We parked in a dusty lot off the hill city of Kastro, a village on the Greek island of Sifnos. We were there to see the Church of the Seven Martyrs, a little chapel sited on a spit of land in the middle of the Aegean. We wound our way down the cliffside along a stone path that led out onto the promontory, wind whipping our hair and clothes. For some reason I kept turning over in my mind the line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” about the chapel perilous, “the empty chapel, only the wind home”—the castle where, in Thomas Malory’s rendition of Arthurian legend, Sir Lancelot almost succumbs to a witch. The Seven Martyrs’ remote position out on a rock, the green waves tossing and breaking beneath it, made me think of it as a margin at the end of the world, and lonely and perilous—if beautiful—for that reason.
This was not the first time I’d visited the Church of the Seven Martyrs. My husband and I had traveled to Sifnos in the late 1990s when we were graduate students many, many years earlier, and now here we were again, this time with our children in tow. As we approached the chapel, my husband took my hand with the excitement of this return to a shared past: “Remember?” he prodded me, “how amazed we were the first time we saw this?” We’d rented a moped, apparently, leaving it in town to trace the very path I was now retreading out to the windswept chapel.
But, in fact, I had no memory of that earlier visit. Nothing in the landscape, nothing in the air or light, triggered a sense of having been here before. The warm yellow light of the setting sun bounced off the white church and blazed its signature on my retina as if for the first time.
This failure of recall didn’t really surprise me; I have a terrible memory, a fact that anyone who knows me will readily confirm. I don’t mean I have a bad memory for names and dates, the silly tiny stuff (although I am bad enough at that, too), but for those essential blocks of experience with which normal people construct a life: the geography of cities I’ve lived in, places I’ve visited, the faces of people I’ve known, milestones in the lives of my children. Large swathes of life-stuff that most people’s sensory apparatus naturally transcribes—catalogue under Things-to-Remember and store for later retrieval—go missing in my case. It has always been a source of great shame to me and something I try to keep hidden.
It is as though the usual thickness of points of contact with the world outside one’s skin that give the average person a sense of grounding as they move through life have been thinned in my case: sporadic, tenuous, full of inexplicable gaps—as though my body and brain are but minimally inscribed in the space-time continuum.
It’s not that I remember nothing, of course. I remember another trip to the Greek islands my husband and I made when we were in our twenties, the summer before or after the Sifnos trip, to Amorgos. We visited a monastery there, I recall, perched like a chalk-white barnacle on the side of a cliff over the sea. As we made our way up to the entrance, we spied a priest in cassock and pillbox skufia bending over some piece of work in the shade of a tree. On our approach, he turned toward us, smiling through his gray beard, and we saw he held a knife in one hand and in the other a freshly killed bloody bird that looked like a dove. Placing the bird and knife tenderly on a table, he wiped his hands on his cassock and ushered us inside. As a parting gift he offered us each a piece of Turkish delight, arrayed like dusty jewels in a burnished wooden box. I remember that. But of the Church of the Seven Martyrs: nothing, not a trace.
Such memory blanks are puzzling enough for me, but even more so for those close to me, who note this absentee quality in my mode of being and occasionally, rightfully, feel derailed by it, almost betrayed. I am both here and elsewhere, present and absent: now I see you, now I don’t.
I didn’t tell my husband that I retained no memory of our earlier Sifnos trip. I knew it would make him feel lonely, like he’d been living with a ghost.
*
Philosophers have always been attracted to the image of light streaming into a dark chamber and projecting pictures on the wall as a metaphor for how the mind, and in turn memory, works. For Plato, the mind was like the smooth interior surface of a cave where objects, paraded before a flame, cast their images in dusky outline like shadow puppets. Almost two millennia later, the English philosopher John Locke compared the mind to a camera obscura, early forerunner of the pinhole camera: “For methinks that the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light,” writes Locke in his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without.”
This philosophical preoccupation with light is natural enough when we consider that reacting to sunlight—sensing it, moving towards it, making pictures out of it—was among the earliest tricks biological organisms had to learn if they hoped to survive in the world at all. Cyanobacteria, the biological ancestors of all plants and animals, burst onto the primeval scene 2.7 billion years ago with their ability to turn sunlight into energy, and photoreceptor proteins in their single-celled bodies allowed them to track and then scoot their way toward the light. Early unicellular creatures conserved these photosensitive proteins and added pigments that, by deflecting certain of the sun’s wavelengths, helped them track the light’s source. By a series of chance mutations, these patches of photoreceptor proteins in early protists floating around in primordial soup slowly evolved into divots, then into cups, then into tiny little protoplasmic chambers with just one small opening for light entry—a cellular pinhole camera, in effect—which first allowed image capture. And from there, it was a gradual process of sharpening up the image.
Yet to trace the evolution of the human eye is to suspect nature of being a genius possessed of a slightly dark sense of humor, so haphazard is trajectory by which our sight organs came into being. When a random mutation in some ancestor metazoan chanced to pick up a cell-repair molecule called a crystallin and plop it, willy-nilly, onto the surface of a primitive eye—like blindly moving around parts on a Mr. Potato head—the crystallin’s molecular structure “chanced to have the right optical properties for bending light,” and was duly pressed into surface to fine tune the images the creature could capture. What zoologists call the “Cambrian explosion,” a dramatic flowering of animal diversity between 545 and 530 million years ago, was likely catalyzed by an increase in eye complexity. One scientist called it an evolutionary “arms race” to capture and focus light. And when our proverbial fishy ancestors made their first forays up onto land somewhere around 385 million years ago, the eyes again led the way: eyes tripled in size and migrated from the sides to the top of the head long before fish traded in fins for limbs. Early tetrapods, scientists suppose, cruised around in the sandy shallows, eyes popped up above the surface crocodile-style, preying on insects and millipedes at the water’s edge and daring themselves, eventually, to make the leap to dry land.
Indeed, eyes appear in all sorts of unexpected places, and evolution will cobble together whatever is at hand to funnel light and grab an image. A humble mollusk called a chiton navigates the ocean floor sheathed in a coat of limestone armor studded with hundreds of tiny, mineralized eyes, a protoplasmic brooch. Over time, small genetic tweaks in the aragonite minerals composing the creature’s shell—bigger grains here, a more orderly structuring of crystal molecules there—reduced the light-scattering properties of the “non-seeing armor” enough to capture a primitive image when light passed through these patches. Looking at a fish-shaped silhouette through an aragonite lens, researchers glimpsed “a somewhat blurred but recognizable shape.” To dip into this history of sight is to sense the whole earth buzzing, scanning, probing, watchful: all life, hungry for light.
*
On Sifnos, we stayed in the tiny, sun-soaked, bay-bound hamlet of Vathi, where the water was smooth and shallow and blue for yards and yards. The day after our visit to the Church of the Seven Martyrs, I snorkeled across the bay, moved as always by the softness of the underwater light: silent, hazy yellow columns stippling the white sand seabed as if in slow motion, as though it had traveled eons to get there and had lost something of itself along the way, muted and tired, somehow, after its long journey (which was not, of course, only a metaphor; this spectral dimming is what actually happens to light as it travels down through water). As I lazily propelled myself deeper out toward the mouth of the bay, the element shifted from washed-out petal green to the color of sea-smooth bottle glass to murky jade. It struck me suddenly that this was the way my had brain felt that day on the chapel rock: my memory’s images watery and wobbly, thin, close to dissolution, shading off to blank or black. How dreary to be such a poor keeper of the light! To live shut up in this darkened closet, a camera obscura whose aperture regularly dilutes the sun’s bright rays or, just as often, snaps shut against them altogether.
And yet other times I think: So what if I am a shoddy light-collector? So what if much of the light that falls on me bounces off and scatters to the far reaches of the universe? That I am granted a lens on the world at all—unwitting inheritor of ancient genes pressed into hard-scrabble, serendipitous service some five hundred million years ago, jerry-rigging up an underwater eye— is a minor miracle, no matter how foggy and tarnished my own model might be.
What I sometimes call my absenteeism—my sensing mechanism’s persistent opacity, its determination to squander so much of the light that hits it—could be seen, not as a glitch in the system, but the price to be paid for being a body at all, a self opened out on a world that is not-self. It is only because we are not transparent mediums—rather, glass-dark and earth-bound—that we can capture an image of the world in the first place. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark,” the alchemist Alymer’s wife Georgiana is the very portrait of ethereal beauty save for a tiny, hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek. Alymer becomes obsessed with the “stain on his poor wife’s cheek,” visible token of the “ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes.” He repairs to his laboratory to concoct an elixir to remove it, and Georgiana dutifully drinks it down. As the last trace of the crimson hand fades from the lady’s white cheek, so “the parting breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight.” Sin-haunted descendant of the Puritans as he was, Hawthorne knew that the realm of pure light, that unmixed with earth, is the sole province of God.
The body provides its own Hawthorne-style allegorical lessons. Take vitreous floaters, those strands of protein that get trapped in the gel inside your eye and cast shadows on the retina, so that when you look at the sky or a blank wall you see bobbing blobs like crystalline chromosomes, vermicelli semicolons, hopping across your eyeballs. This is your body—its coagulating proteins, its material bunchings—getting in its own way, interposing itself like a dark planet between your eye and the sun of the world. These minieclipses are a salutary reminder of our embodied state, that we have access to these images—this stream of stuff coming in from the outside, light inscribed on our retina—only because our bodies provide miraculous portals, always subject to obfuscation or closure, onto a world beyond the black box of the self.
Fine, I think, as I track these funny little darkling swarms across the surface of my vision: I’ll take what I can get.
*
When it comes down to it, the light I’ve lost was never mine to begin with, light-gathering being always a shared project. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, eschatology—from the Greek eschatos, “last, remote, uttermost, furthest”—is that branch of theology devoted to the science of last things: signs by which to recognize that the world is drawing to a close before its final redemption. The tradition of the shevirat ha-kelim in Jewish mysticism recounts the story of creation and redemption this way: on the first day, God contracted himself to make room for the world. He poured his light into ten vessels, which then shattered, scattering the divine ray into fragments. This fragmentation is the fallenness of earth, and our task is to gather the scattered sparks to restore the world. As the time of last things approaches, “when the task of gathering the sparks nears completion,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov glossed, “God will hasten the arrival of the final redemption by Himself collecting what remains of the holy sparks that went astray.” Viewed from a geo-biological-cosmic perspective, the wisdom of the kabbala checks out: all life on earth is just (just!) the extended and highly improbable unfolding, through time and space, of an initial burst of solar grace; gift of light and heat from a burning, spinning star, which we receive and share and recycle endlessly, until the universe stops moving.
The Manichean Gnostic tradition has a similar eschatology, a tale of scattered sparks and their final collection. At the end of time, runs one Manichean psalm, “All Life, the Remnants of Light in every Place/[God] shall gather to himself and form of it an Image (Eidolon).” It is a beautiful myth, and I choose to picture it like this:
Wading in the shallows and gazing out on the bay at Vathi, sometimes I was able to make out a passing school of fish by a sudden flash of light beneath the water’s surface, an electric leap that disappeared as quickly as it came. Schooling fish mold their individual bodies into incredible collective shapes—spiral, sphere, plane—coordinating with each other by mechanisms that scientists don’t yet fully understand. The fish have special crystals beneath their scales that reflect the sunlight, and each must turn just so to catch and propel the light along their collective body in a uniform wave, weaving skin and nerve and bone and crystal together into an improbable emblem of light, an aquatic chorus line. Viewed from above, it must look like a giant silver orb winking at the sky from beneath the salt waves before, once again, closing shut, disappearing into the deep, a thousand tiny lights quenched by darkness.
I try to make peace, then, with the dusky vessel that I am, make peace with the light that goes missing. In the interim, I gather up those scattered remnants of light that do chance across my vision: the curious gaze of a tiny opal sea bream, butting up against my snorkel mask; the shiny, bobbing blue underside of a fishing boat; the ribbon-flash of a green eel in the rock. I offer them up to the collective Image that—perhaps—some cosmic light-keeper is patiently building for the end of time.
Ellen Wayland-Smith, “Camera Obscura” from The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self. Copyright © 2024 by Ellen Wayland-Smith. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org.
