted, fine as his shimmering never-scissored hair, were those Blake saw, of golden twine, hung by Three Virgins from the branches of the trees of the world at dawn.23 They were the ‘webbes’ and fyldor fin, rows and strands of gold wire, which the jeweller-author of Pearl recalled, raying out from the rocks of Paradise; or the ‘most exquisite net’ Coleridge described in a stream in Glen Nevish,
all whose loops are wires of sunshine, gold finer than silk, beside yon Stone the Breeze seems to have blown them into a Heap, a rich mass of light, light spreading from the loop holes into the interstices…
In several of the experiments that followed Newton’s, investigating how rays changed shape as they passed through apertures, the now-presumed-material light was represented by a thread.
The sweeping hillsides of East Sussex often seem to hide not hard bones of chalk, but a loom of light. Ploughed fields are fine-combed; fresh-planted ones are savagely raked with white. Every time Ravilious painted or engraved the Downs he showed a warp and weft elaborately cross-hatched with brightness, under orderly cross-woven clouds. (There was indeed a warp in clouds, Hopkins wrote, as there was in lime or sycamore leaves; spotting a rack of them, ‘I made out the make of it … cross-hatching in fact.’) It is the same pattern you find in wool snagged on a fence, teased by the wind or carded with a teasel, pulled out of tight curls or spirals into delicate netting and then to single strands.
These strands, so fine they are almost vanishing, might be taken for an intimation of the feel of light. Sometimes it forms a soft screen over the sea, warp threads to the wave-weft of lavender, pale green and ultramarine. Near the spot where I first noticed this, on the Downs above east Brighton, there is another memorial, arranged by a padlocked stirrup gate overlooking the sea. Cards of the Sacred Heart are pinned up there, with small bouquets of withered flowers left on the grass; but no name anywhere. Beside the wire fence stands a faded planking sign declaring ‘All you need is love’; and on the gate in chalk, the inevitable medium of this country, the unending mantra ‘Love Love Love …’ Love and light weave easily together. On warm days, when the air seems layered with light-threads, squeaking swifts dart through as if to stitch the scene and hour. They vanish into Ravilious’s oak-framed Sussex barns, where doors stand open to the light and the ridge tiles are outlined with lichen like gold paint.
Such weaving was not necessarily one way, from the central sun-source outwards. For centuries scholars believed that each created thing sent forth an ‘effluence’ of its own. Empedocles taught that tiny particles flowed out from objects continually, each ‘effluence of fire’ making contact with the fire in the eye; al-Kindi, the most influential Islamic philosopher of the ninth century, held that everything in the world ‘produces rays in its own manner, like stars’.24 Well into the industrial age this idea lingered, not least with Hopkins, who noted of streamer-clouds over Kemble End in Lancashire that ‘what you look hard at seems to look hard at you’. Perhaps, then, an infinite confluence of these rays filled the world and wove everything together. Though they were usually invisible, al-Kindi wrote, and varied in power from weakest leaf to strongest star, they streamed out in all directions and influenced the whole of life.25 Through their movement, as through light in the beginning, forms were created and changed into other forms. ‘All things,’ he concluded, ‘came to be and exist through rays.’
The human spirit and imagination, too, were thought to send out rays, and these had the power of moving external things if they were close and strong enough. So the rays from each subject and object, meeting and intermingling, made the phenomena both of sight and, in human cases, love. Duns Scotus, Hopkins’s favourite, taught that in each such encounter the beholder, too, was changed. Dante certainly believed it. He referred to his eyes as le luce, light themselves, for as they mirrored the smiling gaze of Beatrice, ‘so full of the sparkle of love and so divine’, they became what she was. Hopkins in
his solitude experienced it too, describing ‘those fine radiating lines of light which dart out from and back to the candle as the eyes of the beholder are slightly lowered or raised’. He called them ‘trambeams’, after the finest sort of twisted silk. ‘What the Eye is to the Light, & the Light to the Eye, that interchangeably is the Lover to the Beloved,’ Coleridge wrote, and heartily wished it were true in the lost cause of Sara Hutchinson and himself. After all, even flowers did it:
’Tis said, in Summer’s evening hour
Flashes the golden-colour’d flower
A fair electric flame.
And so shall flash my love-charg’d eye
When all the heart’s big ecstacy
Shoots rapid thro’ the frame!
In a long footnote he explained the ‘very curious phenomenon’ of light flashing from flowers. This had been observed in marigolds in Sweden, and also in descending order of vividness in the monkshood, the orange lily and the Indian pink. It happened at sunset when the atmosphere was clear. But the flowers, unlike him, did not anticipate an answering flame.
That was just as well, for the light-exchange was dangerous. Once ‘eye-beames twisted’, in John Donne’s graphic phrase, there might be no escape.26 Dante described how those reciprocal beams of love contained thoughts and emotions as tiny spiritelli, minute spirits that pierced the heart, igniting it as the rays from stars called forth the virtue of precious stones. Everything that was said, seen, felt or thought therefore added to the texture of light and the way it moved. If the sentiment was strong enough, it kindled fire. He wrote of sparks and flames flickering from Beatrice – not only when she stood in Paradise resplendent, but also when she had first appeared to him, nine years old, in church in Florence in her ‘goodly crimson’ dress. Her radiance then was nothing to the sparks that came from him, much as he tried to conceal them. He could no more hide them than his trembling hands, or the pallor of his long, hawk-nosed, melancholy face.
Scientists now say that the eye and objects send out no rays to encounter light, and that there is no entangling. Photons sent to the retina simply reflect from the surface, and go no further: the act of seeing is all they achieve. Yet the effect on those who see may be incalculably powerful; so within the eyes of nature-gazing poets, and certainly within the eyes of lovers, that tender twisting still goes on. Take the pair who, here on the slope of Firle, lie in a mosaic of glancing hawthorn leaves and sky; and who, between plucking grass and pretending to read, steal lightning looks at each other’s luminous skin and light-teased hair and, perhaps irrecoverably, the eyes themselves. Heaven knows, but there are webs here.
These ubiquitous threads, sometimes pulsing in rhythm, suggested to some thinkers that light sounded. If it eternally echoed the first word, or first note, some music or even speech must ripple out of it. Dante spoke of hell’s darkness as d’ogne luce muto, mute of all light; for in Paradise light, composed of souls, had continually sung hymns and talked to him, the sound ‘like pipes filled only with the breath of holy thoughts’.27 Al-Kindi’s rays were agents and expressions of the heavenly harmony that directed all things. Newton too, in some of his demonstrations of colour breaking out of light, fell back on the mathematics of the sequence of notes in a scale.
Coleridge perhaps presumed this affinity when, coming out of London once into buttercup fields and the glint of a winding river, he seemed to hear music playing. He presumed it again when he hung an Aeolian harp in a window of his cottage in Clevedon, in Somerset, anticipating (as he wrote long afterwards) ‘a light in sound, a sound-like power in light’. The jasmine on the wall and the bean flowers in the far fields perfumed the night, small stars; his favourite evening star hung ‘serenely brilliant’ before him; and the harp with its ‘long sequacious notes’ made a ‘soft floating witchery of sound’, not unlike theirs:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought …
Yet if light moved like intricate fingers or the wind through strings, who heard it? Several writers reported whispers in lamps, but some other agency – soot, wax, small beetles – usually explained them. ‘Light hath no tongue, but is all eye,’ wrote Donne, as neatly confident as modern scientists are. The author of Pearl came closest to ascribing a sound to it, as he stumbled unexpectedly, half-blinded, into the woods and rocks of a landscape somewhere near heaven:
As burnished silver sheer leaves slide
That trill so thick on every side,
When gleam of glades against them glides,
With shimmering sheen full shrill they shine …
Light here was sharp again, with the chink of silver or glass. It purled along leaf and branch, but the word was trylle, like the song of the lark or the reed pipes of Palmer’s shepherd boys. Precious stones on a stream-bed, emeralds and sapphires, glente thurz glas yat glowed and glyzt: percussive again, like Sanctus bells. The words remain in use, glint, gleam, glitter, glance; a xylophone might play them. As for shimmering, shining, sheer, those belonged to harps, as Coleridge deduced and as Blake heard – all the while painting, as Palmer declared, ‘in the highest key of light’. Schrylle became birdsong, in full chorus through Chaucer’s casement as the sun rose, or at evening, as Clare walked in the woods, when ‘twittering spangles glow the leaves between’. At dawn Faust heard trumpets and trombones, Blake the hosanna chorus of the heavenly host; in an English seaside town like Eastbourne, the strengthening glare of morning sun and sea often goes hand in hand with the brittle and blown-away sound of a military band.
Though there may be no physical connection, at times light and sound can uncannily complement each other. On the Downs, beside skylark song, there is often a strange soft piping and keening that seems to emerge from nowhere, or only from the radiance around. It might almost be an echo of that ‘ineffable’, ‘mournful’ sound which Hermes Trismegistus connected with the birth of light. It comes, in fact, from tubular steel gates, from apertures in fence posts and from looping barbed wire. India has an instrument made simply of holes in a bamboo staff that is planted where the air moves. The Sussex equivalent, at a gate just east of Seaford Head, is a post of pierced steel that focuses both the light and the notes it seems to make. Those notes can whisper too – at very close quarters, when all else is silent – from random snail-shells by the path, blowing across the illuminated rim that is also lit from within, as if light and wind have joined their tones together.
Another strange affinity is between light and human whistling. I noticed this one autumn day, sitting on the hillside above Hope Gap, as a walker went whistling down the track below me towards the undulating white cliffs of the Seven Sisters. Something in the sound – the whistler’s very confidence, perhaps, that he was the centre of the world – seemed to fix the scene around him in that moment, from the curtain-fall of light on the cliffs, to the reverso sweep of a gull landing, to the grey lean of a gate, to the wind-gusting grass. Those high trilling notes, again like the song of the lark, pinned down and sharpened everything, as a burst of sun would have done.
The only physical link is that sound and light both vibrate; and since this was so, perhaps light was not made of particles after all. Perhaps it was a wave. Robert Hooke, a sharp contemporary critic of Newton’s theories, thought light was a pulse of the aether, that invented apogee of all elements which was presumed to act as a medium for the others.29 In the nineteenth century André-Marie Ampère supposed it to be waves in some kind of electrical aether; Michael Faraday thought it a vibration of magnetic lines of force. James Clerk Maxwell identified it as an electromagnetic wave-form in aether more subtle and immaterial than had been adduced before. All agreed that far from being the very swiftest, finest sort of matter, light was not matter at all, but energy in motion. It made its presence felt not materially, but by action: by the curl of the wave and the flow of the stars and even, perhaps, by dancing.
I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth …
… as Sydney Carter’s hymn goes, to the old Shaker tune.
Chambers Dictionary calls light an ‘agency’, neatly straddling the notions of matter and force. For science now makes light both waves and particles, the particles being the subatomic quanta suggested by Max Planck and discovered, or presumed, by Einstein. He described these ‘photons’ in 1905 as ‘a collection of independent particles of energy’ – and, like everything else in his universe, equally in motion everywhere. Einstein’s ‘bundlings’ or ‘packages’ of light were not objects in themselves; they had no mass, and were really mere hypotheses for the oddities that occurred when light was considered only as a wave. Yet, as a theory, this has proved as precise and predictive as could be hoped for. (Coleridge lightly grazed this thought, in his notebook: ‘Sir Isaac Newton’s [Hypothesis] of Light/ each Particle every where in the course of Eternity.’30)
But Newton, the great dissecter of light – the man who had first demonstrated that a prism split it into differently refrangible rays making different colours – never defined what it was.31 He was inclined to think it was tiny globular bodies, or ‘corpuscles’, not least because God seemed to have made everything out of ‘solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles’, no matter how small. The fact that rays of light entered and left his prisms in ‘right Lines’ and ‘successive Parts’, and that they had opposing sides, confirmed that theory in his mind. So did his observation that different rays appeared to have different sizes, strengths, flexibilities and dispositions imposed on them from the beginning, some being drawn as strongly to the virtue inherent in a crystal ‘as the Poles of two Magnets answer to one another’. Light, therefore, could not merely be ‘Motion or Force propagated’. On the other hand, there was a periodicity to light – a to-and-fro – and those sound-like vibrations, which were thought-provoking. He had also seen light, by continual refraction, bending into a curve.