Luminous Things:
Natural, Unnatural and Metaphysical
At dusk on November
18 [1863] the sky became pitch-black except for a band of phosphorescence on
the horizon that delineated a ragged, heavy sea.[1]
In Jules Michelet’s La Mer (1861) the phenomenon of
mysterious lights at sea is introduced in this way:
Si l'on plonge dans la mer à une certaine
profondeur, on perd bientôt la lumière; on entre dans un crépuscule où persiste
une seule couleur, un rouge sinistre; puis cela même disparaît et la nuit complète
se fait, c'est l'obscurité absolue, sauf peut-être des accidents de
phosphorescence effrayante. La masse, immense d'étendue, énorme de profondeur,
qui couvre la plus grande partie du globe, semble un monde de ténèbres. Voilà
surtout ce qui saisit, intimida les premiers hommes. On supposait que la vie
cesse partout où manque la lumière, et qu'excepté les premières couches, toute
l'épaisseur insondable, le fond (si l'abîme a un fond), était une noire
solitude, rien que sable aride et cailloux, sauf des ossements et des débris,
tant de biens perdus que l'élément avare prend toujours et ne rend jamais, les
cachant jalousement au trésor profond des naufrages.[2]
If one dives into the sea to a certain
depth, the light is soon lost. One
enters into a twilight where a single colour persists, a sinister red; then
even that disappears and the night is completed, an absolute darkness, except
perhaps for an accidental and frightening phosphorescence. The mass, which extends its enormity into
enormous depths, covers almost the entire globe and seems a world of
shadows. Here is what seized and intimidated
the first humans. They assumed that life
ceased everywhere where light was gone; and lay outside the earliest settlements. The
whole sea was an immeasurable thickness, the bottom (if the abyss has a
bottom) a black solitude, made of nothing
but dry and pebbly sand, save for a few bones and other debris, all valuables
lost in the clutches of the greedy elements that took and never returned,
hiding them jealously, the dark treasure of shipwreck.
In this passage, phosphorescence
stands for the final flickering light and life before the greedy, implacable
force of the sea swallows up all colours, all remnants of life.
In another place in this same book Michelet
is more particular and less metaphysical when he describes what herring
fishermen experience when they set sail on the sea at night. It is precisely on Saint
John’s Eve, 24-25 June, five minutes after midnight, he tells us, that the
great herring fishing expeditions into the North Sea begin, the scene composed
of a mixture of moonlight reflected off the waves and the shimmery gleam of the
multitude of fish:
Des lueurs phosphorescentes ondulent ou
dansent sur les flots. «Voilà les éclairs
du hareng,» c'est le signal consacré qui s'entend de toutes les barques. Des
profondeurs à la surface un monde vivant vient de monter, suivant l'attrait de
la chaleur, du désir et la lumière. Celle
de la lune, pâle et douce, plaît à la gent timide; elle est le rassurant fanal
qui semble les enhardir à leur grande fête d'amour. Ils montent, ils montent
tous d'ensemble, pas un ne reste en arrière. La sociabilité est la loi de cette race; on ne les voit jamais
qu'ensemble. Ensemble ils vivent
ensevelis aux ténébreuses profondeurs; ensemble ils viennent au printemps
prendre leur petite part du bonheur universel, voir le jour, jouir et mourir.
Serrés, pressés, ils ne sont jamais assez
près l'un de l'autre; ils naviguent en bancs compactes. «C'est (disaient les Flamands) comme si nos dunes se mettaient à
voguer.» Entre l'Écosse, la Hollande et la Norvège, il semble qu'une île
immense se soit soulevée, et qu'un continent soit près d'émerger. Un bras s'en détache à l'est et s'engage
dans le Sund, emplit l'entrée de la Baltique. À certains passages étroits, on
ne peut ramer; la mer est solide. Millions de millions, milliards de milliards,
qui osera hasarder de deviner le nombre de ces légions? On conte que jadis,
près du Havre, un seul pêcheur en trouva un matin dans ses filets huit cent
mille. Dans un port d'Écosse, on en fit onze mille barils dans une nuit.
Phosphorescent gleams undulate or dance on
the waves. “Behold, the lightning of the
herrings!” This is the consecrated cry
which all the boats have been waiting for.
From deep below the surface a whole living world mounts up, attracted by
heat, lust and light. That from the
moon, pale and soft, pleases the timid tribe; the reassuring signal that seems
to embolden them to this great festival of love. They rise, they rise together, not one
lingering behind. Sociability is the law
of this race. Together they live
shrouded in the profound depths; together they come in springtime to play their
part in universal joy, to see the day, to find ecstasy and to expire. Locked in an embrace, pressed against one
another, they are never close enough to each other, they ride the sea in a
compact shoal. “It is,” say the Flemish sailors, “as though our very dunes set
sail.” Between Scotland, Holland and
Norway, it seems that a great island were heaving, and as though a whole new
continent were about to emerge. One arm
detaches itself in the east and attaches itself to the Sund Islands, filling
the entrance to the Baltic Sea. In
certain narrow straits, it is impossible to row; the waters are solid. Thousands upon thousands, millions upon
millions of them who dares to count the number which is legion. It is told that in ages past near Le Havre a
single fisherman found himself one morning found in his nets eight hundred thousand. In a Scottish port they filled eleven
thousand barrels in one night.
Though mentioned only in the first sentence, the entire
passage implies that in addition to the heavy mass of the herrings, their
filling up of almost the entire surface of the water between Brittany and the
North Sea, and the heaving bodies of a countless number of sexually active
bodies, this whole phenomenon is glowing with phosphorescent light. Whether the light comes from the shiny
surface of the sea reflecting moonlight in this season the year, the writhing
swarm of herrings, or some other inherent glow in the water itself, it is part
of a great springtime carnival of happiness for the fisherfolk and their
families.
After this, Michelet soon returns
to another aspect of phosphorescent light of the sea, this time explaining it
as a kind of electrical phenomenon :
Dans la grande féerie d'illumination que la
mer déploie aux nuits orageuses, la méduse a un rôle à part. Plongée, comme
tant d'autres êtres, dans le phosphore électrique dont ils sont tous pénétrés,
elle le rend à sa manière avec un charme personnel.
In the great magical illuminated show that
the sea puts on during stormy nights, the medusa plays its role. Plunged, like many other creatures into the
electric phosphorescence and which penetrates their being, they perform their parts with a personal
charm.
Not only does the term “féerie d’illumination” allude to a festival
or carnival sound and light show which forms a magical entertainment, such as
pyrotechnical displays and other illusions developed in phantasmagoria during
the early nineteenth century to tease and mystify audiences, but it also
suggests something magical and mysterious in nature herself, as here in
lightning flashes across the turbulent sky.
His focus turns to the medusa or jellyfish which like other denizens of
the deep swim through and form part of the
son et lumière show.
Then a short time later, Michelet speaks of what the sea
would be like if it did not have this secret secretion of light to illuminate
the endless darkness. The world would be
very bleak, lacking all sense of magic, and only fraught with unbearable fears.
Qu'elle est sombre, la nuit en mer, quand on
n'y voit pas ce phosphore! Qu'elles
sont vastes et redoutables, ses ténèbres! Sur terre, l'ombre est moins obscure;
on se reconnaît toujours à la variété des objets qu'on touche, ou dont on
pressent les formes; ils vous donnent des points de repère. Mais la vaste nuit
marine, un noir infini! rien et rien!... Mille dangers possibles, inconnus!
How sober is the night at sea when we
don’t see this phosphorescent light ! They are vast and full of terror,
these dark evenings! Upon the
earth, a shadow is less obscure; it is always possible to recognize the objects
one touches, or which press in upon us; they have some form of familiar shape
to them. But the vast maritime night, an
infinite darkness! Nothing at all! … A thousand possible dangers, all unknown!
This leads him to speculate on what causes the phenomenon:
On sent tout cela sur la côte même, quand on
vit devant la mer. C'est une grande jouissance quand, l'air devenant
électrique, on voit au loin apparaître un léger ruban de feu pâle. Qu'est-ce cela! On l'a vu chez soi sur le
poisson mort, par exemple le hareng. Mais vivant, dans ses grandes flottes,
dans les grandes traînées visqueuses qu'il laisse derrière, il est encore plus
lumineux. Cet éclat n'est point du tout le privilège de la mort.—Est-ce un
effet de la chaleur? Non, vous le trouvez aux deux pôles, et dans les mers
Antarctiques, et dans les mers de Sibérie. Il est dans les nôtres, et dans toutes.
We can sense that on the coast too when we
look out on to the sea. It is a great
pleasure when, the air is electrified, we can see appear in the distance a faint
ribbon of pale fire. What can it be! It
may be seen close on a dead fish, for example, a herring. But living, on the great tides, in the great
viscous trails that it leaves behind, it is even more luminous. This flashing light is no means the
privilege of death.—Its it the effect of heat? No, you find it at both poles,
and the Antarctic oceans, and in the waters of Siberia. It is in our own seas, and in all of them.
Having indicated what it is not—neither the result of
putrefying bodies nor the consequence of season warming of the oceans—Michelet
tries to explain what the phosphorescence is and where it comes from.
C'est l'électricité commune dont ces eaux,
demi-vivantes, se dégagent aux temps orageux, innocente et pacifique foudre
dont tous les êtres marins sont alors les conducteurs. Ils l'aspirent et ils l'expirent, la
restituent largement à leur mort. La mer la donne et la reprend. Le long des
côtes et des détroits, les froissements et les remous la font circuler
puissamment. Chaque être en prend,
s'en empare plus ou moins selon sa nature. Ici, des surfaces immenses de
paisibles infusoires font comme une mer lactée, d'une douce et blanche lumière,
qui ensuite plus animée tourne au jaune
du soufre embrasé. Ici, des cônes de lumière vont pirouettant sur
eux-mêmes, ou roulent en boulets rouges. Un grand disque de feu se fait (pyrosome),[3] qui part du jaune opalin,
un moment frappé de vert, puis s'irrite, éclate dans le rouge, l'orange, puis
s'assombrit d'azur. Ces changements ont quelque chose de régulier qui
indiquerait une fonction naturelle, la contraction et dilatation d'un être qui
souffle le feu.
It is common electricity which these waters,
half-alive, take in from the raging storms, the innocent and peaceful thunder
for which all marine creatures act as conductors. The inspire and expel it, losing it mostly at
t heir death. The sea gives and it takes
back. Along the coasts and in the
narrows, the clashing and the back flow make it circulate it powerfully. Every living creature absorbs it and
according to its nature masters it more
or less. Here, immense surfaces of
peaceful infusoria become a milky sea, with a soft and white light. Which then
becomes animated and turns yellow as burning sulphur. There, cones of light pirouette on
themselves, or roll in crimson balls. A
large disk of fire is made (pyrosome)
which then divides into an opalescent yellow, for a moment and then is struck
into green, irritated by this and explodes into red, orange, and finally relaxes
into azure.
What Michelet seems to be describing is a process whereby
the currents of the sea, with its heaving waves, circulating tides, and
constricted racing through straits and channels creates a friction, an
electrical charge which passes into the various marine animals who swim through
it. An interesting guess, to be sure,
but the writer offers no proof and no mechanism by which the living beings
absorb the electricity. He does not
understand the chemistry and physics of bioluminescence.
Cependant, à l'horizon, des serpents
enflammés s'agitent sur une infinie longueur (parfois vingt-cinq ou trente
lieues). Les biphores et les salpas, êtres transparents qui traversent et la
mer et le phosphore, donnent cette comédie serpentine. Étonnante
association qui mène ces danses effrénées, puis se sépare. Séparés, ses membres
libres font des petits libres encore, qui, à leur tour, engendreront des
républiques dansantes, pour répandre sur la mer cette bacchanale de feu.
However, on the horizon, flaming serpents are
tossed about across a limitless convoy (sometimes twenty-five or thirty
leagues). Biphores and salpas, transparent creatures travel over the sea and through
its phosphorous element join in a serpentine comedy. An astonishing
collaboration creates these unrestrained dances, and then the participants draw
apart. Separated, these now free members
engage in other free movements, which in their turn engender new dancing
republics in order to spread over the sea this bacchanalian fire.
Michelet moves to a new topic
somewhat later in La Mer. Speaking of whales in the Southern Oceans, he
describes the phenomenon of phosphorescence yet again, adding significant new
information:
Ils vont ensemble volontiers. On les voyait
jadis naviguer deux à deux, parfois en grandes familles de dix ou douze, dans
les mers solitaires. Rien n'était magnifique comme ces grandes flottes, parfois
illuminées de leur phosphorescence, lançant des colonnes d'eau de trente à
quarante pieds qui, dans les mers polaires, montaient fumantes. Ils approchaient paisibles, curieux,
regardant le vaisseau comme un frère d'espèce nouvelle; ils y prenaient
plaisir, faisaient fête au nouveau venu. Dans leurs jeux ils se mettaient
droits et retombaient de leur hauteur, à grand fracas, faisant un gouffre
bouillonnant. Leur familiarité allait jusqu'à toucher le navire, les canots.
Confiance imprudente, trompée si
cruellement! En moins d'un siècle, la grande espèce de la baleine a presque
disparu.
They willingly travel together. Formerly they were seen sailing side by side,
sometimes in big of ten or a dozen families in lonely seas. Nothing was so magnificent as they great
tides, sometimes lit up by their phosphorescence, spouting columns of water
thirty or forty feet into the air which, in polar seas, rose up in a vast
fuming spray. They approached peaceably,
curious, observing a vessel like new brotherly species; they took pleasure,
celebrating the new arrival. In their frolicking,
they shot upright and fell from those heights, a great tumult, creating a
boiling chasm. Their familiarity went so
far as to touch the ship and its pinnaces.
Imprudent confidence, cruelly tricked!
In less than a century, the large species of whale has virtually
disappeared,
These giant cetaceans are another species of marine life
Michelet sees as participating in the spectacle of phosphorescence. Their huge size, their vast numbers, their
overly-trusting natures as they greet the very sailors who will make them all
but extinct in a small space of time, are an integral part of that same natural
harmony the author describes throughout his book, a process in which all
creatures interact with their environment and all the forces of the sea no
matter how storm-driven or threatening balance each other out. Human interference is the negative presence,
however. The thoughtlessness of the
whales is one thing, an instinctive desire to associate with other creatures;
the thoughtlessness of mankind, especially in the rising bourgeois world of
trade and industry, another, a malevolent and violent lack of awareness of
where they stand in the scheme of things.
Il semble qu'eux-mêmes ils sachent qu'à ce
moment ils sont sacrés: ils perdent leur timidité, ils montent à la lumière,
ils approchent des rivages; ils ont l'air de se croire sûrs de quelque
protection.
It seems that they themselves know at this
moment that they are sacred ; they lose their timidity, they rise into the
light, they approach the shore; they have the appearance of believing
themselves to be certain of protection.
The great whales are not merely naive or innocent. They cannot understand the breaking apart of
natural harmony. When they rise up to
the surface, into the light, they make themselves vulnerable, for this ordinary
daylight takes away their sacred place in nature—a sanctity which is embedded
in nature, a nature which is sacred in the Romantic paradigm that has replaced
for many early modern Europeans the certainties of a religion where God the
Creator controls the world, who stands above natural things and gives them
meaning in relation to what humans need.
Thus for Michelet—more so perhaps than Herman Melville in Moby Dick—the power, grace and
significance of the whales is found in the phosphorescence they emit and
through which they swim.
C'est l'apogée de leur beauté, de leur force.
Leurs livrées brillantes, leur phosphorescence, indiquent le suprême
rayonnement de la vie. En toute espèce qui n'est point menaçante par l'excès de
la fécondité, il faut religieusement respecter ce moment. Qu'ils meurent après,
à la bonne heure! S'il faut les tuer, tuez-les! mais que d'abord ils aient
vécu.
It is the apogee of their beauty and of
their power. Their brilliant liveries, their phosphorescence, indicates the
supreme radiance of their life. Om
every species which offers no menace by the excess of its fecundity one must
religiously respect this moment [of procreation]. Let them die afterwards and soon! If it is necessary to kill them, kill them!
but first let them live.
What is phosphorescence, how is it related to bioluminescence,
and to the imagination? In other words,
what did sailors see when they sailed in foreign seas or fisherman along
familiar coasts? What was shining out
from the darkness in the countryside, down below the surface of the soil, and flitting
or slithering over the fields, hills and mountains? Was it something that was inherent in the objects
and beings observed or an illusion created by atmospheric conditions, a
reflection or refraction of something in the heavens? Perhaps rather it was a product of the optical
organs, a result of mental events, a dream or hallucination. Or did it arise from a spiritual realm of
experience, a return of life-giving lights from beyond the grave, a small
remnant of exploding stars millions of light years distant at the very beginning
of time, a signal of intelligence in another dimension of space and reality?
[1] Joan Dreyett, Island of the Lost:
A Harrowing True Story of Shipwreck,
Death and Survival on a Godforsaken Island at the Edge of the World (Crows
Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007) p. 11.
Originally published in the USA as Island
of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World (New York, NY: Algonquin
Books of Chapel Hill, 2007)
[3] One scientific website gives this description: “Pyrosomes and salps are
pelagic (free-swimming) tunicates or sea squirts. All species are open ocean
animals that rarely come close to shore, and all are colonial, although many
salps can also be solitary. Pyrosomes are colonies of tiny animals that form hollow
tubes sealed at one end ….Pyrosomes get their name (Pyro = fire + soma = body)
from their ability to emit light (bioluminescence) - colonies can glow or flash
light at night, particularly if touched.”
See http://www.youtube.com/ watch%3Fv%3D5EQGA_4BZ5s.
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