Classical Light/Baroque Light

Light plays differently in our experience, depending on where we are and when we are: the time of day, the latitude, and the atmospheric conditions, the consistency and composition of the air. In a dry climate, when the light is intense in the middle of the day, it picks out each object perfectly, or moves each object into our experience with seeming purity; it becomes invisible as a medium, a pure revelation. Here in the Caribbean, the light is liquid because it is suffused with water. It moves through water and onto water, into which it is captured and from which it is reflected back through our experience. The light is intense (equatorial) but diffuse, and it tends to conjoin experience or unify it across space and time; it is a mood. It is hard here, on the south coast of Jamaica, to maintain a sense of separate things and of one's separation from things; the primordial experience is of unity, in which one must work toward, or drag oneself toward focus, to tease out distinct objects. I sit here looking at extremely pink blossoms through a slatted window, as they move with the wind and return. But the distinction of one blossom from another, or of the plant that possesses the blossom from those around it, or of myself from all this, is an inference, something I must labor to produce rather than something self-evident.

In some environments, one constructs a cosmos from an array of discrete objects; in others, one constructs the array itself from the experience of a unity. Light, in other words, gives rise to ontologies. And ontologies gives rise to ways of living, so that in an experience of things as separate from oneself and one another they are, for example, offered to one as tools or as things to be transformed by tools, which presupposes their separation. But it is a familiar point that in a tropical climate, one "lapses" into the heat and the light, one's alertness is compromised, and with it the capacity to take things and use them, to work. The "lushness" or "profusion" of the tropical environment winds things around each other, makes them more complexly intertwined. It limits the vertical and emphasizes the horizontal. It joins things into a world, not as the collection of all things that exist, but as a unity in which they appear. In such a world, one expects that knowledge arises all at once or not at all, in a coherent system or its negation: a total affirmation or an extinction. As Derek Walcott says of getting a classical English education in St. Lucia, "Either the breadfruit tree and the sunlight became unreal because of the Latin, or the Latin became unreal because of the breadfruit tree and the sunlight."

In a northern environment where the light is thin or the atmosphere dry or both, knowledge arises through composition; one organizes discrete elements toward a unity; the victory would be a principle that makes all things coherent. Here the coherence is given, not achieved, and one must drag one's head into a degree of differentiation that can keep one living and working. It is harder for me to be unhappy here, which is both the cause and effect of my "vacation"; I wanted to come here to escape differentiation, and I do.

The northern climate in winter is a classical environment, simplified or crystallized into determinate masses, arranged with economy and bathed in an unmediated light. The tropical climate is baroque: the space is filled or stacked and the colors and forms must be inferred from the primordially unified array. But it should be said that unity and profusion form a circle, and that at its most unified a design is profuse or as it were just this side of profuse, and vice versa. Greek classicism emerges from a context in which the light etches each object with great clarity. But it seeks through further clarifications to find a perfect unity: always the classical is marked by the longing for coherence, conceived as the composition of discrete elements. On the other hand, the baroque's extreme profusion of effect emerges from the non-differentiation of elements: their unity. A canvas by Rubens or Renoir or Pollock famously has an "all-over" quality that emerges from repetitive gestures, a kind of continual addition of similar simple elements into an extraordinarily complex system. The baroque at its height is a kind of rebellion against simplicity that builds complex systems out of simple elements.