[Transcript] Side B: Light
I know, it’s been a while.
Today I was driving to pick Danny up from school.
I was going to write to you that it was exceptionally warm, that the car smelled of boiled leather again because I had forgotten to put up the sunshade when I’d parked it. I wrote a whole paragraph about how puzzled and happy, and surprised in a pleasant and yet uncomfortable way the heat of the day and the clearness of the sky made me feel. But I crossed it out. I remember how annoyed my digressions made you. You were always so good at explaining yourself. You always knew how to make yourself understood.
I was never as good as you. I don’t think I was ever able to make you understand, for example, that details are the only thing holding the meaning of stories together. That digressing is the only way I have of saying the things that really matter to me.
But there, I’m digressing again.
Danny has been good lately, he’s doing good in school, he enjoys studying History and Science most of all. He was lucky this year because he’s got some really good teachers, and most importantly of all, you’ll be happy to know he’s hanging out with two other kids in his class, whom I believe he’s become really good friends with.
(I’m adding this paragraph after reading myself again: I just noticed I only used ‘good’ as a qualifier for the three pieces of information I gave you in the latter paragraph. Danny’s behavior, his teachers, his friends. All good. You must think me a simpleton for shunning so snobbishly all the numerous synonyms of ‘good’.
You’ve probably stopped reading this letter already because you’re too annoyed at my exasperating, abiding incapability to concentrate my thoughts into one, straight, clear sentence, in which I just state what it is that I want and how I would like to obtain it so that’s over and done with.
But I’m actually quite fond of the word ‘good’. When Danny was learning to speak, for some adorably absurd reason he would add a ‘good’ at the end of all his ‘good morning’s. ‘Good morning Danny’, I would say to him as I woke him up. And he’d reply: ‘Good morning good, mommy!’ You had already left at that point. But that extra ‘good’ in the morning always made me smile. It still does. The word just became so dear to me since then. So now, it makes me smile that I use it so extensively, without even realizing it. I think my subconscious is trying to intersperse my speech with markers of happiness, which is quite good of my subconscious, don’t you think? Again, another ‘good’ just there. It’s as if I had an alarm inside my language timed to make me smile every five minutes.)
Danny and I yesterday were doing his Science homework together. He’s studying light, how light works. As usual, when I have time to help Danny do his homework, I end up being completely mesmerized. Especially when we study the subjects he’s most passionate about, like Science or History. He’s just nine but he has a way of explaining things that strikes me as wise beyond his age: he always manages to make me understand without making me feel stupid or ignorant, which I am. He just lets himself be carried away by how much he loves the subject, and he drags me along with him.
Light is both wave and particle. Apparently, a bunch of white men from the past have fought for centuries over which of the two natures of light to exclude. But in the end they just gave up and allowed that light was actually both. Depending on whether light is behaving as a wave or as a particle, it can reflect, refract, diffract, interfere. And I bet a lot of other incredible and much more complicated things that aren’t written in schoolchildren’s textbooks.
Today, while I was driving to pick Danny up from school, the car smelled of boiled leather. I stopped at a red light and I was really bothered and kind of pissed off by the heat of the car and how I was sweating too much and the sweater I was wearing was going to be stained under my armpits when I had just washed it the day before. I was waiting for the red light to become green when I saw that a light beam was dispersing itself into a rainbow on the dashboard. I was wearing my glass pendants, the ones your mother gave me as an anniversary gift the year I was pregnant of Danny.
You see, when a beam of white light travels through what is called a dispersing prism, such as a piece of glass, it not only refracts, that is it not only bends slightly, but the colors contained in it refract, or bend, at different angles. That means that the beam splits into a spectrum of colors, because each color corresponds to a different wavelength, and when the white beam disperses in contact with the prism, in this case my earring, the different wavelengths, so the different colors contained in it, refract at different angles, creating a rainbow, or a sequence of colors.
I was looking at the tiny, quivering rainbow on the dashboard, and I thought how beautiful it is that it should be called a dispersal.
The light we are actually able to see with our eyes is only a fraction of the light, meaning electromagnetic radiation, that exists. We cannot see X rays, we cannot see Ultraviolet rays, radio waves, microwaves, gamma rays, infrared rays. And then again, the light that we do see actually hides inside itself colors that we can only perceive if we disperse it. So not only we know nothing of the complexity outside of our perception, but we also know nothing of the complexity we can perceive. The only way we have to know it a little more, is to let it spread, let it diffuse. Disperse.
You know, I have grown convinced that human beings are all sources of light. Maybe not in the sense of electromagnetic radiation, although probably that is something Danny would be very excited about, but for sure of radiation of some sort. Call it love, call it halo, call it charm. I think we all are radioactive in some way. For better or for worse.
Danny’s light for example reflects very well on me. I am happy when he is happy. And today, as I was looking at the sunbeam dispersing into the quivering rainbow on the dashboard, I thought: I hope that Danny’s light also disperses very well through me. I hope I can help him spread all his wavelengths and explore all the complex and rich and beautiful things that he can be, help him take the space he needs to diffuse his whole spectrum, and become a rainbow.
And you know what I understood, for the first time? I understood that digressing, getting lost in the details, is indeed a form of dispersal. I always felt bad about it, I always felt it was an impediment to the one, straight, clear development I ought to follow. I always thought it a flaw, an indication of untidiness, of mental disorganization. I wanted to be neat, systematic, concise. I wanted to be that one beam of white light. I wanted to be like you. Piercing into the void at 299,792,458 meters per second.
I think I have understood now that I am a permanently dispersed light beam. There is no way you can shrink me back to a thread of white light: I will always be a spectrum. With my moods, my messiness, my unpredictability. And that’s beautiful too, I see that now.
I see that now in my light’s reflection that Danny gives back to me. I see that in how he radiates different colors when he is with me. Sure, it’s not always a sunny yellow I receive, or spring’s pink. Sometimes it’s also the fog’s gray, or a livid purple. But then again, I’m not always dispersing in summery colors either. What I love about it, is that we’re not two parallel light beams, nor two rays from the same center, but two intersecting, or interfering, sources of rippling rainbow light.
I am sorry I was blind all these years. I am sorry I blamed you for my failure to be who I am not. I see that now. How good it all is. How many different kinds of light we can shine on each other.
And I just wanted to let you know about it.
Wishing you all the best,
