Of Light [I don't know how I began...]

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I don't know how I began but when I imagine it, I see a single illuminated line. A light like electricity. A soft blue current. Breathing, vibratory, becoming almost white, almost pink, as it ripples slowly in a total darkness. Brighter now, a sound resonating, an intention recommitted to. And as the line arches and turns, gathering incandescence, points of light like voices, I know exactly what this light means to communicate. Its meaning opens a door in my face, and I am contained, but infinitely met.

*

All living creatures emit a radiance not visible to the human eye. The brilliance of our glowing animal bodies fluctuates across the day. 

Inside each of us, an unimaginable frequency. The coil-like contraction of each strand of DNA vibrating several billion times per second, in every cell. And with each contraction, one single biophoton—a light particle—is released, generating this luminescence of the cells.

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Our imperceptible glow, an intelligence. This source material. Cells communicating, lineage learning. Cells and stars composing, as they burn, as they write, a highly structured light field that nets all bodies. 

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This field is the first inscription. A crackling pulse that set me going.

I think words like amniotic, birth, origin, beginning. 

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When the density of a star's core is created. When fused atoms con-a tract to cause expansion. When the shape of me is interrupted by grief, by awe, by the regularity of a day. With all its intermittences. Its windows through time, reversing order. 

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When energy moves into matter, time begins. But in its elasticity, the light gets threaded. 

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My favorite memory of my mother is stored in a photograph I no longer have. She stands in a steel-blue oversized sweater and jeans in our backyard by the neighbor's fence. The cherry tree, before the lightning struck, behind her in bloom. The sun, as it sets, makes a halo of her hair. She glows, a corona, at the photograph's center. She's pregnant with my brother, but l don't think you can tell from the photograph; I know because I think I remember taking it. 

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The earliest memory of my body comes from outside of it. Long slats of a crib in shadow. A dim yellow light forming the hallway, gray and particled at its edges, outside my bedroom door. My mother's voice from another room. Before language, just sonorous music. And in the absence of her physicality, I feel my own voice for the first time, vibrating the shape of me. 

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I am comfortable in most kinds of darkness. Darkness allows nearness to the most intimate unknown. That place from which I first arrived. The door of me, my mother. What color was the inside of her body? What color was my consciousness there? 

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I am attempting to get through the door of me. Through the door of my mother's body and her mother's body before her and so on, straight into the mouth of the very first light emitted. 

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We are accustomed to thinking ourselves individual, but so many of us feel unstable: of fracture, disembodiment or conjoinment to something unnameable, some thing other than ourselves. A kind of microchimerism. A persistent presence of an other or elsewhere. We are taught to mistrust this intimacy. 

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Consider the human body. Mine and yours, composed mostly of water, of light. Consider the information stored within the nucleus of one zygote.

Within my body and yours, a coherent, ancestral light. 

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Between a mother and her fetus, the placenta, an organ relating and connecting forms. A conduit for exchange, for migrating cells. And those cells may take up residence in the body of the other. Integrating the tissue. 

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And somewhere, on the other side of time, is everything. 

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Sometimes, when asked what I'm working on, I tell people I'm writing a translation of light. Light, like the memory of a color, of a sound that we can't quite sense, but is there, nonetheless. Inherited light. Cellular light. Interstellar. Memories that have already happened to someone or somewhere else. 

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As a child, I felt a grief in me that was too large to be only my own. By three years old, I realized I could absorb the sensations of others. It was a feeling of light, of concave patterns of energy moving from others and into me. I would stand close to my mother and absorb her anger, her loneliness, her worry, and I would replace it with a calmer light.