BY RACHEL BUSSE
My favorite sound is the heavy click of an old light switch, the kind you have to push a bit before it pops. Suddenly filament glows hot, suddenly a warm buzz fills, and it will burn like this, uninterrupted, until the tungsten blows. I like to listen to a strong glow too; the fluorescent chatter of a motel vacancy sign sits right with me, especially in the humidity of deep summer, the electricity near-criminal, given the heaviness sopping in the air. But there’s nothing better than the good-old-fashioned pop buzz, pop buzz of a light switch. The first time I met a strong switch like this was in the Nebraska farmhouse of an old family friend. The house is a beautiful antique thing, with chipped white paint, wrap-around porches, and chickens out back. The only way to the top floor of the house is a steep, scratched-up staircase hidden behind a heavy door, all lit by a single bare bulb just at the top. As a kid I’d hit the switch over and over, listening for that pop and watching for a burning blow. Walking home and flipping on the porchlight is, to this day, my favorite of all sounds. Flip, filament, fire, repeat.
Here’s the thing: I’ve never met a marquee I didn’t like. This is partly to do with the fact that a marquee is a joy-promising epithet for a movie theater or motel; it’s a direct and flashy pledge to small indulgences. The first recorded usage of the modern marquee was at an American circus in 1930, probably used outside one of those giant red and white tents, the contents of which surely included mustachioed-strongmen in stripes and delicate trapeze artists dripping in glitter and fake pearls. I bet you the whole thing glowed. That’s what they do, marquee lights, they glow and dazzle. The whole point of a marquee, of course, is to catch and force your gaze. They’re meant to be big and bright enough to be read from the road, just driving by. But I’ve pulled over to keep gawking. I can’t help but chase their chasing lights, watching them wink and blink as I am drawn in, all mothy and magnetic.
In that same manner, I am drawn to the gold, the shiny, the reflective, like a bird hoarding treasures to decorate a nest. I am drawn, it seems, to all that is light. It’s part of me, as far back as I remember, I’ve wanted to bathe in the bright. Nearly every day growing up, my mother yelled at me about my chronic habit of leaving the lights on, rightfully citing skyrocketing bills and wasted energy. But even today as an energy-bill-paying-adult, I am compelled to turn on every light in my wake.
Here is what I know about light: most of it isn’t visible to the human eye. This is a continually disappointing fact. I’m particularly jealous of common bees, who can see colors we can’t. When I first learned about this, the teacher suggested that many animals see what we can only imagine, but that’s not quite right. We can’t dream a new color.
The speed of light is approximately 3 x 108 meters per second in a vacuum. Apparently that’s fast enough to go around the Earth 7.5 times in a single second. But we can’t actually do that, for nothing is as fast as light. If it were, perhaps we could talk time travel. Now, space isn’t actually a true vacuum—apparently there is no such natural thing—but it gets pretty close. The inside of an incandescent lightbulb tries hard to be, but falls short.
Light comes packaged as photons, little packets of energy with no mass, so not quite matter. A photon is a funny thing, because its edges are fuzzy. They don’t exactly bounce, but they can be absorbed and reemitted. Some photons have had an incredibly long life as they sally around the universe looking for a spot to land, into some unsuspecting future. But to a photon, this takes no time at all. The noble photon moves, of course, at the speed of light and thereby she is at all possible points between her source and eventual recipient at all times.
But I suppose if you think about it, we only see light, and it’s all we might ever see. We either look straight to the source or we see other light reflected off of everything that doesn’t emit its own. Our eyes, then, are simply light gathering, telescopic tools. Cameras and telescopes attempt to act like our human eyes, which sees things at a resolution of about 576 megapixels. We’ve yet to come up with a camera quite that good, but if it were better, could we even see?
We now understand that our eyes merely absorb light, but it wasn’t always this way. Light is mythic, light is lively; light suggests meaning, intentionality, presence. For a very long time, the commonly held understanding of light was based in something called emission theory, which proposes that our eyes emit light that helps us see, especially in the dark. First suggested in the 5th century BC, Empedocles described how Aphrodite made the human eye from the four main elements, the goddess acting a little heavy handed with fire. Plato tended to agree. The concept of light beams flowing from our pupils might sound silly now, but they only knew what they saw, citing the way that dogs and cats’ eyes seem to glow in the dark as evidence. Some theorize that this is actually where the concept of saluting comes from; Greek soldiers did it as a direct way to shield their eyes from the gaze of more powerful commanders.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Greeks and the rest of the emission theory believers. Anyone who’s ever looked at the moon should as well. All things celestial have probably been misunderstood at some point in time. Space has always been daunting and vaguely horrifying to me, much like the deep sea in its vast unknowableness. The deep sea, though, is void of light (an unlucky fact for any deep sea dwellers). But in the sky, under the silky blues and greys, there is a universe full to the brim of things we can hardly begin to imagine. We are mostly stuck here, in a world that is simultaneously the biggest thing we ever encounter, yet cosmically miniscule. All we know is that for us, the sun will keep rising, and we will keep turning towards the sky.
The first time I ever looked through a telescope, I saw the moon. It was a cool October night during my first semester of college, and I approached the small telescope with a sense of timidity I have since chucked away. It was beautiful, a half-lit waxing gibbous up there in all its splendor and glory. As I peered through the eyepiece, the child in me expected to see something horrifying. All I saw was the bumpy, pockmarked surface, bright and burning. In our most familiar astronomical object, I caught a faint taste of why we take on the vast endeavor of opening up the sky to parse meaning out of what feels like a void. There is raw, human satisfaction in exploration and wonder.
All this beauty, all this resolve to explore and grow and learn, rooted in a mere reflection of light. As it turns out, the reason that cats and dogs look like they’re glowing from behind their eyes is because of reflection. These animals’ eyes contain a layer of tissue called the tapetum lucidum, meaning “bright tapestry.” Evolutionarily speaking, this super-reflecting layer means that any small amount of light will be sufficient enough to hunt through the night. But the layer also creates eyeshine, which is what turns animal eyes into glowing marbles when reflecting the sharp, concentrated light of headlights or a camera’s flash.
We believe these things glow—eyes, the moon—when everything feels dark. What feels like total darkness never really is. When we cannot see the sun, it seems implausible to blame it for the way the moon shines. When a cat’s eyes glow in the dark, we don’t assume it to be reflecting residual streetlight creeping in from between our blinds.
Total darkness is hard to come by; we primarily deal in shadows. I’m a fan of the shadowy, the grey in-betweens. I even like the near-dark and the deep sleeps that accompany it. But it is the purity of blackness—the concept of the complete void of light—that I have trouble with. On Earth, I’ve only ever heard of this existing in something like a cave, where without some sort of light source you cannot see your own hand six inches from your face. “Cave blindness” is the widespread belief that if you spend more than three days in total darkness, you’ll go blind. In reality, our eyes are fairly used to adjusting—we’d probably only have to worry about going blind if we were quite young and never exposed to light at all. But even though the whole cave blindness thing is probably folklore and bogus, I understand the fear. When we cannot even see the parts of ourselves we are sure exist—a hand, a leg, etc.—I would have a lot of trouble not going mad, never mind blind. Beyond the un-breathability, this helps explain why we rarely make it to the ocean’s depths, especially not for long.
That isn’t to say we like all lights, though, for the unidentifiable freaks us out. We can look to the Paulding light for evidence of that. The Paulding light shines mysteriously over a hill in Paulding, Michigan and has been popularly attributed to the likes of aliens, ghosts, or even swamp activity. Though it’s probably just the result of distant headlights being reflected, many like the mystery. Even in the potentially eerie, there is more to be gained than there is in the terror of total darkness.
So, I am greedy for light, and grateful for the guidance it provides. Our eyes have to be master-adjusters because of how the world flows around us. We require perspective, and it sincerely matters how you look at a thing.
Painters get this. Robert Delaunay, a Parisian painter active during the eras of Cubism, Orphism, and Abstract Art was famous for his belief that “breaking up of form by light creates colored planes. These colored planes are the structure of the picture, and nature is no longer a subject for description but a pretext." Delaunay’s most popular series is of Saint-Sévrin’s, a gothic cathedral on the Left Bank of Paris. It was there where he set up to paint the same corner of the church eight different times, hovering primarily in the rich blue, purple, and green tones. Throughout his series, light was shifting always—giving a new color, tone, and even shape to the images. This is testament to the power of shifting light; his meticulous reimagining feels to me like a study in context, with shadow, curve, and color all up for debate.
Delaunay’s experiments remind me of those videos focused on someone’s face, where the light source is moved around behind the camera, creating a kaleidoscope of different human faces. The way a person looks depends so intensely on where the light hits—a shift in light angle creates an entirely new face. The eyes, of all things, stay the most constant throughout. If I didn’t have those eyes to trust, I couldn’t even be sure of the video’s authenticity. It’s uncanny and unnerving to watch something that we typically consider constant—the human nose, lips, cheek, chin, or even the archways in a gothic cathedral—turn and turn under the influence of light into something new.
The way that light shapes and chisels is something portrait photographers don’t have the luxury to ignore. In one lighting technique, the photographer positions the lights so that half of the subject’s face is dark, save for a triangle of light under the eye. This is referred to as Rembrandt lighting, a reference to the Dutch painter’s style. There’s something in that triangle of light—something artists have been craving for over 400 years. Perspective matters, and light gives it to us.
Kitt Peak National Observatory is about 50 miles southwest of Tucson on the Tohono O’odham Nation. The peak is high when compared to the flatness of the desert that sprawls all the way from the airport, dotted with cacti that put the ones in my bedroom at home to shame. The observatory is home to “the most diverse collection of astronomical observatories on Earth” for optical, infrared, and solar observing. The National Observatory was founded in 1958 on the highest mountain in the Quinlan Range. The grounds are leased from the Tohono O’odham Nation under the agreement that the observatory can operate for as long as the National Optical Astronomy Observatory desires. Should they ever choose to close down, the agreement is that the land will be returned in the same state that it was originally leased, with no trace left of the 22 optical or 2 radial telescopes. That practically means that it will never be shut down, as it would cost more to return it to its original form than it would to just keep running.
In the afternoon I went with my companion, the drive pushed us quickly out of Tucson's heat and up the mountain to be met with familiar cool winds. We were on a .9 meter telescope that felt like being at the end of a sunset, with the mellow, sherbet-colored light all around. Photographers and cinematographers who are specialists in light and beauty swear by something called the golden hour, which happens about an hour before the sun sets when the light turns buttery. When it hits the smooth white sides of all the observatories on the mountain, they seem glazed in some glorious marriage of the natural and the industrial. Add in the pink and orange horizon that melt into a deep blue. The inclination to dive in and see where old light kisses the new became irresistible.
At Kitt Peak, there’s no rushing. With that kind of equipment, you have the power to drink in all that old light for 20 minutes at a time without sacrificing quality. That’s quite the sip, but it takes time to get a full picture—all night, in fact. When we left after our first night observing at 6:30 am, we walked down the road to our house just before the sun began to rise. Despite the deep blueness that wrapped the mountain, I was worried about two things: my bed and how to remember what I’d seen that night.
The next night, while staring at a schedule, we noticed a note left by our neighbors at the 3.5 meter telescope about using an eyepiece. We thought it must be a mistake. My companion called over in disbelief; this sort of thing simply does not happen. It’s the kind of thing astronomers tell rumors about but never actually see. But it was no mistake. When it comes to modern astronomy, you don’t get to just stare into the eyepiece of a big long telescope and look into deep space. That sort of thing only works with large objects we can see pretty well already—the moon, Saturn, those kinds of things. Most of the time, astronomical observations are done with a camera that takes in long exposures and compiles the light, giving you data that is an image, yes, but nothing like what your eye would see if the object was in front of you. They’re usually gritty or fuzzy-looking and always in black and white; it takes multiple pictures of the same object to end up with the glossy, colorful things you see in textbooks.
So, an eyepiece on the end of a research-grade telescope is huge news. It’s a chance to see things you’ve only ever seen on a page or a screen with your bare eyes. This is not the comparatively dinky 8-inch telescope with which I first observed the moon. This was 3.5 meters across, and capable of opening up the universe in front of your very eyes.
Naturally, we ran over the second they gave us permission to come by.
The observing deck was both cold and dark—observatories of this grade are kept as close to total darkness as possible and are never heated to avoid distorting images. We shook, chilly and electrified. The attendees all seemed to be in resounding agreement; this was the literal chance of a lifetime. We waited in huddles for our turn to go up on the stepladder and see what the universe had to offer.
The universe, naturally, did not disappoint. The first object we stepped up to see was the whirlpool galaxy—the same one many intro level students take images of in lab—in what is the closest thing we can get to real time, gazing into a past that will never catch up. It was tremendously wide—I couldn’t focus on it as a whole for it was far too full of light. We followed with a globular cluster, which is a smattering of stars all in one central place. This may have been the most stunning view of my life, and due to failures of memory, I’m ironically wishing I could have snapped a picture.
Every time I think back to that evening, there’s a part of the story I tend to leave out. I forget my fascination with lights on the horizon. I’d like to say that I behaved as an astronomical purist, worried about nothing but the sky with my eyes locked upwards. But when on my tiptoes, looking out of the observation deck, I could see down the mountain and into the desert. Far off, there was a series of bright green lights that I’m still not sure I can identify, but now assume was probably border control lighting, as the observatory is quite close to the Mexican-American border. I was transfixed by these only other lights surrounding the dark, dark mountain. I don’t know how it was that they even held a candle to the ancient light above, but they did.
I guess I just like the idea of imposing our own light into the universe. I love watching fireworks, and I consider the best ones to be those that weep like willows on top of smoke legs left behind by bigger sisters now burnt out. I love the gold ones that crinkle a bit, with their spokes wilting and fizzy. They remind me of the fizzle of a neon sign on a humid, drippy night.
They remind me, too, of the Eiffel Tower that glitters every hour on the hour in the city of lights. Paris earned this moniker party due to its position as a major player during the enlightenment, and partly due to how pretty it happens to look post-twilight. In the 1860s, Paris was one of the first cities to install gas lights, and the city burned with over 56,000 lamps. The city has 33 different bridges all lit up at nighttime and over 25 miles of illuminated garland covering the Eiffel Tower. That garland—strung with almost 20,000 bulbs—could nearly light the distance of a marathon.
After the 2015 attacks, it was widely (though erroneously) reported that the Eiffel Tower went dark in reverence for the victims. The lights are actually switched off every night, but the image is still a powerful one, evoking the grief of the nation embodied in a void of the glittering, magical city we crave. But lights always go back on. When I was there after the first attacks in January, 2015, the city turned out en masse to proclaim “we are not afraid” and went out to buy copies of Charlie Hebdo. A small magazine with a readership of around 50,000 (if we’re being generous) was suddenly selling eight million copies of their survivor edition. I went out one morning rather early to see if I could get one before I left town. I didn’t know what time to arrive, so I went around 5:30 or 6:00 am in an attempt to find a magazine stand before they sold out.
I won’t belabor it, but Paris in blue is one of the finest sights I’ve ever seen. At sunrise in January, the light sort of creeps up on you, and the once deep, dark city starts to glow in all types of ultramarine. It reaches up through the bare trees—trees that look like rivers with estuaries, like lightning held in place, like veins in a wrist—and it begins to bless the cold city air. If you’ve ever wanted to see the dreamiest blend of the universe’s own light and neon, a Parisian newsstand at dawn is your best bet.
I shouldn’t discredit Paris at night either, for there is a cold, raw pleasure in wandering Parisian streets as the daylight slips away, the January sun setting early. It can be chilly. After one particularly cold evening walk, I found myself drinking too much red wine in an attempt to feel warm again. That evening, I found my way home on the metro, dazzled and dazed. I was sober enough to remember to set my wine-stained shirt to soak in the sink, but drunk enough to forget to turn the lights off. And so I slept early under the warm soft cover of red wine and lamplight.
Throughout the coldest months back home, I often find myself intentionally falling asleep on the couch, leaving the TV and string lights on all night long. I like the company, especially as the strong Minnesota wind rattles my storm windows and seeps through the old casings. During the darkest bits of a depressive January, I spent many nights on my couch with the TV left on, sound turned down and blue light flooding, feeling the pulsing light on my lids even as I slept. Light is so often a symbol of warmth and welcoming. There is a reason my parents always leave the porch light on until everyone is in for the night, and perhaps in sleeping with the TV on I create a pseudo-porchlight in my own regard, even if it’s tinged in blue.
So what is there to do with all this light? What is there to make of it? What does it mean, if anything, that every time I’m in Chicago I shell out over 20 dollars to spend an evening on the top of the John Hancock tower, just to watch the light stretch out in threads in every direction, lighting the way to the suburbs and beyond? What does it mean that I’ll spend, on average, 15 dollars per drink just to stand on the rooftop of a Brooklyn bar, underdressed but unabashedly there, gazing out on the Manhattan skyline like it’s my greenlit Daisy across the bay? Is it to feel small, or just the opposite?
Perhaps, if nothing else, a light is a reminder, a kind of universal bookmark: though we may not understand what a lumen is or how wave-particle duality works, lights go on. The world around us is big, and the universe around it is even bigger. The machinations of our world can feel violent and insurmountable even as they are invisible. But yet, the sun rises, and sets, and does so forever. Lights go on. And they are going on, always.
Rachel Busse works in the humanitarian field while moonlighting as an essayist and aspiring novelist. She holds her MA in English from the University of St. Thomas, and is published in The Summit Avenue Review, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, and elsewhere. She lives in St. Paul.