Light Traces

11. Dark Light

11 Dark Light 95 When we speak apart from nature, even in speaking of nature, the lines that separate things, the figures of their demarcation, are distinctly drawn. Light is light, and dark is dark; and if, as at twilight, they appear to blend, it will be said that they do so without either of them relinquishing anything of itself to the other. One arrives, the other withdraws, and it is only a matter of their presence, of the degree of presence of each. When one arrives and the other withdraws, then, as always, light remains light and dark remains dark. Speech attests, then, that there is no dark light; it rules out decisively the possibility that such a conjunction might occur, takes it to be no less immediately self-vitiating than the concept of a triangular square. Light may grow dim, and the things it illuminates may come to appear only faintly, only indistinctly. Light may, as at dusk, gradually give way to darkness. As night approaches and the surrounding landscape Seis am Schlern Südtirol July 96 LIGHT TR ACES recedes toward virtual invisibility, it is enveloped by both the light that remains from the day and the darkness that, almost imperceptibly, descends upon it. Yet it is as if, in driving the light from the scene, the approaching darkness remains nonetheless distinct from it, the one receding precisely as the other supervenes upon the landscape. Though it is speech that conveys the seal, perceptiveness will also–almost always–concur. And yet, there are occasions, all too rare perhaps, when dark light is to be seen. Most often clouds serve to bring it into view, for of all the things that let us see light, none let it appear in such various guises as do clouds.· · · · Picture a heavily overcast day in the high Alpine valley. Above the entire valley and the mountains surrounding it there stretches a dull gray, absolutely motionless canopy, which passively admits the daylight, as if through a remote sphere, offering nothing distinct or indicative. This entirely uniform cloud cover is cast inestimably far above even the sheer vertical peaks of the Dolomites, which soar more than a thousand meters above the valley. But it is otherwise with the wispy cloud traces, hardly compact enough to constitute really distinct clouds, that float just above the valley. Almost as if lending their motion to the rocky peaks just behind them, they offer a promise of light even on such dark days. It is not that they reflect the daylight nor that, as on sunny days, they capture the light and embody it in their almost–but not quite–insubstantial materiality. It is rather that their soft, light, drifting 97 DARK LIGHT grayness displays a certain affinity to light itself, simulating in its visible presence and steady flow the largely invisible stream in which light is cast toward the things that it will illuminate. As they not only float before the face of the mountain but also, as if in a kind of slow motion, drift into the deep crevices that articulate and in some cases divide the peaks, these wisps of cloud simulate also the power of light to penetrate wherever there is an opening for it. Overnight there was a light snowfall in the very upper reaches of the mountain, and now the white covering is especially visible on a less than vertical surface adjacent to the peaks. The look of the fresh snow under the heavily overcast sky brings out, through subtle affinity, the dark light of the clouds. At this time of year there is little chance that the thin coating of snow will survive the day; it will prove only slightly less transitory than the drifting clouds. Because the rock surface still shows through the light covering and here and there juts up through it entirely, its white is not quite the whiteness of snow. Not that it is other than white: there is no trace of color cast across it, not even from the underlying rock surface. It can only be described as dark whiteness, and it is largely on this account that it shows an affinity to the drifting clouds and, like them, simulates light in its very darkness. In all these sightings of dark light there persists a vision of a scene that, though sighted yesterday shortly after my arrival, remains so vivid that it seems still somehow present. The sky was already fairly heavily overcast, and there...