6 7 - International Year of Light

Мария Шумейко
Mariya Shumeyko
FOREWORD
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ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ
The International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies 2015
(IYL2015) has been a tremendously successful global initiative with
thousands of events reaching millions of people in over a hundred
countries. United by the interdisciplinary theme of light, IYL2015
has brought together many different people for a year of both
celebration and hard work to raise awareness of the many ways
Light touches our lives.
The many activities that we have seen during 2015 have
involved professionals, students, young people, and interested
citizens and groups from many different communities: optical
s c i e n t i s t s and engineers, astronomers, educators, designers, architects, artists,
lighting professionals, healthcare workers, and many others.
And in this wonderful volume prepared by ITMO University, we see the fruits of a remarkable
international literary competition Words and Light and a beautiful poster competition Let there be
Light! The breadth of topics and themes, and the contributions from so many different countries is
remarkable, reflecting the vital role that Light plays in our lives in guiding not only our science and
technology, but also our culture and art.
Bringing together such a collection of unique words and poems together with such inspiring
images has created a unique one-of-its-kind book which will endure as a lasting testimony to
the events of 2015. I would like to thank the organisers for their hard work and for giving the
International Year of Light such a superb souvenir.
Международный год света и световых технологий 2015 (МГС2015) является
чрезвычайно успешной глобальной инициативой с тысячами мероприятий, привлекающих миллионы людей в более чем ста странах. МГС2015 собрал за год много
разных людей, объединенных междисциплинарной темой Света, как для празднования, так и для напряженной работы, чтобы повысить осведомленность о множестве путей, с помощью которых Свет входит в нашу жизнь.
Многочисленные мероприятия, которые произошли в 2015 г., вовлекли профессионалов, студентов, молодых людей, заинтересованных граждан и групп из
разных сообществ: ученых-оптиков, инженеров, астрономов, педагогов, дизайнеров, архитекторов, художников, специалистов освещения, медицинских работников
и многих других.
И в этом прекрасном издании, подготовленном университетом ИТМО, мы видим плоды замечательного международного конкурса литературных произведений
«Слова и Свет» и прекрасного конкурса постеров «Да будет свет!». Впечатляет
широта тем и форм, а также участие представителей от столь многих стран, что
отражает важную роль, которую Свет играет в нашей жизни, направляя не только
нашу науку и технологию, но и нашу культуру и искусство.
Объединение уникальных слов и стихотворений вместе с такими вдохновляющими изображениями создало уникальную, единственную в своем роде книгу, которая
будет длительным свидетельством событий 2015 г. Я хотел бы поблагодарить организаторов за их огромную работу и прекрасный подарок Международному году Света.
Professor John M. Dudley
Chairman of the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies 2015 Steering Committee
Профессор Джон М. Дадли
Председатель Руководящего комитета Международного года света и световых технологий 2015
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By proclaiming 2015 as the International Year of Light and
Light-based Technologies, the UN General Assembly has
emphasized that light-based science and technology are
vital for existing and future advances in medicine, energy,
information and communications, fibre optics, agriculture,
mining, astronomy, as well as many other industries
and services.
These are also priority areas for the development of our
country, as emphasized by Prime Minister Dmitry Medveded and
Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov in the meeting of the
Presidium of the Presidential Council of the Russian Federation on economic modernization and
innovative development of Russia on 9 July 2014 in Ekaterinburg, devoted to the development
of optoelectronic technologies (photonics). During the meeting, Dmitry Medveded and Denis
Manturov also encouraged colleagues to support the International Year of Light and to submit
proposals for the organization of activities in this framework.
Russia is one of the countries which have been involved in the Year of Light since the very
beginning and supported the UNESCO initiative together with thirty-four other countries.
ITMO University, a unique «optical and computer science» university in Russia, is
proud to have developed, thanks to the commitment and enthusiasm of our students, an
intensive programme of events which demonstrate the cross-disciplinary character of Light,
its connection to science, technology, culture, art, nature – in a word, with Life itself.
ITMO University is proud to be part of the international scientific community celebrating
the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies 2015, commemorating together
our great common scientific heritage and paving the way for the future.
Провозглашая 2015 год Международным годом света и световых технологий,
Генассамблея ООН подчеркнула, что внедрение в жизнь достижений науки о свете и
световых технологий имеет важнейшее значение для современных и будущих достижений, в частности, в медицине, энергетике, информационно-коммуникационной технике, оптоволоконной технике, сельском хозяйстве, горнодобывающей промышленности,
астрономии, а также во многих других отраслях промышленности и сферы услуг.
Эти направления также являются приоритетными для развития нашей страны, как
подчеркнули Председатель Правительства Российской Федерации Дмитрий Медведев и министр промышленности и торговли РФ Денис Мантуров на заседании президиума Совета при Президенте Российской Федерации по модернизации экономики и
инновационному развитию России 9 июля 2014 в Екатеринбурге, посвященном развитию оптоэлектронных технологий (фотоники). В ходе встречи Дмитрий Медведев
и Денис Мантуров также призвали поддержать Международный год света и представить предложения по организации мероприятий в его рамках.
Россия является одной из стран, которые вовлечены в Год Света с самого начала,
и поддержала инициативу ЮНЕСКО вместе с тридцатью четырьмя другими странами.
Университет ИТМО, который является уникальным «оптико–компьютерным» университетом России, гордится тем, что создал, благодаря вкладу и энтузиазму наших
студентов, насыщенную программу мероприятий, которые демонстрируют междисциплинарный характер Света, его связь с наукой, технологией, культурой, искусством,
природой — одним словом, с самой Жизнью.
Университет ИТМО гордится тем, что является частью международного научного
сообщества, празднующего Международный год Света 2015, отмечая вместе наше
великое общее научное наследие и будущее.
Vladimir Vasilyev
Rector of ITMO University, Professor,
Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Vice-President of the Union of Rectors of the Russian Federation
Владимир Васильев
Ректор Университета ИТМО,
Доктор технических наук, профессор,
Член-корреспондент Российской академии наук,
Вице-президент Российского союза ректоров.
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The UN General Assembly has declared 2015 the International Year of Light and Light-based
Technologies, thus recognizing the importance of light and light-based technologies in the lives of
the citizens of the world and for the future development of global society on many levels. The events
organized in the framework of this International Year should highlight the importance of research
both into the fundamental science of light and its applications, attract young people to careers in
these fields, promote the importance of light-based technology in sustainable development and
for improving quality of life in the developed and developing world, and enhance international
cooperation. More than 100 partners from 94 countries take part in this global initiative.
ITMO University, one of the leading Russian universities in the fields of Light-based
Science and Technology, is one of the organisers of the International Year of Light in Russia.
One of the highlights of the programme of International Year of Light events organized
by the university was the International Literary Competition “Words and Light”, in which 433
authors from 19 countries took part, namely Australia, Austria, Belarus, Brazil, Canada,
France, Germany, India, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lithuania, Philippines, Portugal, Russia,
Turkey, the Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
You are holding in your hands the collection of best works submitted to the “Words and Light”
competition, illustrated by the works of the winners of the Poster competition “Let there be Light!”,
also organised by ITMO University from January to March 2015. We wish to thank all the participants
for their wonderful texts and posters, and all the people and organisations that “spread the word” and
advertised the “Words and Light” literary competition in their webpages and social networks.
“Words and Light” is a tribute to all the writers who were inspired by Light, writers who
were interested in the Science of Light, and scientists who were also poets. The particular
objectives of this competition were to extend the audience of the Year of Light in order to
attract the attention of as many people as possible to the significance and aims of this
International Year, to inspire the youth and provide them with ways for self-realization,
and to promote Dialogue and Peace through emphasizing the universal and all-embracing
character of Light and the sense of togetherness it entails.
We sincerely hope that this book may reach some of its aims.
The organizers:
Ana Luisa Simões Gamboa, Evgeny Raskin, Margarita Petrova, Alexey Itin, Yulia Mokretsova,
Valery Bondarev, Elena Kurtseva, Ekaterina Kalkina
Генеральная Ассамблея ООН объявила 2015 год Международным годом света
и световых технологий, тем самым признала важность света и световой технологий
в жизни граждан всего мира и для будущего развития глобального общества на многих
уровнях. Мероприятия, организованные в рамках Международного года, должны подчеркнуть важность фундаментальных и прикладных научных исследований в области
оптики и световых технологий, привлечь молодежь к карьере в этих областях, продвигать световые технологии в целях устойчивого развития и повышения качества жизни
в развитых и развивающихся странах, укреплять международное сотрудничество.
Более 100 партнеров из 94 стран принимают участие в этой глобальной инициативе.
Университет ИТМО — один из ведущих российских вузов в области оптики и световых технологий — является одним из организаторов Международного года света
в России.
С января по март 2015 года Университетом ИТМО проводился Международный
конкурс литературных произведений «Слова и Свет», в котором приняли участие
433 автора из 19 стран мира, а именно Австралии, Австрии, Белоруссии, Бразилии,
Великобритании, Германии, Индии, Италии, Казахстана, Канады, Кении, Литвы,
Португалии, России, США, Турции, Украины, Филиппин, Франции.
В ваших руках сборник лучших произведений по итогам конкурса, иллюстрированный работами победителей конкурса постеров «Да будет свет!», который также
проводился Университетом ИТМО в рамках Международного года света с января по
апрель 2015 года.
Мы хотим поблагодарить всех участников за их замечательные тексты и постеры,
а также всех людей и все организации, которые "несли слово" и рекламировали Международный конкурс литературных произведений «Слова и Свет» на своих веб-страницах и в социальных сетях.
Конкурс «Слова и Свет» является данью уважения всем писателям, которые
были вдохновлены Светом, всем писателям, которые интересовались наукой
о Свете, и всем ученым — поэтам. Конкретными целями этого конкурса были
расширение аудитории Года Света, для того чтобы привлечь внимание как можно большего числа людей к важности и к целям Международного года, вдохновение молодежи и предоставление им путей самореализации, содействие Диалогу
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и Миру через подчеркивание универсального и всеобъемлющего характера Света и чувства единения, которое он вызывает.
Мы искренне надеемся, что эта книга может достичь некоторых своих целей.
Организаторы:
Ана Луиза Симойш Гамбоа, Евгений Раскин, Маргарита Петрова,
Алексей Итин, Юлия Мокрецова, Валерий Бондарев,
Елена Курцева, Екатерина Калькина
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Мари Кобякова
Mari Kobyakova
FOREWORD/ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ....................................................................3
AUSTRALIA/АВСТРАЛИЯ ..........................................................................15
Akshay Chougaonkar................................................................................................... 16
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BRAZIL/БРАЗИЛИЯ/BRASIL ...................................................................21
Luis Emiliano.................................................................................................................22
Giulia Palermo Gianecchini...........................................................................................26
Lara Riboli Bortolato......................................................................................................27
Maria Eduarda Freitas Bertolucci..................................................................................28
Flávia Rodrigues...........................................................................................................29
Gabriela Monteiro Tosi..................................................................................................30
Gabriela Helena de Oliveira Borges..............................................................................32
Paola P de Oilveira........................................................................................................32
Isadora Russo...............................................................................................................33
Vinícius Ferreira de Mendonça.....................................................................................34
Pedro Luiz Vieira...........................................................................................................35
Pedro Sousa Salgueiro Pawlowski................................................................................36
GERMANY/ГЕРМАНИЯ/DEUTSCHLAND������������������������������������������39
Susana Ferreras............................................................................................................40
ITALY/ИТАЛИЯ/ITALIA..................................................................................43
Caterina Serratore.........................................................................................................44
Erzsebet Gilbert.............................................................................................................45
PHILIPPINES/ФИЛИППИНЫ/PILIPINAS��������������������������������������������57
Caroline Nazareno........................................................................................................58
PORTUGAL/ПОРТУГАЛИЯ.........................................................................61
Nivalda Fonseca............................................................................................................62
RUSSIA/РОССИЯ.............................................................................................65
Юлия Воловикова Yuliya Volovikova...........................................................................66
Екатерина Агеева Ekaterina Ageeva...........................................................................67
Алена Сократова Alena Sokratova..............................................................................68
Алексей Ерошин Aleksey Eroshin................................................................................70
Мария Шило Mariya Shilo............................................................................................78
Мария Лисицина Mariya Lisitsyina...............................................................................79
Татьяна Шмидт Tatyana Shmidt..................................................................................80
Яна Галицкая Yana Galitskaya....................................................................................82
Юрий Козлов Yuriy Kozlov...........................................................................................84
Андрей Штырков Andrey Shtyirkov..............................................................................85
Владислав Швец Vladislav Shvets..............................................................................86
Любовь Чумакова Lyubov Chumakova........................................................................87
Ксения Титова Kseniya Titova.....................................................................................88
UNITED KINGDOM/ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИЯ�����������������������������������������91
Melanie Windridge.........................................................................................................92
Andrew Douglas Sokulski..............................................................................................96
David Horgan................................................................................................................97
Peter Clive.....................................................................................................................98
Nicolai Andrea.............................................................................................................106
Alessia Via...................................................................................................................108
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA/
СОЕДИНЕННЫЕ ШТАТЫ АМЕРИКИ................................................ 111
Gregory Scheckler....................................................................................................... 112
Jonh Hart..................................................................................................................... 116
James Ph. Kotsybar.................................................................................................... 117
Kenneth Silber.............................................................................................................120
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AUSTRALIA
АВСТРАЛИЯ
Елизавета Бобырева
Elizaveta Bobyireva
Akshay Chougaonkar
THE MOON AND THE LIGHTHOUSE
The world sees the moon and the lighthouse as merely two solitary guiding lights at our service
in the night. Taking their presence and faithfulness for granted, we fail to perceive that they are
the epitome of the emotion of love – so close, yet so far. So subtly they narrate a fable of love.
These lights are two wandering spirits that are awakened by the nightfall, battling slithering time in
daytime. Awakened by the darkness, they try to have a glimpse of each other, whilst performing
their duties of leading us out of darkness safely. Their epic fable of love comes to an end when
dawn displaces the darkness of the night. An endless tale of love – The moon and the Lighthouse.
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ACT I: THE WOES OF THE LIGHTHOUSE
Rooted!
I am to this rock.
Daylight!
Ah! It casts me dead.
I hailed the sky,
He stole my spirit instead.
Behold!
My gallantry,
‘Tis not fragile,
The populace believed me.
Unused,
It turned futile,
Too frail, they shunned me.
So, I challenged
The colossal sea.
Oh! Life and blithe; hark; I beseech!
Why are you eluding me?
Horizon the hypnotizer;
He stole my gaze
And imprisoned my mind.
A mystical maze,
Of time and tide
Entrances me.
An impasse; I fight
Until the fall of enchanting, endless night.
ACT II: THE TEARS OF THE MOON
The dazzle stands futile.
So spiritless,
Subsists the air around.
All in vain, I try to suppress
The brooding gloom and the oblivion
Prevailing all around
Incarcerating me,
Making me bound.
I snivel.
These tears invisible.
The stars mock at me, devouring,
Savaging this faith so feeble.
A hazy gaze
Deep into this vile void.
Yearning for the night.
A night devoid
Of the painful wait
And this longing sight.
ACT III: THOU SHALT DESCEND
Panoramic view
And the lurking lull abound.
The scene turns purple,
Now shall free what remained shackle bound.
From deep within,
From the horizon,
From the vastness of sky,
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From the chasm of ocean
Shall descend
Two solitary spirits.
A blissful aura
Shall cease their wait, their fight.
The horizon shall be enlightened,
By their guiding light.
The day ends,
And the night transcends.
The moon gleams,
And the lighthouse glows, the soul, deep within.
Thriving to unite,
They are the spirits.
They showed their might,
A true grit.
ACT IV: THOU SHALT PART
The dawn slithers in,
A grief starts to bloom,
The glee withers off.
The spirits plunge into despair,
A sheer gloom.
The spirits,
Moon and the lighthouse,
You are the epitome of love.
A fable of emotions.
In sight, so close,
Yet so far.
You carved a niche
In the heaven’s lair.
But alas!
You shall part
And return to where it all began.
Варвара Флорова
Varvara Frolova
BRAZIL
БРАЗИЛИЯ
BRASIL
Артём Сенин
Artyom Senin
Luis Emiliano Costa Avendaño
~
LUZ COMO OBJETO, LUZ COMO EMOCAO
O design historicamente ainda se guia pela famosa frase "a forma segue a função"
ultimamente também está sendo agregada a esta frase a questão da emoção, entendendo
aqui a emoção como fator subjetivo da percepção da forma e é através desta emoção que
conseguimos criar a empatia do consumidor com o objeto, caracterizando-se assim o valor
da aquisição. Atingir este valor subjetivo, gerado pela competência do design, é o foco de
qualquer projeto de objeto e o sucesso da competitividade de uma empresa.
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O consumidor não se questiona e nem questiona como o objeto foi produzido, quais
são os materiais e processos utilizados, a tecnologia e recursos humanos empregados na
construção do objeto, que são de extrema importância na construção do mesmo, não são
bem compreendidos pelo usuário, então surge o valor subjetivo como o maior valor de
julgamento no ato da compra.
A analise emocional do objeto se da em vários momentos, sendo o impacto visual o
principal, atribuído à percepção do "golpe de vista", num segundo estágio o consumidor
para observar e analisar com mais detenção o objeto do desejo até entrar numa análise
racional onde a questão do preço decide a compra.
No caso de uma luminária o fator que deveria decidir a compra é a luz e não o objeto
decorativo, o consumidor compra uma percepção ambiental da luz, infelizmente depois
que a luminária está instalada percebe que a beleza estética do objeto não corresponde à
beleza subjetiva da luz imaginada.
Mas como o consumidor pode analisar a percepção da luz?Como o designer deve
compreender este ato no momento do projeto do objeto? Entender estes fatores é
compreender o ato humano que da alma ao objeto, deixando de ser puramente um objeto
físico e passando assim a ter identidade emocional. A procura desta identidade não é
mais uma questão mercadológica e simsensorial, é perceber que o ser humano (seja
consumidor ou usuário), tem suas necessidades inexplicáveis pela simplesracionalidade,
para sentir a luz cada um de nós tem que sentir a escuridão. Começo minhas aulas com
o ambiente escuro, onde o "ser" se desconecta da realidade, onde o pensamento viaja,
a imaginação voa, onde a visão não é mais o sentido básico, onde o tato e o ouvir são
os sentidos principais, e o mundo é percebido de outra forma e eis que a luz aparece,
inicialmente por uma luz de vela - aconchego, a luz artificial original, o calor é sentido e a
calma inunda o nossocorpo, a luz artificial é "dura" muito tecnológica, percebe-se que lhe
falta identidade, calor, esgota os outros sentidos.
Sempre me pergunto qual é o sentido do objeto que ilumina se de fato o "sentido" dentro
do significado sensorial da palavra é a própria luz e como esta interage com o ser humano,
será que o objeto se sobrepõe à própria luz? Será que a materialidade se sobrepõe à
imaterialidade da luz? Como deve ser analisada a luz? Pelo objeto (sua embalagem) ou
sua subjetividade (fator sensorial)?
O objeto em si, a luminária, tem sido muito analisada como objeto de desejo (valores
semânticos, signos, poder, luxo, etc.) e como elemento decorativo importante na história
das residências e seus espaços habitáveis da humanidade, iniciando-se como luz calor
real - no uso do fogo (as lucernas, por exemplo) e como luz calor (sensorial) as atuais
luminárias e suas tipologias de fontes de luz (lâmpadas e LED's) que geram um valor de
aconchego que depende de valores de conforto ambiental de acordo às necessidades
fisiológicas de cada indivíduo.
A luz também é de fato o valor mais importante dentro da compreensão deste binômio objeto/
luz, já que é em suma o que se precisa, assim como sua sombra, consequentemente é isto que
tem que ser valorizado no momento do projeto da luminária, ou será que, sendo o interesse a
própria luz, não seria interessante "projetar" a luz e não sua "embalagem", podendo gerar assim
novos conceitos e inovação num setor industrial carente, às vezes, de novas ideias?
A luminária só tem sentido de uso quando existe o namoro entre a luz e o espaço, antes
só é um objeto decorativo, inútil até, cobra existência no momento da sua luz, no momento
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da percepção fisiológica e psicológica do uso do ambiente - o lugar, e é aqui, durante este
ato que o objeto transparece como valor poético sensorial que somente dentro de uma
análise de observação desta intimidade a obra pode ser gerada. O objeto que ilumina e um
facilitador da percepção da luz, sua estética material é a base para a própria imaterialidade
da luz.
A luz na sua inexistênciapalpável representa um estado de espírito, o próprio objeto
deixa de existir quando a luz comparece na sua função imaginada. Não só no design de
uma luminária com também em qualquer coisa que o designer crie deve ter sempre em
mente a construção do desejo percebido, a parte física da luminária é a embalagem do
sensorial é o meio para fazer o elogio à condição humana através da poesia da luz.
26
Aos designers de luminárias não comecem se perguntando como deve ser a estética do
objeto, mas pensem na sensação da luz.
A luz é então sensação pura
para sentir a luz
é necessário sentir sua sombra
luz e sombra
lua e sol
contrastes
tonalidades mil
sentimentos dois mil
aconchego
grito
nos leva
nos guia
quero chegar lá
Алина Лукьянскова
Alina Lukyanskova
Giulia Palermo Gianecchini
DIFFERENT MEANINGS FOR LIGHT
28
What is light to me?
Electricity? Lamp?
Not just that.
It’s the eyes on the shadows,
It’s the warmth on the ice,
It’s the way to look in the dark.
The light dispels my fears in the dark.
The light lets me find something.
It makes me choose something.
Without light, at night, I can’t see anything.
So, It does not make sense,
Because my eyes are the most important thing
In my body, for me.
Like, I love playing the piano at night,
Without light, I can’t see my fingers on the piano,
So, I can’t do my hobbie.
The light is important even if I was blind,
Because at least, people would see me, at night.
What would happen if the light finished? More deaths?
More stealing? More assault? I don’t want to know that.
The light has a different meaning for each other,
But for me,
It’s the most important thing for life.
Lara Riboli Bortolato
WHAT DOES LIGHT
MEAN FOR YOU?
The sun light,
And the moon light,
Illuminate our
Own light.
Our dreams
Had been ideas,
In our soul,
And now
We can see
Our radiations
And the world light too.
You are my light and my life.
If I die you can
See me again.
Don’t care
The light will never extinguish!
29
Maria Eduarda Freitas Bertolucci
THE LIGHT
30
In the dark I can see
The beauty light in your eyes
You’re the light of my way
When I am lost in the day
You’re the light of the moon
The sunlight
The light of my soul
The light of the sky
You’re the light of my life
The light of the world
The light that dispels my fears
The light that makes me feel alive
You´re the person
Who taught me the meaning of light
Light that means love
Love that means you.
Flávia Rodrigues
WHAT LIGHT MEANS TO ME
Light brings inspiration
Without light, it is only darkness
I can’t imagine the world without light.
Well, I can, but I don’t want to.
Even with light, we have to confront darkness every day.
Our own darkness.
But when things aren’t going well,
we can turn on the lights and run away
of the dark in our soul.
Of course we have to preserve light,
and sometimes it is good to turn the light off.
But it is better to have the choice.
31
Gabriela Monteiro Tosi
LIGHT
32
All was dark,
Nothing was seen,
Nothing was heard,
Then something came,
Small, bright and yellow,
Running between the inexistent,
To make existence,
Did it walk lonely?
In direction of somewhere…
In the centre of something…
That isn´t know
No, it wasn’t alone!
There were others,
In direction of centre,
Of something that isn’t known,
They meet,
Because of your attraction,
Radiated darkness,
Fulfil emptiness,
Illuminated and energized,
Something happened,
There wasn’t emptiness anymore,
It wasn’t lonely, and quiet,
It had now,
The pulsing of life,
The light of hope,
Of the life that is made.
Надежда Бей
Nadezhda Bey
Gabriela Helena de Oliveira Borges
LIGHT
34
Light is a word with no exact definition, it means a lot of different things. So, how can
I know what something so wide means to me? How can I know what light means to me if
I don’t think about it?
No one takes a break from this hectic life that we live today to think about this thing that
we don’t exactly see but it’s so important for us without us knowing.
Like I’ve said, we don’t stop to think about light because we don’t realize what it means
in our lives. If we stopped to appreciate this magic thing, we’d be with no words in our
mouths and our minds.
Because it’s one of the most amazing things in the world.
Paola P de Oilveira
WHAT LIGHT MEANS TO ME
If you put a sheet of paper in front of me and say «draw light», I’ll probably draw a sunny
day and a lot of sun rays and some families in a valley having a picnic and kids playing
at this place. I know that that is not exactly light, but it will be the first thing in my mind.
The sunlight and those happy families...
Light is not only the lamp or the lantern, but being happy, for me, it is a source of light.
A spiritual light, which, together with the sunlight, is the most beautiful thing.
Isadora Russo
WHAT LIGHT MEANS TO ME
Light to me isn’t nothing more than life.
Light to me isn’t just to enlighten, light is happiness.
The reason I wake up.
It is to realise that a new play without trials will start.
But in the end, light is only «material»
Well... For me it isn’t.
Light also is into me and into you when we remember or invent
something extraordinary,
This is light to me.
35
Vinícius Ferreira de Mendonça
SWEET, SWEET LIGHT
Light’s a spark
A gleam in the night
A firefly in the dark
The meaning of life
36
It’s the sun on opur skin
The moon when it’s night
Such beauty, such a gleam
Such love when it’s bright
When we’re flying our kites
Running down the hill
Feeling this delight
There it is: light
So here we are
Everything’s alright
Such a sweet bliss
From dawn to twilight
Pedro Luiz Vieira
THE PAIN OF LIGHT
What is light?
For me, it’s something bright.
Something that makes things clear,
Things that are never near.
Faint or intense,
It can mean the end of the race,
The race against the time.
The race we call «life».
Or maybe it can be,
A signal of real love.
And always when you see,
You will remember me,
Telling you to «seize the day».
Every day it can be the answer,
Of the troubles that you have,
That comes fast like a ray.
37
Pedro Sousa Salgueiro Pawlowski
DEAR CURTAINS
(based on The Beatles song —
Dear Prudence)
Dear Curtains, won´t you get out of the way.
Dear Curtains, shake for the windy new day.
38
The sun is up,
The sky is blue,
And there’s light
All over you
Dear Curtains, won’t you get out of the way.
Dear Curtains, let me see the clean skies.
Dear Curtains, see the tears in my eyes.
The wind is low,
The birds will sing,
And the sun light,
Just warm their skin.
Dear Curtains, let me see with my own eyes.
Look aglow ‘glow...
Look aglow ‘glow ‘glow...
Look aglow...
Dear Curtains, let me see clear now.
Dear Curtains, like a glowing night.
The clouds will be
A daisy chain,
Won’t you let me be
Able to smile again?
Dear Curtains, won’t you let me be able to smile?
Dear Curtains, won’t you get out of the way?
Dear Curtains, shake for the windy new day.
The sun is up,
The sky is blue,
And there’s sun light
All over you
Dear curtains, won’t you let me seize the day?
39
GERMANY
ГЕРМАНИЯ
DEUTSCHLAND
Алина Лукьянскова
Alina Lukyanskova
Susana Ferreras
«Auch das kleinste Licht hat sein Atmosphärchen.» — Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
MATHEMATIK AUF LICHTBASIS
42
Licht ist das Conditio sine qua non, die notwendige a-priori-Bedingung des Sehens und
des Lebens. Licht ist inhaltstragender Punkt, Linie durch Raum und Zeit, Licht lässt sich in
sphärischer Ausprägung betrachten, es ist Botschafter entfernter Himmelskörper. Licht kann
Ein-, Zwei-, Drei-, Mehrdimensionalität wiedergeben. Es ist virtuell als potenzielle Welt der
Möglichkeiten, real durch die Sinne wahrnehmbar und messbar. Das Lichtquant könnte sogar
jenes in den neoplatonischen Lehren Plotins (205-270) als “Mona” beschriebenes Konzept
sein, das Minimum der arithmetischen Größe genau so wie es gleichzeitig, stellt man es als
Punkt dar, das Minimum der geometrischen Größe sein könnte. Vielleicht wird man künftig
mit Lichtquanten, die durch die transzendentale Zahl π erzwungene Schätzung des reellen
Wertes besipielsweise von Kreisumfang oder Kugelvolumen genauer berechnen, und somit
auf den transzendentalen Wert verzichten können. Ein Photon hat, wie am CERN in Genf
auch experimentell bestätigt wurde, eine Speicherkapazität von 10127 bits1. Würde man ein
Photon als meta-mathematische Messeinheit nehmen, könnten man mit einer Messung
multidimensional Information, etwa über Größe, Entfernung, Zeit oder Alter bekommen
und vielleicht noch einen Einblick in viele unerforschte Erkenntnismöglichkeiten gewinnen.
Die deskriptive Kraft der Zahlen könnte sich durch Licht in Informationsbits umwandeln,
also eine “Inhaltsmathematik” werden. Da sich Licht kugelförmig in Lichtgeschwindigkeit
um seine Quelle ausbreitet, ware eine genaue Berechnung - also ohne der Zahl π, die
nur annähernde Werte zulässt- des Volumens einer Kugel für mehrere wissenschaftliche
Disziplinen interessant. Dies könnte mit einer “Mathematik auf Lichtbasis” ermöglicht werden.
1. von Buengner, Peter: „Physik und Traumzeit“, Eigenverlag 1997, S. 29: “Ein menschliches Gehirn hat im
Vergleich dazu nur 1012 bits Speicherkapazität“; nach dieser Rechnung wäre ein Photon etwa zehnfach
leistungsfähiger als ein komplettes menschliches Gehirn.
Алина Лукьянскова
Alina Lukyanskova
ITALY
ИТАЛИЯ
ITALIA
Кирилл Ермоленко
Kirill Ermolenko
Caterina Serratore
Erzsebet Gilbert
Light
Is
Gorgeous
Hug
Timeless.
46
LIGHT YEARS
Photons don’t experience time, my father tells me. Isn’t that something?
The dusk falls upon us in that sort of violet which is the color ofjazz, and the moon isjust
now rising to practice the gibbous serenade. And even as my father speaks the fortitude
of fact, I can see that particular wink of pale blue joy in his gaze which is also the endless
potential for a joke. Years of ecstatic mathematics and starstruck methodology and the
astronomer’s devotion to gravitational law have taught my father levity, too.
Already he smiles. A photon walks into a fine hotel, he tells me. And being a courteous
gentleman, the concierge welcomes it. May I help you with your luggage, sir? And the
photon replies, why no. You see, I’m travelling light!
And my father laughs and laughs, and so do I, so that tears make fallacies of our home,
chromatic aberrations of the midsummer poplars and the willows of winsome tragedy, the
backyard deck from which we could launch ourselves on a grand vacation to everyplace
we haven’t yet had the chance to see. It has been a beautiful day, I know. My father did not
need to go to the doctor today, and we sat in his study to eat oatmeal cookies with icing, his
favorite kind, while his old records told us it don’t mean a thing. The honeysuckles will soon
unfurl their trumpets to the dark, and the books are in their full bloom.
My father wipes his glasses, looking as wisely whimsical as always he has, even if he
seems so much older and smaller to me now. With only a few wisps of hair remaining now,
he is a sage and he is a fledgling.
Nevertheless, he says, it is true. A photon, the fundamental quantum particle of light
itself, does not experience time. He looks to me, hoping I will understand.
You see, my father tells me, a stargazer moving at far more mundane a velocity — say,
a scientist such as myself, calculating the distance to the lodestar from Earth’s beloved
gravity well—would observe duration growing peculiar for an object approaching the speed
of light. This is Einstein’s theory of relativity. Do you remember it?
Yes, Dad, I think that I do.
My father nods. As an object accelerates, faster and faster and faster still towards light’s
unsurpassable speed, its mass increases, and its clock ticks and tocks at a slower and
47
slower pace. Or so it seems to an observer, watching a mere minute pass to the object flying past,
while a lifetime of posies and cancer and constantbirdsong passes upon our own tiny world.
He raises his hands to his head, a theatre of puzzlement even though he knows all
the equations by heart. Time itself changes, he whoops. The confounding of chronology!
Eras and hours all in a tizzy! For space and time are inextricably woven, a tissue bent and
bowed in the presence of acceleration and all extraordinary mass.At that most superlative
of speeds — 299,792,458 meters per second, the C, the constant celeritasof light in
a vacuum — time will cease even as billions of tectonic eons go by. Yet nothing may surpass
the speed of light, my father says.
I nod, and watch him sigh. He sighs so much more now than once he did, and sometimes
it is hard for him to breathe.
But at once my father leaps to attention, his heart hearkening to the voiceless, lucific call
of the evening star. We haven’t much time, he cries. We’ve got to go!
48
***
My father and I ascend so quickly, accelerating as best we can towards the speedof
light, so that it only takes us a few seconds to reach the moon.
We pass through cirrostratus and through flocks of thunderbolts, and meteors plummet
past us like wishes burning away. When we alight upon the Sea of Tranquility, we bounce
helpless as babes in this gravity so much weaker than what we have always known in our
terrestrial home, and the lustrous white dust of the regolith rises in wee tempests around my
father’s battered shoes. His laces are untied, but they always are.
Would you take a look at that, my father says. Wow!
Around us the moonscape glows with all the queer and pitiless splendor of desolation:
the vast basin is a spill of selenography and pieces broken from the world, pale boulders
and motionless sands extending unto a horizon so brilliant and so keen it might be an
incision. In the untold blackness of the lunar sky, my father and I can perceive naked stars
with only numbers for their names, fearfully sharp without an atmosphere to soften the fires
of their reality. Here, the stars are hypodermic.
Upon the moon there exists no air through which sounds can travel, but my father’s
voice rises just as it does when we step out to the symphony—where he will wear his
preposterous suit of velveteen, and I will wear a silly gown that leaves glitter in our wake—
then and now,he speaks in gasps and rapturous odes.
Look there, my father says. The flares of Orion, do you see?
I lean against his shoulder to look up along the thinned line of his arm and past his
bruised hand; here upon the moon, our weight is so slight, but I think he feels as strong as
he did when I was very young. He caught me when I fell from the boughs of the olive tree.
One, two, three, that’s his belt. I see it, Dad.
And there, do you see? The Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery. Out of its clouds and shrouds
of cold hydrogen, gravity draws matter together unto clumps like the gems of my insomnia, until
nuclear fusion begins and each becomes a protostar. The infants of a constellation yet to come!
I remember when first the Hubble telescope my father helped to craft revealed a throng
of evolving stars, the Eagle Nebula’s embryos; he showed me the photograph, and wept in
human awe. I do not know if he is weeping now.
And yet, he tells me, that very nebula lies one thousand and three hundred light years from
our own solar system. Though light is so very, very fast, still it takes more than a millennium
for those photons to reach our wondering eyes. When those fiery seeds emitted the light
we see so clearly now, the Umayyad caliphate raised the unreconciled Dome of the Rock,
and the city of Teotihuacan burnt in Yucatan wars, and some gloomy and anonymous poet
composed the epic of Beowulf while Li Po wrote of wine sipped in in the spring. And yet as
those photons experienced it, no time passed at all!
My father sighs upon this moon with no breath. The light which now departs the nebula
will not reach our solar system until another thirteen hundred years have slipped away.
Who knows, he says, what voyagers shall see it then.
I lift my father’s case of caplets and painkillers from where it lies in the lambent lunar
regolith. He has to take so many pills now, but he tells me is so grateful for all the marvels
of the medical sciences.
Oh! My father might leap for joy, bounding so high in the nonexistent air, but he only
takes my hand. Look!
The Earth is rising, now, like a realization interms of the perigee. There it is,the ultimate
vision of valiant navigators and the icon of frailty since Apollo’s halcyon nights. Cast half in day
and half in dark, the planet exaggerates the way I always knew it might appear: we can see the
shreds of clouds and swirling hurricanes signaling a graceful catastrophe, and I recognize the
continents, puzzles of plate tectonics and forgotten ice ages. There are the oceans of absolute
blue, and I remember when we went to the sea, how I feared for my young brothers and yet
my father and mother kept watch, how it felt to have sand between the toes.
49
50
Before you were born, my father tells me, I bore witness to a total solar eclipse, when
the moon passed in a perfect path to mask the sun from sight. I heard fanfare in my mind,
he says. Perhaps it is this which made me the astronomer I am today.
It’s wonderful, Dad.
And somewhere lies our home, my father muses. I have been so lucky.
I look him full in his face, the tracery of bones which formed my own. Dad, what is
happening?
That? My father shines with delight. Why, that is the aurora!
That is not what I was asking about. But I remain silent, and turn to see.
Upon what seems the crown of a somersaulting world, a phantasmic glow floats and
flickers past the terminus of the earthly night. As green as ghosts, it could be the halo of
dreams rising from one billion restless sickbeds, but my father says that this is but one
more manifestation of all that light can do. The winds of our own star, the dynamism of our
planet’s magnetic shell, the particles of our fragile atmosphere exuding photons beneath
the blows of cosmic force.
Do you remember, when we saw the northern lights?
I do, Dad. They were pink, and there was an owl on the telephone wire.
For a moment my father and I can only watch; he sighs, now. I must organize my lecture
notes, he says. I am a born teacher. I would like to return to the university soon.
Dad, this is only a hiatus—it’s only for a while, I promise.
From the frostbitten shadow of a lunar stone I take up my father’s notepad, the yellow
kind, where I can see calculations with mysterious variables scribbled in my father’s loopy,
inimitable handwritingand clarified by the glamour of the earthshine.
Here you go, Dad. See? It’s all still there.
My father takes his work with a tremble; maybe it is only a shiver of gratitude. Yes, he
murmurs, you’re right. I have so much left to teach. Softly he smiles. And so much left to learn.
He turns his gaze back to the firmament, the lucent arm of our galaxy sweeping through
the unfathomable dark. The more we look, the more stars seem to materialize, even if they
have existed so much longer than we ourselves.
The photon, my father explains, is the carrier of the electromagnetic force—unified,
with magnetism upon one face, and upon the other the light which blazes from a nova in
its gorgeous death throes, from the detonation of a nuclear bomb, from the lamp beside
the bed when I read myself to sleep. And light even manifests as different species of itself.
My father falters, for a moment, and his eyes seem at once to focus upon something
I cannot see. May we sit? he asks me. I would like to sit down. It seems I am a little tired today.
Of course, Dad.
I spread his blanket out over the phenomenal white soil of the Mare Tranquillitatis,
repose upon the basalt which has never known a rainstorm. Here you go.
Shakily my father leans upon my arm to settle and rest against ancient stone.
Yes, he sighs, thank you. Yes, that’s better. What was I saying? I have almost forgotten
what I wanted to say. Oh yes, light. We were speaking of light.
Light is illumination, and yet it is contradiction! My father grins. For light is a particle,
the unparalleled photon, and yet in unabashed paradox it is also a wave! Light exists as
a duality, both a quantum of energy and wave undulating like the surface an ocean with no
depth. Isn’t that something?
My father runs his cracked finger over his lecture notes, up and down and up again. And
like all waves, he says, light possesses an amplitude, the height of its peaks from the bottom
of its troughs, and a wavelength, the distance from one peak to the next, and a frequency, the
number of peaks and troughs through which it moves in a single instant. It is the wavelength
which determines the hue of the light we see — the more crimson the light, the longer the
wavelength, and growing blue as the wavelength shortens. And the shorter the wavelength,
the quicker its frequency, and the higher the energy its photons bear.
My father, the born teacher, pauses for a moment. Do you recall the double rainbow, in
the spring of the year your brothers began school?
I do, Dad. It was so beautiful. I wondered where it might end.
And yet the light which we are capable of seeing is only one fragment of all the spectrum that
exists!My father claps his hands. Beyond red, when wavelengths reach the size of a thorn’s
tip, the radiation is infrared; if the wavelength stretches past the span of a moth’s wing, it is
microwave, and if it is as long as the height of a batty bell-tower, then it is radio. But beyond the
visible blues, when the wavelength is shorter than a bacterium, small as a molecule, the light
is ultraviolet. As short as an atom, the radiation is x-ray, and a wavelength short as the nucleus
reaches the gamma ray. Yet light is only absorbable as a packet of energy — a photon, both at
once, propelled by an energy proportional to the light’s frequency. And nevertheless it forever
moves through the vacuum at that mostquintessential, ultimate speed.
Photons existboth as particles and as waves, my father tells me. And we can never
possess the entirety of information about a quantum particle, for it is forever uncertain, and
51
Юлия Полежаева
Yuliya Polezhaeva
it can be both here and there, both in this state and in that state, all at once.
He looks towards Arcturus and a strange star. It was x-rays which the doctors used in the
course of my radiation therapy, he says now in a sort of hush. The energy of the photons at
such a wavelength was intended to destroy the cancerous cells within me. I am so grateful
for all the marvels of medical science.
I know, Dad.
The doctor has informed me that more radiation and chemotherapy will not help me
anymore, my father says. Life is quieter, now. He takes my hand. I am not afraid, he tells
me. They directed starlight towards my heart.
54
***
We ought to find some presents, my father says. For your brothers, and your sister, and
your mother too. A souvenir from our lunar holiday! He smiles, a little weakly. I want to go
for a walk. I need to go for a walk.
But when my father tries to rise his legs don’t seem to work, and he shakes and tumbles
against me.
Maybe you need to lie down, Dad. I hold him, his weight so trivial upon the moon and yet
so difficult for him. Maybe we should just rest.
My father shakes his head, frowning and bleary. No, no. I have so much to see.
Still he cannot walk, and I lead him over moondust and meteorites to the cold, skeletal
metal bed the nurses gave to us. He does not want to lie down, but when his head falls
gently on the pillow he grows calm. Thank you, thank you.
I sit beside him to press a cool cloth to his brow, and take his hand. His skin feels so cold
against my own, but he is burning within. He stares upwards, then hazilyglances at me. Do
you see what I can see?
We sail along the celestial ecliptic and pull the tides towards our breasts; together we gaze
into the universe. The Earth is on the wane, and my father is waxing aware. We look towards
the austral constellation ofFornax, past the doomed duet of a binary star and past a lonesome
exoplanet, past a bulbous red giant at the close of its life; we look past a planetary nebula, the
last revenant and relic of some collapsed star at one thousand and one hundred forty-five light
years away. There is the sprinkle and sparkle of a globular cluster whose light only reaches us
after six hundred and thirty millennia, and there is a barred spiralgalaxy reaching its arms to
the void of forty-five million years ago. The first mammals are born, and die.
And further and further on we look—and we have so much to see—unto the Hubble
Ultra-Deep Field. My father gasps to see. Wonder, he must be gasping in wonder; this must
be the reason why his breathing sounds different than before.
We view the plenum of cosmic history. In a patch of sky which seems small as apupil from
where we rest in this barren lunar sea, ten thousand galaxies emerge unto our sight—islands
of the luminous, flowers of gravity, lanterns scattered through the brightness of the dark.
Look at that, my father murmurs. Look at that. These galaxies, he tells me, formed and
flashed and spun through space billions upon billions of years ago, epochs before the brute
stardust that would someday kindle our own solar system was forged in a molecular cloud.
Yet only now does their light fall upon our gaze. In the dimmest of these luminaries, we are
seeing the earliest galaxies to emerge within this universe, only a few hundred million years
after the universe began.
Light is very old, my father says. But a photon does not understand time.
His lashes flutter, and he searches for the words, and finds them in the starry cope.
And when we look upon those galaxies most distant and so old, he mumbles, we find
their light changed slightly, stretched towards the wavelengths of infrared. But this redshift,
this redshift, why am I stumbling as I speak, this occurs when light is moving away. For
the universe itself is expanding—swelling from within, as space itself is stretched and
everything within the cosmos is borne along in its growth. In spite of light’s most excellent
speed, someday the light of those galaxies will never reach the eyes of an unknown earthly
astronomer, like me. A certain force we cannot name, something we do not understand:
dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe, as everything recedes.
My father winces. Something hurts. Please, hold my hand.
I am holding it now, Dad.
Yes, he whispers. I am glad we are here.
My father shivers, and I unfold a blanket that sits upon a lump of lunar stone, casting it
over him in a flurry of prehistoric dust. I slip his glasses from his temples, and let them fall;
they strike the ground and rebound, up and down and up again to refract this weightless
world. But my father does not need them to see.
Do you hear something? He blinks. I believe I can hear music, somewhere.
We look on and on. And even further than the most distant of galaxies, there remains
a primordial glow. Stretched to faint microwaves by the expansion of the universe, the
relic of the very first light to ever exist endures still, if only as a dim and fading daybreak:
55
56
the cosmic background radiation. This, my father explains, is the lingering echo of an age
only 380,000 years after whatever it was that we call the Big Bang. Out of the churning
plasma filling all of the newborn universe, protons and electrons combined to form atoms of
hydrogen, and for the first time in the long and fiery chronology of reality, light was possible.
Before then, the great scattering, all of space was too hot and dense for photons to travel to
illuminate anything at all—dark with excessive bright. But the universe became transparent,
and visibility was at last possible for the potential, improbable, insignificant stargazers of
thirteen billion years to come.
My father licks his lips, sticky with mucus and thirst; I wipe his mouth, and he looks up
in a gentle daze. The sun is drifting over the mountains of the moon, sinkingin a colorless
twilight whose shadows make us seem so true, as if the geometry of our bodies may never
be undone. A child’s blameless amazement enlightens my father’s face, his long-ago
boyhood of spaceships and cowboy adventures emerging in the bliss with which he regards
the celestial sphere. He smiles at me, innocent with astonishment.
I’m here, Dad.
When you were born, he murmurs, when you were born I held you and sang to you
a pastoral symphony. I will always remember playing basketball with your brothers in the front
yard, how we laughed until I cried, we laughed and your mother lay crocuses in the flowerbed.
My father breathes differently from before; a sigh, a gasp, one, two, three, twenty, and
he breathes again.
The stars of Fornax pirouette, and the spangled galaxies of the Deep Field race away from
us, primeval signs of a time which will never return. My father is bedazzled, beatified. There
is no sound upon the moon, but we are full of music, and the arithmetical strains of Bach’s
final fugue encircle us, and mingle with the improvisation of a bebop love song. Somewhere a
star exhausts the last of the hydrogen fueling the subatomic reactions of its intimate core, and
collapses in its own failingfires; the light of its death will not reach this world until all poems are
silent, all suffering has ceased, and chemosynthetic fish slither in the shallow, glassy seas.
The earth sets over the empty meadows of the moon, and I forget the names of the
constellations I learnt to find when I was very small.
Our family is here, now, our faces all shimming with sobs. Here is our family; we are
here, crossing the wastes of a celestial body to gather around this brittle bed. My brothers
are shaking, please, my boys, don’t cry. And we all reach to touch my father so he will know
that matter is real, that we are here and we remember.
I clasp his hands, the ashen wrists, so that I can feel his pulse beating in a strange way,
slower and slower as if his veins are forgetting themselves. My father works his mouth,
struggling with something; I watch his albedo rise. I know what he is trying to say.
And light, multifarious light, acts as the fundamental particle of electromagnetic radiation,
and as a wave it charges ions, and as an x-ray it attacks cancer and as a gamma ray it
causes it, and in a microwave hum it reveals the quickening expansion of our universe, and
in one fragment of the spectral spectrum it is the visible prism which seems so exquisite
to our sight.
And light, paradoxical light,exists as both particles and waves, and a particle exists
in two states at once, but all that we know is this single reality, out of countless possible
worlds.Somewhere there may be a universe in which people cannot go to the moon, and
somewhere a universe in which organic cells cannot grow malignant and cancer is only
a creature of the zodiac. Somewhere there may be a universe in which the speed of light is
not a constant, a topsy-turvy world of outlandish mathematics where still my father studies
quantum mechanisms and shows us his telescope, and my mother’s crocuses seem like
sweet organs in the black earth, and still we allcaper and play ball and laugh together
in the front yard.
And light, light the exemplary, moves in a vacuum at an invariant, finite speed, altering
the texture of its own space and time while all around it the cosmos grows old. A photon
does not experience time. We ourselves might have learnt to move at celeritas, and lived
out a perpetual moment in which life is ceaseless and nothing will change. But then we
should lose it all.
I know what my father is trying to say. We don’t have much time, Dad, so please, look
with me now. Dad, we are here. And eons pass by in an instant, a vast chronology of
starbirth and spectra andsupernovae, pianofortes and words, radiation and radiance and
heartbeats stopping beneath the fingertips, while we watch the skies and feel the lightness
of our years.
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PHILIPPINES
ФИЛИППИНЫ
PILIPINAS
Алёна Стаскова
Alena Staskova
Caroline Nazareno
ILLUMINATING ROVER
60
Light me as the powerful nebulas
Returning from light years of photons
Be my auroras in the eve of unknown darkness
And all other darkness that the lord of light solarly define
Be my spectral radiance in all spectral fluences
Where all black bodies and blackholes can shine
Be my photometer in every image, in every bulb, in every candle, in every stone
From the flickers of ages, of all epochs and Galileo’s hall of flames
Be my nanolight radiating in light energies from east to west, south to north
Be my quantum light in every space, where all spaces become the light
Be my eyes of all wavelengths to show the universe
That you are transversing in every planet of life and non-life
Yes, let there be light because you are my light in every word
And every breathing letter of L-I-G-H-T in my life
The meaning of light that does not only refract and reflect
Is you, the lightbearer
The light of love, the light of lights.
Евгения Пупышева
Evgeniya Pupyisheva
PORTUGAL
ПОРТУГАЛИЯ
Елена Вельянская
Elena Velyanskaya
Nivalda Fonseca
A luz
A ela
Basta uma fresta
Para colidir
Com a escuridão
Astuta
Reflete
Permeia
Revela
Brilha
64
Алёна Тихонова
Alena Tihonova
RUSSIA
РОССИЯ
Юлия Сергеева
Yuliya Sergeeva
Юлия Воловикова
Yuliya Volovikova
Екатерина Агеева
Ekaterina Ageeva
***
Стоять на краю земли
бывает немного грустно
и слушать, как в небе пусто
и замерли муравьи.
Стоять на краю земли.
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Смотреть и не видеть дна
у синего в волнах неба,
там только плывет комета
на весь небосвод одна.
Смотреть и не видеть дна.
Любить и не знать причин,
и крылья сложить в полете,
к тебе пролетая в гроте,
а там так темно в ночи.
Любить и не знать причин.
И свет рисовать тебе,
пытаясь найти повсюду
твоё отраженье в судьбах,
пытаясь искать везде.
И свет рисовать тебе.
***
Как меняются люди порой, как сгорают их старые лампы,
Освещавшие жалкий ночлег с перебоями в сотни лет.
И теперь, предвещая бой, в темноте раздаются залпы,
Начинается новый век: в нем есть звук, но отсутствует свет.
Неустанно вещатели ткут паутину своих разговоров,
Оплетают планету словом, бесполезным, как тот хлопок
Из бутылки, хранящей брют, что в тени новогодних споров
Вместе с пробкой летит над полом, и ты не сразу не чуешь ног.
Дальше к слову придут семь нот и родят колеи мелодий,
Раздражающих тех, кто любит мир природы и тишину.
Каждый третий у нас поет и для музыки точно годен,
Только звук бесконечный губит, он мгновенно ведет ко дну,
Без возможного шанса спастись. Потому что легко оступиться,
Когда главный источник света в нашем сердце перегорел.
Слышишь звон — непременно молись, вдруг уже колокольная птица
Не захочет давать ответа, сколько в жизни успеешь дел?
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Алена Сократова
Alena Sokratova
ЗВЕЗДНЫЙ ВЕТЕР
Если это и знак беды, —
Умирая, гореть красиво!
Каждый миг происходят взрывы
В глубине молодой звезды.
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Ветер огненный пролетит,
Опалив небосвод вечерний,
Выжигая остатки терний
На далеком земном пути.
А тебе – лишь тепло и свет,
Бесконечность огней и радуг…
Позабыть обо всех преградах
И светить миллионы лет…
Но остынут звезды лучи,
С каждым мигом во тьме бледнея,
Если только ты не сумеешь
Ветер огненный приручить…
Людмила Финогенова
Lyudmila Finogenova
Алексей Ерошин
Aleksey Eroshin
СВЕТ КРОМЕШНЫЙ
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— Яко же придеше злыдени, да в души седоше, падеше на мир великыя темь.
Ибо темны злыдни суть, иже их тьмы. Иже лягаше темь на всея земли, да сокрываше
всяку же тварь живущу — летящу, ползущу, тако же лающу, мычащу да говорящу.
Иже пущаше тьмы злыденей тьму темь, дабы свыше не видаше, яко человецы грех
творяше, ибо греховны человецы суть.
Блаженный Микеша кончил говорить и шумно высморкался в рукав. Слышно
было, как он, вздыхая, жуёт беззубым ртом, и грязненькая жидкая бородёнка его
шуршит по рубахе, а мамка наливает попрошайке топлёного молока. Тишка чуток
подвинулся на лавке – вознамерился горячую горбушку под шумок стянуть. Микешины байки он слышал не раз уже, сидя на печке у какого-нибудь приятеля. Придёт, за стол сядет, и ну бухтеть про великую темь за грехи тяжкие. Смешно. Блаженный – он и есть блаженный: дурачок. Темь всегда была, это любой знает.
И то славно: был бы свет — все и ослепли бы. И горбушку, поди, не стянешь – мать
враз увидит и подзатыльник даст. Кому нужен он, свет этот?
Поднёс Тишка пальцы к самому носу и вгляделся в чуть видное пятно ладошки. Потом отвёл руку плавно — и пальцы растворились в черноте. А Тишке всё равно видно.
Не глазами, а чувством каким-то другим, непонятным. Чувствует он, как поворачивается мамка у печи, как Микеша макает нос в тёплое молоко. К чему глаза? И так ладно.
Повёл носом Тишка, и ощутил явственно свежий духмяный хлебный аромат еще тёплой корки с прижаренным капустным листом. Вот он, совсем рядом.
Рука почуяла тепло и сама потянулась куда нужно…
— Я всё слышу, окаянный! — грозно предупредил мамкин голос. — Вот анчутка!
Поди лучше, дров принеси.
Тишка соскользнул с лавки, привычно юркнул в сени. Свой дом он знает, как пять
невидимых пальцев, да и двор тоже. Проскользнёт меж лавок ужом – не зацепит
ничего, ничего не свалит. Чуять людей, скотину или печку горячую – это у него хорошо
получается, только вот вещи всякие — никак.
Свалил Тишка дрова на приступку, а сам на печку шмыгнул. Хорошо, тёпло. Дурачок Микеша всё не уходил – цедил молоко из кружки, да вздыхал:
— Ибо человецы суть. Во тьме родяше, во темь уходяше…
Мамка тоже вздыхала следом. И чего вздыхать? Ну, родятся в темноте, и что? Где
ж родиться ещё, коли кругом тьма? И уходят в неё же. А может, и не уходят. Может,
их злыдни забирают. За ересь всякую. Или, может, они вовсе пропадают. В реку или
там болото. Во тьме, поди, много чего такого есть. Сбился с тропы — и поминай, как
звали. Батька Тишкин так и пропал прошлой весной. Пошёл по дрова, да и не вернулся. То ли заплутал, то ли злыдням в лапы попался. Был человек, и нету. А может, и
злыдней-то никаких нету тоже. Кто их видел-то?
— Дидку, а почто людям глаза, коли ничего не видно? — спросил Тишка.
— Ты что пристал к юродивому? — пригрозила мамка. — Вот я тебя оттуда ухватом…
— К чему мальца ухватом? — забормотал Микеша. — Не надо ухватом. Больно
будет.
— Любопытный шибко, — проворчала мамка, — греха с ним не оберёшься.
— Ну, а всё же? — не унимался Тишка. — Пускай скажет, коли знает. Интересно
же. На кой глаза, коли ничего не видно?
— Глаза – дабы суть греховную зреть, которая тьма есть, — прошамкал Микеша.
— А скотина почто во тьме видит?
— Всякая тварь мычаща, лающа иже блеюща есть тварь безгрешна, поелику бездушна. Человек же есть тварь мысляща, мысли рекуща, творяща лже. Ибо же мысль
изреченная ложь есть.
Тишка выставил руку с лежанки, ловя ладошкой жар от огня. Рядом с этим
жаром тепло мамкино и Микешино почти пропало.
— А вдруг она тоже не глазами видит, скотина-то?
— Что значит — «тоже»? — взбеленилась мамка. — Я вот тебе дам «тоже»,
злыдень окаянный!
— Шумно у вас, — проворчал блаженный, — пойду я.
Микеша, шаря по стене, прошаркал до двери и вышел. Залаяла дурачкова собака:
заждалась. Хорошая у него собака, куда хочешь в два счёта доведёт. Микеше за неё
две козы предлагали – не продал.
— Что ж ты, дурашка, творишь? — всхлипнула мамка, едва собачий лай отдалил-
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ся за ворота. — Беду накликать хочешь? Ну, как донесёт он про твоё «тоже»?
— Не боись. Кто ему поверит? Он же блаженный.
— Будут они разбираться. С дядькой Филимоном не шибко разбирались.
С Филимоном и в самом деле никто не разбирался — забили до смерти.
Раз побили – отошел, а после второго разу не оклемался уже. И то – зачем было
кричать, что все слепые, а он зрячий? Пропал год назад, а потом объявился, и ну
кричать. Кому такое понравится? Зрячих никто не любит. От лукавого это – во тьме
видеть. Только злыдни такое могут.
— Иди уже, от греха, — вздохнула мамка, — да не болтай при других-то – худо будет.
Соскользнул с печки Тишка, подобрал со стола уложенную котомку – хлеб, яйца
и фляжка молока, весь нехитрый обед пастуший. Снял с гвоздя верёвку, накинул на
плечо. Чуток задержался на пороге. Неохота Тишке избу покидать – такое тут всё
уютное, привычное да тёплое. Родное все. Мамка мягкой рукой напоследок волосы
пригладила — даром, что ругает, от любви ведь. Стой, не стой, а идти надо — корова с голоду ревёт уже, да и приятели заждались.
По росной траве прошлепал в стайку Тишка. Тут ему тоже каждая соломина знакома, на ощупь ходить не надо. Корова привычно холодным носом в ладошку тычется
— ищет соли. А соли-то сегодня Тишка и не взял. Позабыл с дурачком этим. К мягкой
тёплой шее коровьей прижался и зашептал на ухо, как бабка учила: «На острове Буяне, в реке Ириане, лежит бел-горюч камень алатырь. Заклинаю камнем-алатырём,
камней царём: зол-злыдень, сгинь навсегда, без следа, как дым во тьме, как в песке
вода. Чур-чура, приди помочь, гони злыдней прочь, в чёрную ночь, чтоб корову нашу
не сбили с пути, а дали домой прийти. Слово моё не зря, крепче камня алатыря. Как
я сказал, так и будет».
Корова трясла ушами – не хотела слушать, хотела на выпас. Ничего, потерпит немного: с наговором оно надежней. Может, и не помогает, а так, бабкины сказки, только всё одно спокойней. Привязал Тишка верёвку к рогам, калитку открыл, да пошёл в
поводу – корова сама знает, куда идти. Знай только, ногами пошевеливай.
Хорошо поутру на выпас идти. Это поначалу из хаты выходить не хочется, потом
к прохладе приобвыкнешься – и хорошо. От лопухов росных свежестью веет, на ветвях
птицы щебечут. Корова рядом шагает – горячая, мягкая. Озябнешь, прислонишься на минутку — и хорошо. Слышно уже, как на деревенской площади мальчишки галдят, собираясь. Коровы мычат, овцы блеют. Осталось последний сарай миновать, и вот она, площадь.
Идет Тишка, не думает ни о чём таком, и вдруг тяжелая рука за плечо – цоп! Пальцы твёрдые, как железные, и холодный пёсий нос в колено упёрся. Да это Микеша!
— Ай! Дидку, пусти: больно.
От неожиданности Тишка верёвку из рук выронил. Верёвка по траве шуршит: корова-то
дальше топает. Прошла чуть, и остановилась. Ну, хоть не трудно сыскать будет. А Микеша
Тишкино плечо отпустил и дружески так по мальчишеской худой спине пришлёпнул:
— Ступай. Подумал я, ты и впрямь что видишь. А ты – как все.
Приблизил блаженный лицо своё к Тишке вплотную – пахнуло тряпьём старым,
сеном и потом. И даже вроде глаза во тьме видать, и словно свет от них даже. Или
показалось всё Тишке со страху – и нос крючком этот, и бородёнка нечистая, растрёпанная.
— Нет, — повторил Микеша, — не видишь ты дальше носа. Во тьме родяше, во
темь уходяше… Лже рцы, человецы-червецы… А я-то подумал – ходишь больно ловко, как зрячий.
— Я, дидку, сердцем вижу! — вдруг шёпотом выпалил Тишка. — И тепло всякое
чую. Это не грех?
— То не грех, — ответил блаженный, — темь есть грех. Ступай за коровой своей,
она тебя выведет, куда надобно.
Сказал так юродивый, да верёвку в руку Тишке обратно вложил. Корова потянула, и зашагал Тишка дальше по дороге, а старик пропал во тьме, как не было.
Тут и на площадь они вышли. А стадо уж на выгон тронулось, еле догнали. Жутковато как-то Тишке от встречи такой. Обхватил он за шею корову свою, к тёплому боку
приник — всё не так страшно. Ну, вскоре и на выгон пришли.
На выгоне хорошо – расслабиться можно. Коровы никуда не денутся – вкруг
луга жердяная городьба устроена. Трава уж подсохла. Можно с приятелями поваляться, клубнику поискать. Клубнику искать легко: пахнет она здорово. Горстью листву прочешешь – и вот тебе угощение. А рядом кузнечики стрекочут, и приятели
тож языками стрекочут, словно кузнечики. За разговорами день быстро проходит.
Вот скоро и обратно собираться пора. Ищет Тишка свою корову, а коровы-то и нет.
Что ж теперь делать-то? Руки выставил, в стаде шарит, ищет кормилицу. Ан, всё
одно нет её нигде. Раньше-то мигом находил, а теперь никак. Тепло чужое повсюду.
Делать нечего – прошёл Тишка вперёд от стада. Если отойти подале — почуять, вроде как, легче должно. И правда, маячит вдалеке. Еле-еле слышно.
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Пошёл Тишка на тепло. Шёл, пока в жердь не упёрся. А жердь-то поломана — прогнила. «Чур-чура, приди помочь, гони злыдней прочь, в чёрную ночь, чтоб корову нашу
не сбили с пути, а дали домой прийти», — забормотал Тишка. Да только не хочет
возвращаться корова — стоит себе, дышит, ногами переступает. И недалёко, вроде.
Ан, за изгородь страшно идти. Может, и ничего, если недалёко? Вернуться Тишка
сумеет, поди? А без коровы как? Нельзя без коровы.
Привязался Тишка верёвкой к жерди, выставил руки, да и шагнул за ограду. Пройдёт немного, поворотится — вроде, недалече ушел. Слышно, как мальчишки кричат,
стадо мычит и блеет. Но и корова своя ближе не становится, ровно дальше отходит.
Вот и верёвка кончилась. И корова совсем рядом дышит. Верёвку оставить боязно,
да потерять кормилицу ещё страшнее.
Бросил верёвку Тишка. Идёт за коровой, а та от него. И вроде рядом совсем, и не
взять никак. Не иначе, Микеша сглазил, злыдень старый. «Приведёт куда надобно»…
А Тишке туда и не надобно вовсе. Уже и стада не слышно стало. А тут под ногами
вовсе захлюпало. Кусты кругом колючие — шиповник. Присел Тишка и завыл тихонько со страху. Тут корова и остановилась. Постояла, подумала, да и назад пошла.
Видать, жалко мальчонку стало.
Подошла, губами у лица шлёпает, слезы солёные со щёк слизывает. А губы мягкие,
добрые, только не коровьи вовсе. Пошарил руками Тишка, на недоуздок наткнулся: голова-то лошадиная. Эва! Как же он так обмишулиться мог? Зазря заблукал, выходит.
А теперь что же — пропадать? Дороги назад не найдёшь. В недоуздок вцепился, пальцы разжать боится — ну, как уйдёт лошадь, что тогда? Поди, куда-нибудь, да выведет.
Утер щёки рукавом Тишка, всхлипывать перестал. Поднялся, ухватился за гриву
на холке, да на широкую конскую спину влез. Влез, улёгся и за шею обхватил. Пропадать, так не в одиночку. Неси хоть куда-нибудь.
Повернулась лошадь и пошла. Тишка лежит, руки разжать боится — вдруг свалится? Под копытами то болото хлюпает, а то тропа будто. По лицу да по спине
ветки шлёпают, секут вроде за дурость малолетнюю. Плачет беззвучно Тишка, слёзы
о гриву вытирает — страшно же. Дома-то всё привычно, понятно было. Всё знакомо.
Мир такой маленький да уютный казался. А тут — эва: огромный, страшный, неизвестный. Идёт лошадь, уносит Тишку. А куда — кто знает? Приостановится, траву
пощиплет, и снова идёт. И конца и краю этому пути не видно.
Спина у лошади широкая, что лавка, только мягкая, живая. И тёпло, не замерз-
нешь, и покачивает — как в зыбке. Песни мамкиной только не хватает. Вместо песни — чу! Вода журчит. Речка. Лошадь копытами цок-цок по настилу деревянному.
Никак, мост. Ну, как сронит? Да нет, ничо вроде — ровно идёт. Значится, дорога
привычная. Руку вытянул Тишка – перила нащупал. Так и есть — мост.
Растопырил Тишка ладошку. От воды тепло идёт. Не как от огня, а как от молока
парного. И в тепле том будто бы свои пальцы видно. Не у носа самого, а насколь
руки вытянуть хватает. Поднял Тишка голову. Чудное дело: чернота посерела будто.
Сверху светлее как бы, а ниже чёрные пятна древ шевелятся. Жуть.
А лошадь всё идёт, мост перешла, и словно бы в гору подымается. А на горе той столп
словно. Да яркий такой, аж глаза режет. И лошадь к тому столпу поворачивает.
Струхнул Тишка, голову опустил, лицо в гриву конскую спрятал и глаза закрыл: ну, как ослепнешь вовсе от яркости этой? А столп всё ближе, да всё ярче.
Уже и сквозь веки видно его, не спрячешься. Пришлось рукой Тишке глаза прикрыть.
Подошла лошадь близко-близко к столпу и стала. Вроде как, идти дальше не собирается. Не знает Тишка, что делать: глаза открывать страшно, да и не открывать
страшно. Не будешь так век лежать. И тут корова Тишкина вдруг замычала! По голосу-то узнал он её сразу, от неожиданности руку от глаз и отнял. И ничего не увидел.
Вблизи столпа тьма ещё черней.
С коня соскользнул Тишка и на голос коровий пошёл. Вот она, совсем рядом. Нашарил, обхватил голову рогатую, знакомый запах вдохнул. Ну, теперь-то не пропадёт, поди. Корова к дому выведет. Вот и обрывок верёвки на рогах есть — доведёт.
Распутал верёвку с куста Тишка, корова и пошла. Неспешно так. Рад мальчонка, успокоился. Нашлась. Родная, тёплая. Привычная. Огромная такая корова. Теперь и домой можно. Дома-то хорошо: знакомо всё, ладно, гладко, уютно.
Мамка, поди, вся извелась уже. Хлебы выпекла, на столе остужает. Запах по всему
дому — так и пил бы запах этот.
Шлёпает Тишка по тропе за коровой, а столп назади светит. Пройдёт немного
Тишка, и оглянется. Шаг сделает – и тянет его снова посмотреть. Ведь уйдёшь —
и снова темь вечная, глядеть не на что. А любопытно – страсть. Как страх пропал,
так сразу любопытно стало. Аж свербит в носу от интереса.
Остановился Тишка. Корова домой тянет, а столп — к себе. И чем дальше отходишь – тем тянет сильнее. Хоть разорвись надвое. Уйдёшь – век жалеть будешь.
Ну, и поворотил назад. Корова неохотно идёт, упирается, словно пускать не хочет.
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А столп – вот он уже, рукой подать. Словно бы из-под земли растёт, как дерево.
Ан, и не из-под земли вовсе – из камня. На камне знаки какие-то вырезаны, и горят
они так, что глазам больно. И не жгутся – потрогать зовут. Не огонь, а горит. Чудно.
Тут корова Тишкина совсем упёрлась, чуток дотянуться до камня не даёт. Рванул Тишка, верёвка и порвалась. А ладошкой он прям в горящие знаки попал.
Как полыхнуло у него в глазах-то — ровно лбом о притолоку приложился. Заорал
Тишка матом благим со страху, да и дух из него вон.
Сколько пролежал он подле камня без памяти – никому не ведомо. А только как
очнулся да голову поднял — так по глазам и резануло: светло всё! И всё ему видно.
Глядит – а ни столпа, ни камня нету, как не бывало. Трава-мурава под ногами —
красивуще! Дерева кудрявыми головами качают. А вверху и вовсе цвета такого —
аж на глаза слёзы наворачиваются. Дюже свет ярок. Только над ним — круглое,
горячее, ещё ярче. Уж такое яркое, что и смотреть больно. Вот где свет самый. Куда
там столпу давешнему! Проморгался Тишка, глядит – поодаль животина стоит. Шкура
пятнами: половина, как темь, чёрная, половина светлая. Голова у животины рогатая,
к рогам верёвка привязана, глаза глядят грустно. «Корова, — догадался Тишка,-на
свету-то маленькая да неказистая какая! Грязна, колченога, в репьях вся».
Поднялся Тишка, да и пошёл по тропке, а корова за ним. С горушки спустился — вот
и деревню видно. Мальчишки по выгону бродят – коров собирают. Мужики по заборам руками шарят — до изб своих ковыляют. Бабы да старухи в рукоделия по завалинкам уткнулись, тоже вокруг не видят ничего. Чудно и страшно.
Идёт по улице Тишка, удивляется: до чего грязно всё, лопухами да крапивой
заросше. Избёнки кривобокие слепыми окошками в пыль уставились. А которая
своя — разбери теперь. Кабы корова в калитку не упёрлась – ни за что не узнал бы.
Домишко махонький, тёмный, затхлый — рухлядь одна. И мамка на крыльце – домишке подстать: ветошь какую-то нацепила, сгорбилась. А у забора Микеша стоит
и пристально так смотрит. А на что тут смотреть, коли нелепо, сиро да жалко всё?
Сел Тишка у крыльца прямо на землю, глаза закрыл, да и заплакал: пропади он,
свет этот кромешный, пропадом!
Ольга Осадченко
Olga Osadchenko
Мария Шило
Mariya Shilo
Мария Лисицына
Mariya Lisitsyina
***
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Светом ладони прикрой счастье —
мы не взорвемся. Дыши часто.
Мы не утонем — дыши глубже.
Как небу воздух ты мне нужен,
как стон огню, как листу осень,
как семь и девять числу восемь,
как тамбурину душа скрипки.
Я буду тенью твоей Шипки,
расколочу зеркала мрака,
стану победой в твоей драке,
шерстью собаки, теплом камня…
Ты для меня сочинишь тайны,
выпорхнешь песней моей птицы,
перемешаешь судьбы лица,
талых миров соберешь части…
Мы не исчезнем. Дыши часто.
***
Зимой не холодно. В попытке бега
В шубы кутаться, латте греться.
Буквы чёрные на бумагу снега
Высыпать. Из бреши сердца.
Брезгливо корчатся тучи в лужах.
Пустые тучи. Муляж. Подделка.
В два счёта солнце меня к тому же
Опять обставило в гляделки.
А снега не было. Уж пару месяцев.
С надеждой в небо, а там — всё синее.
А люди нынче чаще крестятся.
А косы нынче — больше в инее.
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Татьяна Шмидт
Tatyana Shmidt
СКАЗКА О ЛУЧИКЕ
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Далеко-далеко, в прекрасной воздушной стране, жил-был первый луч весеннего солнца. Сладко спал на перистых облаках, слушал истории Северного Ветерка,
прилетавшего погостить на Небо, играл в салки с солнечными зайчиками... Но вот
пришло время ему отправляться на Землю, чтобы подарить себя людям.
«Ах, как хорошо!» — думал Лучик. — «Совсем скоро я принесу весну, и тогда
расцветут цветы, пробудятся деревья! О, все будут так рады!»
Вместе с каплями теплого грибного дождя наш герой достиг земли и очутился в городском парке. Сонно улыбались ему березы, приветливо щебетали синицы, а любопытные вороны кричали:
« Карр! Кто это у нас здесь? Карр!»
« Где же все?» — удивленно воскликнул Лучик. Тут он заметил людей. Женщины
и мужчины сновали по аллеям, а дети играли и оживлённо болтали обо всем на свете.
Какой-то мальчик весело кричал что-то другу, а тот строил высокий замок из песка.
« Сейчас! Сейчас! Нельзя заставлять их ждать!» — Лучик надулся от важности доверенного ему дела, спустился еще ниже и вдруг загорелся изо всех своих маленьких
сил. Парк озарился ласковым светом весеннего солнышка. Казалось, будто мудрый
волшебник достал из сундука россыпь искрящихся на гранях алмазов…
Но люди словно бы и не заметили этого. Продолжали игру дети, все так же шли по
своим делам взрослые. И никто не остановился, не посмотрел в не по-зимнему синее
небо, не подставил лицо пригревающему солнцу …
В отчаянии стал летать Лучик по парку, заглядывать в человеческие лица, ища
поддержки. «Разве вам не нравится мой дар? — кричал он, — Разве вы такие жестокие, люди? Почему вы не желаете пускать весну в свое сердце?». Однако его усилия
были напрасны. И тогда Лучик заплакал.
Сидевшая на скамейке маленькая девочка потеряла дар речи от изумления.
Она заметила, как прямо из воздуха падают капельки воды, а под ними вырастает
семицветная радуга.
— Разве так бывает, мама?!
Лучик услышал слова девочки и внимательно посмотрел на неё, заглянув в самые
тайные мысли. Не было там ни злобы, ни безразличия, только доброта и беззаветная
вера в чудеса. И, что главное, — бережно согретая теплом любви, спрятанная под
слоем повседневных дел, в ребенке жила Мечта.
Захотелось спрятаться Лучику от людского непонимания: «Хорошо бы поселиться
в душе этой девочки. О, как славно бы это было! Наверное, она не прогонит меня …»
Подумав так, он вновь загорелся ярким светом и проник в её сердце.
Когда Лучик наконец заснул, уютно свернувшись клубочком, его новая хозяйка тихонько засмеялась. Счастье билось внутри, как рыбка, и щекотало ей нос. Девочка
вскочила и вприпрыжку побежала по парку. Впереди её ждало много удивительного.
С тех пор пролетело немало лет. И сегодня приходят на Землю лучи Весеннего
Солнца, но видит их лишь тот, кто хочет увидеть. А поймаешь такой Лучик, впустишь
в себя — никогда уже не станешь прежним, будешь вечно нести людям свет и тепло.
83
Яна Галицкая
Yana Galitskaya
СВЕТ
Ты – не пророк и не поэт,
Ты – только образ позабытый,
На глубине ста тысяч лет
Твоя душа покоем сыта.
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Ты не творец своих идей,
Но, ты беспечен и прекрасен,
Сквозь ночь покинутых дождей,
Твой образ также строг и ясен.
Ты не боишься темноты
И заполняешь все пространство,
А, там, где ты, нет суеты,
И без тебя нет постоянства.
Ты – друг покоя и мечты,
Но можешь быть таким печальным,
Боишься сонной пустоты,
И можешь быть для всех прощальным…
А, иногда, ты – силуэт,
Что озарён любовью нежной,
Гори всегда, душевный свет,
Как символ мира и надежды!
Алина Лукьянскова
Alina Lukyanskova
Юрий Козлов
Yuriy Kozlov
Андрей Штырков
Andrey Shtyirkov
ВЕРНЫЙ МАЯК
Всем светлое слово приносит тепло,
Ведь для человека, что Солнце оно!
Лучом превосходно владел Архимед —
Страшным оружием сделал он свет.
86
При помощи линз и зеркал Галилей
На астрономию пролил елей:
Своею трубой, сфокусировав свет,
Он разглядел свет далёких планет.
Сегодня луч лазера незаменим —
Мы в жизни всё больше встречаемся с ним.
Но всё ж самый верный по жизни маяк
Есть свет лучезарного нимба, вот так!
СВЕТ — МЕРА СОВЕРШЕНСТВА
Что эталон? Возможно совершенство?
Неосязаемое — не моя стезя.
Измерить можно, только вечность
Не множенная на ночь мера дня.
Процесс зависим от событий,
Происходимое — еще произойдет.
Неповторимое — вот кладезь для открытий,
Но как измерить то, что не течет.
Недвижимо, не мертво и не живо,
Без веса, вне объема, без длины.
В отсутствии знакомой допустимой
Приборно-измерительной шкалы.
Проблема не находит объясненья.
Легко теорию обманом доказать.
Известное всегда найдет решенье,
И по ученому друг другу будем лгать:
«Есть эталон! Подвижно совершенство!
Все, Всё, Всея — Проекция Вселенства».
Одно наверняка — без света меры нет.
Вне жизни не найти ответ.
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Владислав Швец
Vladislav Shvets
Любовь Чумакова
Lyubov Chumakova
***
Луч, преломившийся в бокале,
Не проникает сквозь хрусталь —
И, падая по вертикали,
Ложится на горизонталь.
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Душа с причудой в каждой ноте
Не преломляется в вине;
А то, что соткано из плоти,
Грешит не по своей вине.
Пусть ты – один из миллионов
Лучей; что свойственно — не грех;
Но толкование законов —
Не одинаково для всех.
СВЕТ
Не тьма решает все вопросы,
Она их чаще создает.
Лишь теплый луч, осушив росы
Теплом не Землю свет свой льет.
И пробуждаются растенья,
И звонко птица песнь поет…
Планета дышит вдохновеньем,
Она сияет, она живет!
Как царственно явленье света!
В нем сущность вся и простота.
На все вопросы есть ответы,
Не то, что там, где темнота.
Я каждой ночью жду рассвета,
Успокоеньем бдит душа…
Ведь жизнь и создана на это,
Чтоб ею жить при свете дня!
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Ксения Титова
Kseniya Titova
СВЕТ
«Знай, до начала творения был лишь высший,
Всё собой заполняющий свет,
И не было свободного незаполненного пространства –
Лишь бесконечный ровный свет всё собой заливал».
Рабби Ицхак бен Шломо Лурия Ашкенази (АРИ), XVI век.
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Буквы. Что вы видите сейчас перед собой? Линии, которые мы выводим на белом
листке бумаги, как на высшем, всё собой заполняющем свете. О чём нам говорят
эти линии? Любая из них – ограничение на получение света, о котором пишет АРИ
в своём стихе «Древо жизни». Тогда зачем же нам нужны буквы?
«Сказано: когда задумал Творец создать мир, все буквы были ещё скрыты», —
пишет Рабби Шимон Бар Иохай (РаШБИ, II век нашей эры). И далее: «Когда задумал
Творец создать мир, пришли к нему все буквы алфавита в обратном порядке».
Так, буквами был создан мир. Ведь, если есть свет, должен быть сосуд, для получения этого света, иначе он бесполезен, несмотря на то, что прекрасен. Поэтому нам
нужны буквы — сосуды для получения света. Каждая из них особенная по своему
начертанию и имеет своё значение, своё свойство. Они призваны по-разному взаимодействовать со светом, давая нам многогранные ощущения своим сочетанием.
Так красиво и аллегорично повествуют нам о свойствах людей старинные источники. И это отнюдь не примитивное представление о сотворении мира или фантазии чернокнижников, уводящие нас в мистику. Здесь речь идёт о внутреннем мире
человека. Авторы этих высказываний намного опередили человечество в понимании
природы людей, и теперь мы спустя столетия научились читать их «между строк»,
впитывая всю принесённую мудрость.
Множество учёных пыталось изучить и понять явление свет. Сначала мы узнали от них,
будто свет— это волны, потом, что он частицы. Но как бы нам ни рисовали его физики,
мы всегда воспринимаем это явление, как нечто приятное, тёплое, несущее добро, знания,
любовь, справедливость, свободу, счастье. И это неспроста. По определению исследователя АРИ и его предшественников свет – это свойство (желание) отдачи, которое имеет
обратную сторону, тьму — свойство (желание) получать. На этих двух желаниях строится
всё мироздание, и кроме них ничего не существует. Всё доступное нашему пониманию:
материя, время, пространство, мысли, разум, — исходит из желания получать. Сам человек — получение. Потому он так стремится к источнику света, к дающему. А у дающего,
с его стороны, только желание насладить получающего. Сам факт существования Вселенной говорит о том, что свету удалось выполнить своё предназначение отдавать, и всё возникшее в мире, получило бесконечное наслаждение. Каждый камушек, каждая травинка
являются непрерывно исполняющимся желанием получать. Но вот парадокс, почему, если
задача света бескорыстно насладить всё вокруг, человек, как получающий, не чувствует
этого наслаждения, более того, он так сильно страдает?
В своих трудах о природе человека РаШБИ рассказывает нам о неком световом гене,
отличающим людей от животных, растений, и неживой материи. То есть, в каждом человеке есть точка света, альтруистического желания, которая делает нас отчасти дающими,
подобными свету, а не только получающими. Поэтому человек не может брать, не видя,
что этим самым он доставляет кому-то наслаждение. Рабби Йегуда Ашлаг, живший в прошлом столетии и давший полный комментарий на труды РаШБИ, приводит простой пример из жизни. Хозяин приглашает гостя за стол отведать удивительных кушаний. Но тот,
поскольку пришёл с пустыми руками, стыдится принять приглашение и отказывается от
еды, хоть очень голоден. Тогда хозяин говорит, что обидится на гостя, если тот не поест,
ведь он целый день старался и готовил всё это только для гостя, узнал, какие тот любит
блюда, объездил весь город, чтобы купить продукты, а гость не хочет даже притрагиваться
к еде. И только тогда, чтобы сделать приятное дающему, хозяину, гость начинает есть,
ведь теперь он знает, что хозяин радуется и наслаждается больше него самого.
Человечество как раз переживает метания гостя. Оно пришло в этот мир с пустыми
руками, как получающее. Но точка света, как совесть или чувство стыда, не дают ему
насладиться. В отличие от животных, растений и неживой материи, не ощущающих
дающего и берущих всё со «стола» как бесхозное и бесплатное, мы подсознательно
чувствуем «хозяина» подобием свойств с ним. Чтобы удовлетворить позывы пробудившейся совести, человечество должно очистить свои сосуды получения (те самые
буквы), сделать в них правильную надстройку, намерение на отдачу. Тогда мы сможем
получать наслаждение бесконечно, как бесконечен всё собой заполняющий свет.
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UNITED KINGDOM
ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИЯ
Алина Лукьянскова
Alina Lukyanskova
Melanie Windridge
NOTES FROM THE NORTH
I am in Longyearbyen on Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago at around 80 degrees
North. It is the International Year of Light and I am a plasma physicist writing a book on the
northern lights. I’ve come here to visit the scientific facilities and see the solar eclipse at the
end of March, but also to experience the northern lights in the remote wilderness and get a
flavour of what it must have been like for Arctic explorers over a hundred years ago making
forays into this inhospitable land.
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THE LIGHTS
Reindalen was vast and beautiful — a wide, long expanse edged by flattened mountains
that looked like a giant line of piled white sugar subsiding into the valley. The surface was
mostly icy crust, again with puddles of snow, so pulling the sleds was relatively easy but we
were accompanied always by the loud scraping sound of skis over uneven, frosty ice. It was
too loud to talk. We progressed in our own individual worlds. Every hour or so we would
stop for a very quick break — put on a down jacket, drink some water from our flasks, sit
on our sleds and eat a few nuts or a biscuit, swapping our hands in our mitts between each
action to prevent the fingers becoming painful from cold. Despite my best efforts they would
hurt anyway, and it was always a relief to get going again and for the pain in the fingers to
gradually diminish.
It got colder. By day three I could no longer write my diary because my fingers were
too cold even in the tent. Getting into camp was a race to get everything set up and to get
warm. As the guide pitched the tent I would get the bedding, fuel, burners, pan, food and
guns ready to go in. He would put up the polar bear trip wire and I would get everything
inside and dig a step in the porch for easy access, piling snow up in the other half for melting
for water later. Then I’d go into the tent, pump up my sleeping mat, organise, get changed
and get in my sleeping bag to get warm and out the way as the guide came in. By day four
when we got in the tent our clothing was stiff with frost. There was solid ice around the front
collars of our jackets. I hadn’t been able to wear my goggles because the view became
clouded by millions of tiny ice crystals. Taking off mittens for more than a few seconds, even
in the tent, made fingers scream in pain. We lit a burner in the tent to take the edge off. It
wasn’t warm, but we could function. We could pass a relatively pleasant evening once we
had eaten our rehydrated food and heated up water for our bottles, chatting in our sleeping
bags over the small burner. Morning was unpleasant. I never enjoyed wiping away the ice
from the opening of my sleeping bag and wriggling my way out into the frigid air.
One evening I went out around eleven o’clock and saw the northern lights. They were
a feint greenish white, stretched out east-west across the whole sky and reaching up in
places like towers to the heavens. From where we were camped we had a wide view
and it was beautiful to see the lights over the full horizon. However, what I had not been
prepared for when I planned this trip was quite how cold it would be. The temperature was
a huge barrier to enjoying the northern lights, not just because it was cold to stay out there
watching, but because it required a huge strength of will just to leave the tent and see if
there was any activity. I think I had romantic notions of enjoying the lights from a tent in the
snow, but I was not prepared for what it would feel like in these temperatures. Even the
guide was cold.
“This was one of the coldest trips I have ever done,” the guide said to me afterwards.
“I’ve never skied in padded trousers before.” He has been guiding for ten years and has
made numerous trips to the North and South Poles. He said this trip was worse than skiing
to the North Pole. This is because we weren’t seeing the sun, so nothing warmed, nothing
dried. Many ski trips go under the midnight sun.
I learned that the conditions the polar explorers had to endure were extreme. Out there,
everything is about getting things done as quickly and efficiently as possible. If you stop you
get cold. It’s dangerous. You have to focus on doing just what is necessary. I was grateful
to have my experienced guide looking out for me. I certainly have a greater appreciation
now of what these explorers and scientists did in these frozen regions. And I also know that
a camping trip is not the best way to experience the northern lights.
ECLIPSE
Last Friday was an extraordinary day. Eclipse day. I awoke to mostly clear weather
and couldn’t quite believe our luck. As I walked down through Longyearbyen towards the
university (UNIS) just before seven o’clock, there was a large lenticular cloud hugging
the summit of the mountain across the fjord, and some wispy, pink cirrus clouds up high.
Otherwise the sky was blue. I met my friend Pål (pronounced Paul) at UNIS, an optics
specialist in the atmospheric physics group, and we went across to the old aurora station
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96
in Adventdalen. Visiting scientists were there setting up their equipment for imaging and
spectroscopy, and the Norwegian broadcaster NRK was preparing for a live broadcast. Pål
set up his telescope and camera. The clouds disappeared and the sky became a perfect blue,
the sun shining strong and clear and reflecting brightly around the snowy mountain landscape.
After nine a group of students arrived. Up and down Adventdalen people were gathering.
It was freezing – probably around -20C – and I was wearing full down clothing. People
walked around between small groups, trying to keep warm and anticipating “first contact”.
Then, at about twelve minutes past ten local time, there it was. The moon touched the
sun and we watched it gradually move across, people tracking the progress through their
eclipse glasses. We also had a Sunspotter, a folded Keplerian telescope which projected
an image of the sun onto a small screen. People gathered round to watch.
Gradually the sun shrunk down to a small crescent, then a sliver. At this point it became
noticeably darker, though still quite light. “It’s just like looking through sunglasses,” I heard
a student nearby exclaim. Except we weren’t wearing sunglasses. Then, a strange strobelike effect began, clearly visible as flickering light-and-dark on the snow. These were the
shadow bands – rippling waves of light caused as the final, almost point-source, sliver of
light is focussed and defocussed as it passes through warmer and cooler air currents in the
atmosphere. People talk about watching out for the shadow bands because they are easy
to miss. Experts recommend putting a white sheet on the ground because they are most
visible on a flat, white surface. There they were obvious – we had a landscape of pure white
snow all around.
Incredibly quickly, after seemingly only a few pulses of the strobe, there was sudden
brightening, the diamond ring effect, and then darkness. Totality. The moon was completely
blocking the sun and I looked up at it with naked eye. I could see the pink tinge of the
chromosphere (so called because of this distinctive pink colour) and prominences, though
the fine structure of the prominences was more visible by telescope than by eye. I think
I just saw the colour. The solar corona glowed silver, a ring around the dark shape of the
moon stretching short, silky fingers outwards into the black. It looked fairly symmetrical to
me, not highly pinched in any direction. It was like the sun had taken on the moon’s sheen,
an eerie, ethereal silver. It was beautiful. I looked around at the mountains. The darkness
was not pitch black, more a navy blue, perhaps from all the snow to reflect the light. The
mountains could be seen clearly and the horizon all around gave out a yellow glow. People
stood staring up in awe.
All too soon there was another bright burst of light and the sun was back. I fumbled in my
mittens to open my eclipse glasses again and looked up to see the newly exposed crescent
of the sun as the moon moved on its way. I took a deep breath as people around whooped
and began discussing how incredible it was. I couldn’t quite believe that I had witnessed a
total solar eclipse. I felt elated. It had all worked perfectly. I was in Svalbard, the weather
cleared, the heavens aligned. To be in such a phenomenally beautiful setting in the wide
valley, with the mountains around, the snow, the light – it was special.
After totality we watched the sun return to us in full, everyone talking excitedly about
what they had seen. Then at twelve past midday the moon made last contact and was
gone. Everyone packed up and left, leaving Adventdalen deserted once more. Apart from
the scientists taking measurements from inside the old aurora station building, Pål and I
were the least to leave, clearing the place up like at the end of a party.
A lecturer at UNIS last week compared a partial and total eclipse thus: “it’s like a kiss
on the cheek versus a night of passion.” It’s true. I saw the partial eclipse near London in
1999 (I didn’t go to Cornwall) but I wasn’t prepared for the difference. What I found most
interesting, most incredible, this time was the sudden transition from light to dark, from
crescent to corona. It was the way the land went dark almost instantaneously that really
struck me – one minute strobing shadows, then a bright flash, then darkness. Then the sun
as you have never seen her. I have seen pictures of the corona before but, just like viewing
the aurora, to witness it as part of the landscape gives and new depth to the experience,
something that I am exploring in my upcoming book, Seeing the Light.
I am truly grateful to have been there in Svalbard to see the eclipse. I’m pleased that
there was so much excitement and activity in the UK, and that so many people were able to
get a glimpse of the splendour of this celestial event for themselves by viewing the partial
eclipse. But I urge you to remember that if you saw the partial it was just a glimpse, and I
hope that one day you will have the opportunity to see totality for yourself too.
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Andrew Douglas Sokulski
***
The darkness of ignorance is mysterious,
Knowledge, the sum of light is marvelous!
While wandering around in stupidity,
Light comes to me with much serendipity,
I am taken to its great, galvanizing cottage,
Light is the stupendous guide of knowledge!
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Shocked am I at this cottage of smartness,
I see outside an array, a realm of blandness. Inside I am
enraptured by positivity,
Outside the world is entrapped by difficulty,
I am in the energy, I am in the light!
Honestly, I do not want to have a flight.
My old self was in darkness's bondage,
Light is the stupendous guide of knowledge!
All the intellect has come to me,
Light has given me glee!
Light has created liberty!
It is my sole fraternity!
No more ignorant bondage,
Light is the stupendous guide of knowledge!
David Horgan
WHEELER'S DREAM OF LIGHT
Wheeler's dream of light made mass,
does not fade with time.
The toroidal and the the spherical Airy' s functions show the rhythm.
They hold the light tight, they don't let it go.
His Geons, those fiery kugelblitz do burn and glow.
Trapped in that near Blackhole pit, the Planckian fires are lit.
Electrons formed from wormholes dance the song of It from bit.
John's dream of mass without mass, geons made of light.
They grace my thoughts shining so brightly in that primeval night.
99
Peter Clive
DRY LAND
That may look like solid ground beneath your feet,
but we are all walking on water without knowing it.
We are all still like children:
we are cradled by ghosts,
and dream of dry land as we sleep
in their insubstantial vapour embrace.
100
Every sight we see,
every renegade photon that makes it to us,
across space to our stubborn inhospitable retinas,
our isolated fortresses on desert islands of sight,
is a tiny parcel passed to us by a vacuum,
and the teeming multitudes that relayed it,
one by one,
through that succession of miniature voids,
each of which is an entire ocean,
cease to exist, snuffed out,
thrown away like all the wrappings
when we finally open the box and see the gift.
The photon is what we see, but it is not real.
What is real is the winding row of candles,
each of which was used to light its neighbour
before being itself extinguished in its turn
until the light was brought within our grasp
and the properties we observe here and now
are all that linger of those distant lights long dead
along the cold dark corridor of time.
The world is mapped out on the palms left behind
as if raised in prayer, or bearing aloft a crowd surfing singer.
We take an orphaned world in and raise it as our own,
with no thought for the mother who wasn't there
when we found it all alone
Perception's seizure of each instant erases its authors
and we are left in a world that seems to dance before us
as though untutored, stepping through its routine
as though following some spontaneous choreography,
as though we must resort to miracles or puppetry to explain.
We need to realise that walking on water is not remarkable,
it's solid ground that is the mystery.
Only then will we learn how to dance as well.
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THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION
Every possible moon
lay glittering and glistening,
and writhing among the ripples of the pond
like an abundant catch of silver fish,
since all imagined moons are real,
and beat their wings and take flight
rioting across the liquid sky
into which Einstein has thrown the stone
that makes the ripples that chase them to its edge
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until at last the surface is smooth again,
stretched once more like a taut drum-hide
upon the horizon's rim,
and he reaches in
and retrieves the pebble
and tosses it into orbit
to take its place
alone among the heavens,
and shows to us only one face
alone among the stars,
the paltry world is the price we pay
for not bearing witness to the part in it we play.
LUX AETERNA
A pale light shines through the threadbare world
a cold luminous presence over which the world rests
like gauze, a milky white light that lingers in the mist
and comes to rest in the dew drops that are threaded,
like pearls, on a spider's web on a cold morning,
before it is wrecked by ruinous chance
or a passing child’s exuberance.
It is a light denied. We sense it with our eyes shut,
half asleep, and it recedes when we awaken
before we can notice it. Does it illuminate our dreams?
Is it a residue of refraction that escapes explanation?
Certainly, no microscope finds it. It sits behind the light
our eyes can see. It blows through us in ghostly gusts,
leaves no imprint where we lay out film to make a record,
is not embroiled in our retinas, eludes the traps we lay for it,
slips through the net and avoids the snare of sense.
I must disaggregate myself entirely to lure it into my grasp.
I sink my cold brine-filled lungs to the bottom of the sea.
I cast my eyes among the worn shingle orbs upon the shore.
I stack my weary bones where fences need mended,
let the wind spin my hair into bog-cotton,
let my breath escape into the clouds,
before it becomes truly crystal clear to me, and I feel the light
and wander in stunned silence, vanishing into the infinite mist of my trance,
a mist that brings me only the most distant and diffuse light,
and I see beyond the dull diurnal description of things,
find them tedious, these rude intrusions that interrupt my ecstasy,
tripping me up with their misplaced urgency, their insistence
padding out our daily barter and trade, dyes that stain our fingers
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as we thumb and rub and try out the fabric of the world
with words drained of any colour that can catch
this infinite paleness that will confound our trials and reckoning
in its ungovernable billowing, always out of reach.
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The Moon:
she is well known, meticulously described, thoroughly documented:
she shines with reflected light; men have walked upon her, and so on,
but to my infinitely dispersed self she seems to shine
with another light that is not caught in that net of words,
a light that reveals this earth is just as cratered and lifeless
when seen beyond the scope of human sight, from our orbit
in the stark and barren brightness of the void, and all our follies,
our fret and fuss, our boasts and monuments, our footprints on the Moon
are ageless dust to which we have no real claim,
and the hopes and fears of those that made them mean nothing.
With every effort possible we try to trap the light: every stem of every quaver
and minim, every stroke of every pen committed by artist, poet or composer
every strut of logical scaffold with which our arguments are supported,
even every strip of lead in the stained glass windows of St Denis,
where the light blasted holes in the walls of old Romanesque Europe, every rib
of every vaulted space where thoughts dwell and find their compass,
is a bar in a cage we think we make to contain the light,
and we justify the trespass we attempt upon it with a promise
of a lantern in which the light peers through the bailing wire,
cradled in this pharos with which we hope to show the way ahead,
as though we were lost,
as though we could ever be found,
as though we are more than passing eddies twisting in the ancient dust,
until eventually we discover that in fact the cage contains, not it, but us,
once we are released at last from the prison we make for ourselves,
and finally walk into the light.
Елена Вельянская
Elena Velyanskaya
STARDUST
106
The alien inside me, who this face serves to disguise,
who sees this world's outline through these dull dim human eyes
and watches all our empires rise and riot, rot and fall
feels homesick for the sunbeams of the farthest stars of all,
for floating cities stranded on unimaginable moons,
and aches with curbed divinity, but patiently he waits:
although he must sink with me when I merge into this soil
and rise once more to crawl with each and every earth born child
he knows where we have been is where we finally return,
to face the furnace burning in the heart of every sun,
the heat where every atom moved by love is first begun,
the fine anthropic threads that bind us all within are spun.
2013-09-06
Just as each rain drop is not lost,
but mingles with the pool
that makes the ripples possible,
and the summer sun,
crystallised in the brittle
bronze leaves of autumn,
succumbs at last to gravity,
and is swept into the fire
that releases its light
to disperse as smoke
in the darkness,
and every failure at the tables
merges with the calculus of odds,
all futilities fusing together,
so as we progress
from the clarity of strident youth
to the confusion of perplexed old age
to eventually yield to the final
absence and entropy
we are not lost
but become one at last
with an infinite night, studded
with ten hundred thousand stars
becoming at once nothing
and more than we can imagine.
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Nicolai Andrea
DAWN
108
Night was mounting. The sun was slowly but unstoppably setting on another working
day and the city would soon have turned into a gigantic electric beehive, buzzing with
hundreds thousands dots flowing industriously out of their work cubicles, only to transfer
their buttocks and place them in more comfortable and better furnished ones. Once there,
the pulsing vitality outside would have been forgotten for a few hours, obscured as it was
by the blinds which sealed each and every window of the tall residential buildings, the
calmness inside artfully set up to prevent the last gasp of mental sanity to leave the country
and let it completely astray, on the brink of a collapse not contemplating the slight possibility
of a return to safety.
So was the domestic panorama at block number 3, apartment number 28 of a common
township street, not far from the underground station which, together with the uninterrupted
lines of streetlamps, was the main and most visible bond with the ever-beating heart of the
metropolis: Mother under the bed sheets, eyeing distractedly a catalogue depicting all sorts
of clothes in the latest fashion; Father on the sofa in the living room, deep in conversation
with the TV screen, that night’s football teams and, most of all, their coaches, guilty of not
possessing an ounce of his inner comprehension of all the tactics and dynamics underlying
the most beautiful and popular game in the world; Son and Daughter killing time in different
rooms, but equally dedicated to the listless consultation of their own smartphones, lonely
and in touch with the whole planet at the same time. A bedside lamp, the green of the field
projected by a last-generation TV, two smartphones – Son’s one just a little more stateof-the-arty because bought more recently: such were the only glimmers left to clash the
surrounding darkness; a little lapse of time and the whole scene would have been wrapped
up in a pitch-black silence.
That is what effectively happened, but not as customarily as expected. Just count with
me: one, two, three... and all the sources of light went out at once.
— What...?
— Hey!
— What the...!
— What’s happening?
All of them got up in unison from their comfortable positions, suddenly terrorised by the
lack of illumination which had taken possession of the premises. Not a spot was visible, not
even a dim afterglow where the TV-set once was — for how was it known 100% sure that
it would have been found in its usual, reassuring corner? A blackout, no doubt about it; a
sudden, total, fucking blackout. That explains everything... or not?
— Why shouldn’t my phone be working? The battery is independent from the house
electricity supply... What... What’s happening?
— I don’t know, I really haven’t a clue but... if there’s really no electricity at all... I... I’m
afraid we are locked inside the house!
Yes, Father was right. The progressive automatisation of any possible device and
operation had definitely led to a more comfortable and safer daily routine; that is, as long
as electric light was a matter of fact. Supplies had been made more and more stable, to
the point that even a thunderstorm did not represent a menace anymore; to experience
a blackout nowadays belonged more to a science museum replica placed in the “How-welived” section, than to the world of possible scenarios. To put it simply, this meant the entrance
door of apartment 28 in block 3 — together with all the windows and blinds — was locked,
without a single way to unlock it; to put it simply, Father, Mother, Son and Daughter — and
with them all the Fathers, Mothers, Sons and Daughters of the whole metropolis — were sealed
in the cosy prisons they had spent so much time and money to furnish.
The four grew extremely enraged, only to gradually give way to an inconsolable
desperation. “We’ll never get out of here”, they said; “We’ll languish inside these walls until
we’ll starve to death”, they sobbed. Everything seemed lost.
In such loss, they started talking to each other, as they had not done for years: laughs,
jokes, positive discussions on the world outside (or what they remembered of it), intimate
confessions. In the darkness of their domestic walls, free from the innumerable distractions
provided by technology, they remembered how it was to be a family and, if not on everything
they talked about now, there was one thing they definitely agreed on: if they had to die that
way, it was good to do it as a compact whole and not as four distinct beings.
Then one morning. some days after the blackout, a flaming halo cast a dim film of light
on the walls of the house. The four instantly woke up and ran towards its source: the blinds
were unexplainably open, in front of them the blissful warmth of a new dawn.
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Alessia Via
it, showing clearly human weakness. Just one single beam and you can not longer hide, you
have to let go and feel free to cuddle up with honesty. Light is naked and real. Light is truth.
A MOTHER TO A CHILD
I would like to show you in how many ways you're the light of my life, the sparkling light
of my eyes. Because you are, even if you still don’t know. It’s not easy, but I'll try to explain
how light is part of me, of my life, just as you are.
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I can not touch it but it is within me, within each of us, more than the stomach and hand
in hand with the heart. Each human being has its own light as everyone nourishes different
shades of light: you are the shining light of my eyes yet emotionless for the most. You are
the light of my path, I see clearly since you’re here. But light is also outside and beyond
each of us and, impalpable, it surrounds us. Light is mystery.
I am able to see the light because I also live of darkness: shadows and light to be
a whole. I am comforted by light because I know it is a gift of darkness. As I hold out against
it, light makes its way through an unimaginable prism of colors. Light awakes me from my
reckless numbness and points out my place in the world. Light is life.
When I feel cozy in the dark gray of my closed eyelids and unruly hair covers my ears
making the world outside muffled, then, light is indiscreet, it creeps into my protective
bubble, and I try to escape, I don't want to feel pain. I don't want to feel. Period. But light is
powerful and again it makes its way breaking the walls of silence. Light is strength.
And then, my distracted lips open with disbelief in front of the ray of sunlight that pierces
the leaden sky making the horizon terse and enlightening my thoughts. A single ray of sun
and it’s day again. The warmth of a generating thrill shakes me. Suddenly I’m overwhelmed
with new ideas and goals: I plan, I create, I move. Light is hope.
The masks of the night offer new and different identities, sheltered by the hypocrisy of
blind and untruthful minds. The audacity of the fragile is brazen until the purple dawn deforms
And then there's you, miracle of nature and flesh of my flesh. I’m not inflamed by
a fleeting vanity, nor by the reflection of your soft, fresh skin. The completeness of your
being is my lifeblood, you leave me breathless yet fill my lungs with fresh air, over and over.
I didn’t realize how lost I was until you were born, the luminous light of my path towards total
awareness. You’re the light, you’re home. Light is love.
One day, you’ll understand what light means to me, what you mean to me.
One day, you’ll know.
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
СОЕДИНЕННЫЕ ШТАТЫ
АМЕРИКИ
Татьяна Агеева
Tatyana Ageeva
Gregory Scheckler
DIARY IN A TIME OF LIGHT AND CHANGE
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July 22, 2018: This afternoon I stood at the bay windows and looked across to the
Taconics when a great flare erupted in the sky. It flashed, just like a camera flash. Blitzed my
eyes and made me blind for a moment. I saw in my mind a negative of the familiar scene,
the mountains bright and red and the sky turned dark and burnt orange.
Electricity failed. Cell-phone failed. Internet stopped. Car wouldn't start. Digital watch
looked gray and empty, not even a readout. My first instinct was to message friends and
family: What happened? What's going on? The smartphone wouldn't turn on. If it would've
I'd've been sending a note and emoticons like lightning bolt frowny-face. I just about freaked.
The phone's been my umbilical to society for ages, like a portable water cooler where we all
chit-chatted with each other whenever I took breaks from writing and telecommuting from
home. My computer wouldn't function. Without it, I had no job.
My neighbors had solar panels on the entire south side of their roof. I went over to see
if these were functioning. They were freaking out too. Their daughter, Sunny, she tapped
at her phone and tapped at her phone and tapped at her phone. It was like she'd never not
tapped at it, and couldn't figure out that it wouldn't respond. It was just a blank block of glass
and polished metal, nice to the touch, but lifeless. The look of fear on her face, I won't forget
it, she tapped on the phone and looked up at me, eyebrows lifted and mouth pursed, nostrils
flaring. Her eyes kind of just wobbled for a while. The she stopped. She said, "changeystrangey," which I thought just about summed it all up.
Her Dad and I shut off the link between the solar panels and the main grid, and pulled the
circuit breakers, then reset them. There was plenty of sunlight. Plenty of energy streaming
right at us. The panels seemed to do nothing and we had no way of testing whether they
were producing any electricity, although we thought about seeing if any live wires might
shock one of us. There was no way to check safely. We have to figure out some other plan.
If only we were photosynthetic, like plants, generating food from air and sun.
My wife and I had candles, and a nice store of food in the basement. We decided best
to eat everything in the refrigerator soon as we could. So we grilled it all and drank the milk
and cooked a lot so that it could be dried for later. Damn cooking. I hate cooking, on a fire.
The smoke. But what are you going to do? My favorite cooker, the microwave, wouldn't operate.
I got the lawnmower with the pull-cord to run. I turned it off right away, but it made me
think it might be a way to generate some power if I could string a pulley to a generator of
some sort. That'd take a lot of time.
July 24: What would cause such a disruption of all electricity? The best I could figure:
near direct hit from an X-Class Solar Flare and pop everything light's out.
X-Class Flare. (insert research) Once in a lifetime. Would you even see it? It didn't make
sense. It couldn't be visible like that, a humongous flash, would it?
A distant nuclear explosion, with EM-Pulse? Maybe. No sign of ashes, radiation.
No news of distant destruction. No news at all, actually.
If power grid everywhere was down, I imagined the hospital and the grocery stores would
become hollow lands of emptiness, useless. If anyone was on life support, then dead?
We took out the capacitors from the solar panels, and decided to find more someday,
see if replacing the parts would help.
July 23, 2018: My wife and I rode our bikes into town to see if anyone had any news.
It was eerie. No lights. All stores dark inside. Restaurants shuttered because kitchens
not functioning. One cafeteria was giving food away for free, out of their refrigerators and
freezers that'd failed. Nobody had any news.
If life were science fiction literature or movies, then without the basics all hell breaks
loose and you need a strong leader with an iron grip on the law to keep order and prevent
our inevitable descent into chaos.
I'm glad to report the such ideas are wrong, at least here. Maybe if food runs out, there'll
be more problems later on. But for now we're collaborating and cooperating and most of us
are all trying to help each other best we can. We've got messengers running from place to
place, identifying needs and creating distribution systems. People are a lot smarter, and we
don't have a centralized leader and I don't think we need one.
We realized when we got back home that we had two big jobs: find food and water, and
consume it. That was primary motive number one. It had to be, for everyone. We got out the
books about locating wild foods in the woods. We got them from the library, from everyone's
shelves, we shared and discussed setting limits so that we didn't over-forage.
I was raising cucumbers in our garden. These did fine, and the rain came in the afternoon,
which helps everything grow.
Writing in my little journal here, I'm thinking it's quiet at night. We haven't got motors running
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all the time driving up and down the street. Who knew, that the apocalypse would be so nice?
July 30, 2018: People who hiked up to us from Pittsfield had no news. They were just
bored so they went walking, figuring the north was nicer anyway.
There were reports of a rape in town. We couldn't verify any of it, and we never found a victim
or a criminal; it was just hearsay and rumors as far as we could tell. But it was polarizing people
and homeowners were some of them thinking they'd best keep their guns, safekeeping.
I had my recurve bow and two-dozen arrows. I know I'm not a good shot. I got the bow
as a gift and it was just a hobby. Now it seemed like it might be a critical source of food. I
set about to practicing and my arms got sore. Nobody nearby knows how to use a bow. I
got a book from the library, and have to settle for trial and error to learn how to improve my
aim and timing. If I could take down a squirrel — there's lot of squirrels — then we'd have
meat if we need it. I hate the whole thought. I hate thinking about killing any of the animals.
We might not have much choice.
Update on the lawnmower idea: it worked fine and we figured the generator and pulley rig.
We filled up some batteries. But the idea's dumb because we're running out of gasoline for the
lawnmower. And it doesn't sound like we'll be getting more gas anytime soon. So we attached
the bicycles and make a little electricity now and then with our own two legs. Works okay.
None of the tech really matters. Even when you get enough juice to charge a phone or
computer, there's no wifi and no signals. All the big networks, tv, Internet, cable, cell towers,
all seem to be completely out. Not sure what's going on, and news from afar is rare and
unverified. We heard about looting in Boston, and a couple riots, but it seems outlandish
and I don't trust the reports.
August 8, 2018: I'm worried about the approaching winter, but we stashed enough food
and I'm getting better at my aim. We've cut a lot of lumber. Speaking of which we said
goodbye to the old apple tree which fell over in a thunderstorm. There's plenty of dead
branches in the forest, so we have lots of heating fuel. There's no lack of clothing and layers:
we've made a handful of trips to this or that old store and traded goods (gossip, cucumbers from
my garden, some jars of pickles that we made) for extra clothes, and we gathered a lot of secondhand items from around the region and shared those with our neighbors.
My wife is making charts of the moon's progressions and each day on a hand-drawn calendar,
on our living room wall actually, so that we can keep track of our planet's movements. It's hard
to believe the starlight. There's no more light pollution from streetlights or cars or buildings. It's
amazingly dark. They feel good, the stars, thousands and thousands sprinkled in the sky.
Екатерина Николаева
Ekaterina Nikolaeva
Jonh Hart
James Ph. Kotsybar
A SUNNY SPELL
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Juliet truly yet “Dew by the light beget!”
Dawning in the morning’s chill,
Forming into warming rill,
Juliet, pool then gill, spilling spree, rivulet.
Fickle yet, trickle yet, riffles, roils, runnel jet,
Speeding into leaping spate,
Feeding into deep’ning fate,
Quickly yet, ripply yet, ruffles, coils, channel met.
Bourn of fancy, freedom’s waif,
Burbling, skittish, soon in grace;
Love infused, gently limns, timely swells, kismet brims.
Eventide ebbs, shadows rush,
Dusk engenders river blush.
Shining Jule, serene, dims; mist enshrouds, twilight rims.
THE SHEER POWER OF LIGHT AND THOUGHT
Regard the radiometer — a toy
as well as scientific instrument,
a vacuum bulb with racing flags inside,
an inverse top that spins with endless joy
and makes the photon’s power evident
with one absorbing, one reflecting side.
Requiring no battery or plug,
the particle-waves providing power
inspire awe and imagination,
though most, by far, would dismiss with a shrug
explanations that might take an hour
which delve into “thermal ranspiration.”
Suffice to say, not beating that dead horse,
things lacking mass can still exhibit force.
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DARK GRAVITY
OPENING NIGHT
The speed of light’s the limit, so we hold,
though frequencies get stretched into the red,
and all the universe is growing cold
a process that apparently has sped
almost impossibly since it began
because expansion should reduce its vim,
and gravity should be custodian
and sweep together, not its antonym.
With random movements but organized steps,
the Universe shimmers like a diva,
caped with sparkling,
luminescent wings,
as, unexcelled,
she soars through the spotlight brilliance
of her own production.
Thermodynamics on the largest scale
Accelerates decay faster than light;
more locally, this action’s not wholesale,
as galaxies bunch and cluster up tight.
There’s contradiction in what we can see,
so we are forced to re-think gravity.
She is the stars
and lights the stage
yet provides a level of mystery
and noir matter to her performance
that manages to bemuse her reviewers.
Eluding description, much less review,
her choreography, based on
simple laws of gravitation,
achieves complexity with spin and grouping.
As patterns emerge
in this cosmic kaleidoscope,
the already spectacular e x p a n d s
with impossible speed
into the unknowable infinite.
Ensembles troupe across the stage of space.
Whole galaxies dance and merge in embrace.
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Kenneth Silber
MARRYING INTO LIGHTING
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At New York University in the 1980s, my roommate and I held small dinner parties in
our modest dorm room. He spent as much time fiddling with the lights as he did cooking.
There wasn’t much to work with, a few movable lamps and an overhead, but he tried myriad
combinations assiduously, seeking the perfect ambience.
After we graduated, I became an editor of a financial magazine at a company that had
many magazines, including one called “Architectural Lighting.” Without giving it much
thought I sent some back issues to my ex-roommate, who’d cycled through some unfulfilling
jobs in music and publishing. Some switch turned on, andnext I knew,he was getting career
advice from the magazine’s editor. Then over the next couple of years he got a master’s and
became an architectural lighting designer.
By accident more than design, I’d steered my friend toward a career path that would suit
him well, in a field I’d been only dimly aware existed.
A decade and a half later, he called me and suggested a blind date with a woman
he knew from the field. I called her, and as an easily found Manhattan location to meet,
chose the Flatiron Building, a distinguished old skyscraper on 23rd Street. “Meet me in
the shadow of the Flatiron Building,” I said, meaning outside. She found those words
romantic, even though the literal shadow at that late afternoon hourshe knew would be
largely found amid auto traffic.
She and I hit it off. We got married, and have a son. Like the friend who set us up, my
wife is an architectural lighting designer, in her case with further emphasis on the lighting
of landscapes. As designers, they must keep up with fast-moving technologies — the
latest LEDs emerge from the lab at lightning speed — and thenthey must apply them with
an artist’s eye.
The field of lighting design, beyond stage lighting, barely existed a generation ago. A key
mentor to both my wife and our friend is a pioneering designer who lit the Statue of Liberty
for its 1986 restoration. I happened to be on a boat that night, and saw the lights get turned
on for the Green Lady. I had no idea I was seeing a hint of my future.
Алина Кондратьева
Alina Kondrateva