Tracing light

Now, even in the dark, she was no diva.
– that glow-in-the dark rabbit
next to my narrow bed.
A tiny thing, in daylight appearing
that dishcloth colour of phosphorescent silicon,
her complexion dirtier
with each childhood year gone by.
The rubber smell of her.
The most modest of companions, sitting faithfully
on my bedside table.
Red bow in her plastic non-existant rabbit hair,
polka dot dress painted onto her chubby body.
Just waiting
for her time to shine.

After lights out, she would give off a soft glow
for an hour or so, nothing extravagant.
With each curious touch
by human hands
less light was absorbed by her skin
less light was let out again.
But nonetheless: Charlotte the rabbit
was the only light in the room.

A phosphorescent material,
like the fake skin of that rabbit
absorbs energy from light sources
– the ceiling light, the pale spring sun through unwashed windows,
from the desk lamp above the homework in the evenings –
absorbs it as a sponge absorbs water.
The shine of glow-in-the-dark objects
is that stored and stolen light,
gradually released back out.

Gently comforting children afraid of the dark,
calming insomniacs,
helping the alterered state of mind of dancers at a rave,
adding magic to everyday life in a way
that already feels obsolete, 80’s-like, in the steady light of
our security blanket shaped screens
illuminating every part of ourselves.

I am tracing light, tracing life, facing the bright light of day after the longest night. Tracing light, tracing life, waiting for that first star piercing the August sky after the stretched-out summer. Waiting for Orion’s hourglass shape to bring back the measure to our lives. Wanting there to be a difference between silence and sound, between nighttime and dawn, between the peaceful truce and the gleam of knives.

Tracing light, tracing life, following those short-lived fireflies, calling their mates with their bright backsides. Which part of you glows in the dark? Do you light up a room?

My grandmother, who did light up a room
not in a sunny but more in a steady beacon kind of way
allegedly saw a UFO once
above a country road in the south of Sweden.
She stopped the car on the hard shoulder
to watch the bright light
first hover, then take off, at an otherwordly speed.
She told me this story like it was a secret.

To look for those lights in the sky, to look for life, just driving by. To look for those who look for lights, those who are never in the dark about anything. Where did it go at such speed, our adolescent want to believe?

In the flourescent Wind Caves of South Dakota
scientists go into the dark
to learn more about potential extraterrestrial life.
If things can live in these deep, cold caves,
why not in those beneath the surface of Mars
or on the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter?

In those caves in South Dakota
the glow-in-the-dark minerals
carry the secret of life.
The flourescence from impurities
lodged within the Earth millions of years ago:
chemical fossils of organisms of the past.
The pinks, blues and greens that glow
when you shine a light on the rocks,
tell the story of organic compounds.
Indicating where water once carried
minerals down from the surface,
leaving traces of the microorganisms
that once lived on these rocks.
Like ancient rivers of an ecosystem
meandering as strangely to us
as the grammar of a foreign language
or as the unknown colours of space.

Tracing light is tracing water is tracing life. Tracing light, tracing life, spotting the rhythmic flare of a lighthouse from the ocean’s thick and liquid night. Tracing light, tracing water, tracing life, finding comfort in the neon signs at the edge of a city after spending time in the wilderness. Trying not to hold on too tight to this one and single, stubborn and elusive life.

And those flourescing hyalite opals
discovered in Zacatecas in Mexico in 2013.
In incandescent light, the rock appears near colourless:
the pale yellow of the horse of death.
While in indirect sunlight
a vivid yellowish green.
So, not only will it glow under a UV torch
but also in natural sunlight.
It is a very rare thing.
Its green luminiscence comes
from traces of uranium.
The opals form in hot spring environments
in Namibia and in the US, and in Mexico
where the small deposit in Zacatecas
is now completely worked out.

Upon finding out they are all out of the ground,
I immediately become obsessed with owning one.
Glowing on my nightstand, perhaps,
or taken out to show to special visitors.
A party trick, a trickery, a flickering trace of radioactivity.
Browsing those amateur photos on eBay I wonder
where that light fits into my life.

Tracing light, tracing life, erasing all stories layered by the slowest time. Tracing light, mining lives, selling the last rocks to the highest price. Imagine: tracing light, tracing life, shedding a light and then leaving, minding the traces of ancient lives, leaving the last of that marvellous glow for another time, another future, leaving the glow for another starless night.

And on that summer’s evening in the 1760s:
Elizabeth Linnaeus, nineteen years old, in her father’s garden.
How she, in the fading light, noticed
how the «yellow … brilliant» flowers of the nasturtium
appeared to gleam unexpectedly brightly.
Almost like flashes or sparks.
Fascinated by the phenomenon, Elizabeth,
who had not been allowed any schooling
but encouraged in her botanical interest by her famous father,
published her findings in the article
«Om Indianska Krassens Blickande» («On the twinkling of Indian Cress»),
in the Acts of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for 1762.
The effect became known as the «Elizabeth Linnaeus phenomenon».

Slightly obsessed with the brave new world of electricity,
contemporary scholars believed the «flashing flowers»
had something to do with phosphorescence or «electric materials».
It was brought to fame by romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge
who both, with the futility of all human poets,
tried to capture this evening event in words.
The poets, however, believed, just like Elizabeth herself,
this flashing quality of the yellow flowers
to be an optical rather than an electrical phenomenon.
That was later proven by a professor Thomas,
who concluded it to be caused
by an image of red light
moving across the retina of the eye.
So Elizabeth, you were right: the gleam
of the flowers is not actually
an inherent flourescence,
but resides quite literally
in the eye of the beholder.

Tracing light, tracing life, spotting that crack of the door. The half-light, the leaving light, the bright desperate glow of marigold on a summer’s night. Tracing light, trick of the eye, flickering chances of a different life. Desperately seeking the flashes of light, the flashes of life, the shedding of the yellow dress that you once wore.

On my way up that hill,
just before they cut down the trees,
on my favourite path one night,
letting my feet find the way across.

On the powder pink trunk of a pine tree:
a single drop of resin caught the light of the moon, and
my eye.
In its singularity it gleamed
like the tiny diamond on my first engagement ring.
It was asking me to touch it.

That one light
capturing the last year in the life of that tree.

I stopped to look at it and to breathe the night air,
hearing the tawny owl
calling from the black tangle of treetops.

Did I reach for it?
Could I stop myself from bursting that drop,
from dissolving that light,
from taking what that pine tree had pressed out,
claiming it as mine?
I did let the moonlight hang, mirrored and contained
in that gem,
leaving it as the only light
in that non-electric wooded house.

Tracing light, tracing life, letting the small and the bright shed a much greater light on our poor and human and – allegedly – enlightened minds. Tracing those lives with our deceiving and insufficient eyes, irises hungry for riches, comforting and gleaming lies. We trace the light until we can see clearly, that’s when we know it’s time to close our eyes.

Until our cells and hearts themselves turn into that tiny glimmer, a flourescence for future cavedwellers to find.