Sunday, October 22, 2006
Illumination
Some nights, I’m not ready to turn out the lights when Kel is. She needs to get up early, but I don’t; she’s all worn to a frazzle by a long exciting day of competitive sports and international intrigue, but I’m not. Sometimes that means I stay up late at the QWERTY keyboard or the television, but that’s not always the right choice. Sometimes, in fact, I enjoy coming to bed and just reading my big book (barely 100 pages left in 7 Pillars!) or writing my little writings. It’s a relaxing way to invite some gentle slumbers.
For me, it’s relaxing, anyway. I lie there with my book or my pad and ease my mind by the light of my grandma Delores’ 2nd Empire vaselamp. She had a pair of them wired up, as I recall, from antique vases she’d bought in France. We need to replace the plug on one of them; the other continues to grace my nightstand. However, it’s not what you’d call “focused” lighting. It pretty much lights the whole room up, really. And, given that, sometimes it interferes with Kel getting the sleep she needs.
Well, I may have come up with an answer to this dilemma – one that doesn’t involve Kel having to wear some sort of photon-blocking technology: it’s a mini-lamp, a “reading light” that clips to my book with a small, bright LCD lamp on an adjustable gooseneck wire. It’s just enough to illuminate one page at a time, leaving the whole rest of the room delightfully dark. Kel can curl over and sleep peacefully, unconcerned by startling brightness, and I can read or write in the strange isolation of a burst of light while otherwise surrounded by stygian darkness. The little lamp even makes the rest of the room seem, by contrast, that much darker than it really is.
This experience of localized illumination affects my experience as a reader and a writer, too, in unexpected ways. As I read 7 Pillars, which remains one of the most idiosyncratically punctuated and obscurely vocabularized 750 pages I’ve ever hefted, the words seem to swim up to me out of the dark of my bedroom, a century-old story rising to the level of my awareness by virtue of a few precious square inches of blue-tinted light. Shining thus in isolation, the text seems to reflect new meanings back to me – intended, unintended, expanded, ironic…. Under the spotlight of the reading lamp, Lawrence is brought back to life in a manner that almost seems deeper, if not more real, than reality could have been. As I sink towards sleep, tempted to drowse by the darkness all around me and by Kel’s deep, regular breathing beside me, I feel the book oscillate between literature, truth, and dream, with the spotlight leading it, and me, from each to the next.
My experience of writing, too, is altered when undertaken by the tight beam of the reading lamp. I take my ratty little notebook in hand but, familiar though it is, under the small blue beam in the blackness of my sleeping chamber, it seems – not just fresh, but strangely unfamiliar The blank page lures me and coaxes me. A notion that spawned a brief notation in my memo pad is magnified in the hole in the darkness. My attention, uncontested, focuses on that shred of thought, locks in on it and examines it microscopically. Each word I write seems imbued with depth, gives rise in its ellipse of light to new ideas, different directions, and shadings of meanings as various and subtle as the gradations of light and darkness on the page. I write, in my spot of light, as if the words were rising up out of the page, or were born, dreamlike, of the very darkness.
In the morning when I review my newly-minted words on the bus to work, I can’t tell any difference between readinglamp writing and the usual crap I always come up with. It reads pretty much the same. But while I’m at my writing or my reading under that $2 gooseneck LED, I experience a whole new dimension of the word “illumination.”
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As an admission how long I’ve left this in the notebook, I finisheded 7 Pillars about a month ago. The last section was very stirring and much easier to read. I don’t recommend it, but I’m glad I read it. Twice.
