ThirdNight

Basil De C.

Over the past two nights, we have considered, first the nature of light, then its beauty. Tonight we will focus on its movement. You will agree that light’s mandate issues from the divine. Which iswhy, again, I seek the answer to the question of light’s motion in the word ofGod.  For God said, “Let there belight”; he didn’t say, “Light will be” or “Let light come to pass.”  At the exact instant God spoke, lightrushed through the ether, through the sky, and, in an instant withoutextension, lit all the world, the North as well as the South, the Orient aswell as the Occident.  As soon asGod’s order was heard, it was instantaneously executed. 

John Ph

Light is Creation’s first corporeal form; one could call itcorporeality itself.  The problemsolves itself so easily if you simply hold this axiom in mind.

Dennis PH.

Visible light, descending light, is essentially slow, althoughto our blind eyes it seems infinitely quick.

Lewis De B.

I maintain that light, being a body (its body being anemanation issuing from luminous bodies) appears first in the intermediary spacebetween earth and sky, and then travels to us in a motion so rapid it escapesour notice.

M. Goodman

I have trouble grasping both its instantaneity and itsubiquity. It seems to me that an infinitely quick light would be motionless.

William H.

The paths,

     cleared through the dark,

oflight

arefacts.

WilliamH.

Thepaths, cleared through the dark, of light

thatgoes without saying because we know

alllight goes, clearing its way, through the dark.

BasilDe C.

            Lightdoesn’t clear its way through the dark, it dissipates it, annihilates it; butit crosses air, and air is a substance so subtle and diaphanous that light  needs not the least instant to crossit.  Just as it brings sightsuddenly to the objects that strike it, and just as, without the leastinterval, with a rapidity thought cannot conceive, it receives light’s streamsin all its extremities.  Lightmakes the ether more pleasant and the waters more limpid, and the latter, notcontent simply to receive its luster, send back light’s reflection, throwingoff bright sparks. Light’s voyage is instantaneous because it is obeying divineorder, but also because it is, by nature, determined to leave darkness nomeans, not even temporary, of survival. In the presence of light, there is nodark.

M.Goodman

Thenis emptiness dark?  Doesn’t Heronof Alexandria tell us that if there were no void, light could not make its waythrough water?  He goes on to saythat if this fluid, like air, had no pores, a vase of water would overflowwhenever light struck its surface, which it doesn’t do.

JohnPh.

Yesit does; with light.

ButI would put it more like this: light, by its very nature propagates in alldirections in such a way that a point of light instantly produces a sphere ofevery dimension unless an opaque body interrupts it and deforms some ofthem.  Matter’s extension into thefour dimensions (I don’t exclude reversible time) is concomitant to corporeality;non-luminous matter is, by contrast, substance without true dimension,therefore it can’t multiply or move by itself in any dimension at all.  Light alone has the power to multiplyand propagate instantly in all directions. I’d say it is the agent, parexcellence, of the creation of all dimensions.

Lewisde B.

Forthe moment, I’d simply like to point out that a movement that takes aninfinitely small amount of time is not an instantaneous movement; animperceptible interval is not an instant of no duration. Reread Alhazen.

DennisPs.

Althoughmoving in an instant that is (because of our own slowness), imperceptible,visible light is essentially slow. For it doesn’t emanate directly from an absolute luminous core, but froma dark body (dark like ours, like all material bodies). A body, a dark body, isa sponge for light; it absorbs real light and adulterates it. Heated like thestars, it goes from red to white, but the glow it emits, which we call light,is only a distortion of the true light it has swallowed and which we force itto give back.

DennisPs.

Truelight clarifies matter in its subtle, ethereal state by acts of light,incandescences of mundusarchetypus, of the world offigures and forms. True, its motion is instantaneous; true, its speed isinfinite and in a way that escapes you because it’s not a matter ofsimultaneity, but of a sequence in empty time.

WilliamH.

Anylight can always successively disperse

thatwhich it is, also

light

LewisDe B.

Let’sget this straight: simultaneity and sequentiality are two attributes of lightthat our friends Dennis Ps. and William H, following their own theories, agreeto recognize in light (for reasons which, I must humbly say, escape me);however, there’s a well-accepted notion that reconciles thiscontradiction—the Ray of Light. Rays of Light are the minimal units; individually, they’re sequential,and collectively, they’re simultaneous. We know that light is organized inparts that are both successive and simultaneous because you can stop arrivinglight at a given moment and let light pass a moment later at the same spot;simultaneously, you can stop light at one spot and let it flow through atanother. The portion of Light that is stopped cannot be the same as that whichpasses.  Let us call Rays of Lightthose minimal Lights that can be stopped apart from the rest of Light, and canbe propagated singularly, that act or are activated solely in what theremaining light cannot do or undergo. 

BasilDe C.

Let’ssay, for example, we see the sun rising. Clearly, our gaze can’t reach it without traveling across all the spaceoccupied by sky and air between it and us. Is anyone really capable of graspingthat distance? Yet our gaze or our visual ray will certainly never manage tocross the air above the sea if it doesn’t first cross the air above the earth,the entire distance from where we stand to the sea’s shore.  And if other lands interrupt our lineof sight, our sight can’t leap across the air stretched out over these far-offlands without first crossing the middle space. Let’s now suppose that there’snothing left beyond that but ocean. It occupies an immense expanse, butregardless of its size, the visual ray must cross the air above it and whateverelse may lie beyond in order to reach the sun. And although I  may have used the terms “before” and“after,” didn’t our gaze cross all these spaces instantly?

JohnPH.

Lightwas the first form created from primal matter, and that’s why by nature it isinfinitely multiplied, spreading uniformly in infinite directions.  But material extension cannot beachieved by a finite multiplication of light because, as Aristotle showed in De Caelo et Mundo, the finite multiplication of an entitycould not create quantity.  But aninfinite multiplication could. So light, simple in itself, multipliedinfinitely, created finite matter (and is still creating it).  Creator of finite time, itselfinfinite, it endlessly superinfinitizes within the confines of the universe,creating further infinities, which are to infinity what infinity is to thefinite.

M.Goodman.

Ionce read a series of objections to the idea that luminous movements areinfinite. If I remember correctly, it went something like this:

“a.what the instant is to the point, the point is to the line, which is why,through exchange and permutation, what the instant is to the point, time is tothe line.  Passing through a pointoccupies an instant, and so traveling a line requires time. Therefore light,crossing a segment of space, however short, travels in an interval that is notvoid of time;

b.light travels faster in a straight line than in an oblique one, but both thefastest and the slowest require time (this argument seems weak to me);

c.no force acts instantaneously, as a greater force would then have to act inless than time;

d.a before and an after in space assumes a before and an after in time;

e.Instantaneity ensures that light lights an infinite number of places at thesame time. It would be God.”

M.Goodman.

AndI read another argument somewhere that led to the same conclusion:

“lightis a transmutation; all transmutation is instantaneous unless it encountersresistance; resistance assumes a contrary; but light has no contrary; it onlyhas loss.”

DennisPS.

Theloss of light is darkness; the darkness of a dark body is this darkness.  It is not the Dark of themore-than-luminous shadow.  Lighthas its own contrary (the photon, that blind approximation of light has itsantiparticle, which is itself), black Light, which infinitely exceeds visiblelight; that is why your philosopher’s argument will not do.  Physical dark is non-light.  Dark Light is non-non-light, anentirely different thing.

JohnPH.

Rarefactionis not loss. As I said, because light has spread matter by its infiniteself-multiplication in all spacio-temporal directions in infinitely multipliedspherical layers, the outer edges (of each infinitude— infinites beingheirarchized) are more rarefied than the inner layers, and closer to theprimordial point of light. And since the farthest layer is the rarest, it givesthe illusion of emptiness.

WilliamH.

Hellis a palace of strange architecture

Shutin on all sides by the Stygian tributary,

Atheatre in which Pluto manifests his cruelty,

Whereone feels in death eternity’s factor.

Thefoundation is coal, of sulfur the vault,

Coolshadows run hot, flames rapt icebound,

Herehowls and tears never resound

Whereterror and rage govern torture.

Herethe proud Angel on high was deported,

Andthe soul languishes for having insulted

ThatSoul so perfect he brought the soul forth.

Butthe greatest torment Hell can trace

Isloss of the Master’s features,

SinceParadise resides in the hour of seeing his face.

BasilDe C.

I’mgoing to approach the problem differently to bring you to the truth.  Nature loves everything that is usefuland good for living things, and strives to create that. Because living thingsfind it useful to see quickly, nature made sure that the visual flow wouldarrive at sight’s object as quickly as possible; now, since the fastest motionis the instantaneous, the visual flow instantly reaches sight’s object.

LewisDe B.

Right.And creme caramel was created simply to be confused with creme brulée!  Let’s be serious: as soon as the Sunappears on the horizon, Earth’s upper hemisphere is instantly and completelyilluminated.  How does that happen?Just as when you move the end of a long, taut rope, the whole rope movesinstantly because all its parts are united, and the first moves the next and soon; so luminous energy moves, since all the bodies in the cosmos immediatelytouch one another.

LewisDe B.

AndI’d go further than that. Please follow me through this thoughtexperiment. 

Nodoubt at some time or other, you’ve found yourself walking over rough ground atnight without a torch, so that you had to use a stick to find your way, and youmust have noticed that you could feel the various objects that you encounteredthrough the intermediary of the stick and that you could even identify them— trees, rocks, sand, water, grass, mud, whatever. True, theseperceptions are a bit confused and dim to those who aren’t used to it, butthink of people who were born blind and have used this method their wholelives, and you’ll find it so perfect and precise that you might almost say theysee with their hands, or that their sticks are organs of some sixth sense giventhem in place of sight. To make the analogy, I ask you to consider that light,among what we call luminous bodies, is nothing more than instant motion, aninfinitely quick and infinitely animated action that arrives at your eyesthrough the intermediary of the air and other transparent bodies, just as theresponse or resistance of everything that this blind person encounters passesinto his hand through the mediation of the stick.

M.Goodman.

Butdon’t we find ourselves once again, by following an idea quite philosophicallydistant from that of our friend Dennis Ps, faced with the notion that hiddenbehind visible light (which is of a finite speed, as everyone knows) is aparameter light that is non-local in essence and able, at the quantum level, toinstantaneously affect the farthest reaches of the universe?

BasilDe C.

Givethat power back to God.

DennisPS.

Let’sretrace the steps of the illuminative sequence. Have the intelligence tounderstand that this is what permits intelligences to see themselves as sharedlight and to see the theophanic light available to them. Don’t confuse theuniqueness of absolute light with the multiplicity of lights, which is onlydispersion and darkness.

WilliamH.

Dissipation,diversity, signs of death, forced plurality.

JohnPH.

Lightis not the flow of a body, like water, but a wave, like sound.

JohnPh.

Thatwas confirmed by Roger Bacon. On the other hand, Pythagoras saw it as fineparticles sent like numerable messages by luminous bodies.

LewisDe B.

Havingconsidered this problem all my life, I have come to the conclusion that no onehas yet discovered a way to elucidate the relationship between waves andparticles.

WilliamH.

inthe grass

            grainswaves

                        oflight

     attach                         the earth

               to black       

               and spit them

     in the grass                                    thenight          realto the

edges

                        of trees

     beneath the earth

M.Goodman

Newtonattempted to synthesize the granular concept and the undulatory concept. Herealized that light came in grains and thought it was conveyed by anundulation, at least while passing through matter, and that this undulationacted upon the grains, causing the corpuscles of light to pass regularly andalternately through “fits of easy transmission” and “fits of easy reflection.”Arriving at the surface separating the two zones, the grain of light will passeasily if it’s in a fit of easy transmission but will be bounced back if it’sin a fit of easy reflection.

DennisPS.

Goddesired the finite transmission of visible light.  God has 700,000 veils of light and shadow; if he took themoff, the radiance of his Face would reduce all who encountered his gaze to ash.These veils are the ensemble of all perceptible and imperceptible universes,and all these worlds exist inside man, visible to as many eyes.  One sometimes opens them in dreams, andthey sometimes fall a bit into memory on their own.

BasilDe C.

Luminousbodies were created in one fell swoop by the divine power and, without anylocal disturbance, were instantly applied to the air capable of receivingillumination.  And light, thedivinely inspired negation of the rule of the non-distributive divisibility ofthe All, arrived in an instant in every sky.