Dawn, perception and the 'Cnutters'
Some thoughts for the Black Friday as a flash of light and golden thoughts come into sight
BLACK? Whatever anyone’s thoughts of ‘thanksgiving’ and indigenous people, or capitalist indulgence and a day of otherwise post-prandial boredom, science and nature together said something entirely different to me this morning.
The dawn that greeted me provided a pastel palette for the ultimate cinema lighting designer we know as the Sun.
Wind last night blew hard against the chimney. I appreciated the cosiness afforded by thick stone walls, feeling safe and secure as I heard the power of weather.
It also loosened a second shutter on the bedroom window. I’d had the other half shut for the last month but not the second, so the light of the dawn could wake me. I took the loosening to be nature telling me it was time to shut the second for the winter.
Nature also seemed simultaneously ironic and caring – because I didn’t see the dawn until I got to the landing window, more awake than I otherwise would have been.
The house opposite was glowing, the stone a radiant light orange in the low, refracted light. Wisps of clouds, east-west stripes, were also aglow, a light pink but set against sky that was a light blue to the south and a far more intense mid-blue to the north of west. I took a few photographs from there and from the landing below. By the time I opened the ground floor kitchen door, two minutes later, the sun was higher, the effect of the refraction had gone as had the radiance of the stone.
Those two minutes of such glorious illumination, right at the start of a day not only filled me with joy and tranquility but inspired deep though. I know too many people would attribute the sight and the emotion to a ‘god’. That seems too easy and intellectually lazy as I further gasped at the joys of physics – and chemistry and biology.
I remembered university psychology lectures about perception – how a retina is affected by radiation, how chemistry allows data from that sensor to be transmitted deeper into the brain, where the biological cells of whichever cortex it is convert it all to ‘thought’, at the same as the brain is absorbing incessant data coming from every other sensor of our bodies and combining that with each and every other thought occurring at any single millisecond. This is nature and science colliding. It is rational rather than spiritual while simultaneously existing as a transitory, amazing, ‘wonder’.
I tried to put that into the context of what I had already absorbed from reading as I had breakfast: Uber-right thugs rioting in Dublin; the right winning so many seats in the Netherlands election; whether the ‘war’ in the Middle East really will ‘pause’ so hostages and prisoners can be released, whether guns there will fall silent for a few seconds, let alone a few days; at the inability of Westminster politicians to rationalise the UK’S dire need for health and social care workers from overseas with the vitriol of media moguls as ‘mega-influencers’, fuelling up a frenzied fear of the country ‘changing’.
To lift a reference from the Dark Ages (500-1500 CE), such people seem to be unconsciouslly ‘channelling’ Cnut, King of England from 1016 until he died in 1035.
He’s probably better known as Canute, the king who tried to turn back the tide. He was presented to those of us at school in the 1960s and 70s as too stupid to know he couldn’t do that. Nowadays, the stunt is regarded as an attempt to show those around him that he knew royalty – and therefore government – is largely powerless in the face of progress.
Government can steer more than direct, if that nuance makes sense. The political right – anywhere in the world – appears collectively as Cnuts or Cnutters, trying to hold back tides, ignorant of their own inherent frailty or trying to deny it. That the terms are either an anagram of the C word or a a slur on mental health add to their tragic-comic relevance, I fear.
As for the Middle East, I return the mantra: ‘Vengeance begets vengeance, sayeth the people’.
We know Noël Coward was thinking about ‘cheap music’ when he prefaced that expression with ‘strange how powerful’ and followed it with ‘can be’.
Being here in France, I look anew, afresh, at so much of the world around me, seeing leaves blowing round la place never still reminding me of the huge, solitary, Henry Moore statue in the middle of a field at the West Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Its surface reflected autumn clouds scudding across the sky. Look at it for a moment too long and the juxtaposition of movement and stillness could blow one’s mind.
The only way to see and appreciate the nuances of the light itself is to use photography to record a still image; one that can only be replicated or copied in another format.
I cannot comprehend science and nature when I compare and contrast stillness and movement that way. The enormity seems to try to defy the intellect.
Is it really strange how powerful so much can be? Or do we simply ignore the question as too intimindating, threatening?
I dislike the word ‘spiritual’ because it has been usurped by religion. The Oxford English Dictionary says it relates to the human ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’.
‘Soul’ means something to me; ‘spirit’ – because of religion – does not.
Soul is atheistic. Soul is psychological. Psychological and physical. Where neurotransmitters meet emotion; create emotion.
I checked the meaning of ‘soulful’: ‘Full of soul or feeling; of a highly emotional, spiritual, or aesthetic nature; expressing or evoking deep emotion,’ says the OED. Too often, that word has negative, depressed connotations.
That first sight of daylight this morning was, yes, ‘highly emotional’, but in the most glorious and joyous of ways. I found myself wishing that the most majestic music that reflects and expresses this has been composed and is performed ‘in the name of (a) god’. I wished the libretto of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio Creation suggested that ‘science is telling the glory of li-ife’ – which just about scans – rather than ‘heavens’ and ‘god’.
A ‘good’ newspaper feature article usually ends by returning to its starting point. This early morning meander through the synapses does the same: the reflection of refraction in the immobilier – the immobile real estate – of the stone of the house opposite truly was an instantaneous paeon to science and nature.
And no, I’m not going shopping.