Memory of the Light

Of light as a quality of the Sacred: a personal musing on childhood and memory.

Memory of the Light

“Every homeland constitutes a sacred geography. For those who have left it, the city of their childhood and adolescence always becomes a mythical city.” — Mircea Eliade

“Mystery and Melancholy of a Street”, 1914. Giorgio de Chirico

I remember my childhood well; at least, I like to think that I do. From the moment of inception of my earliest memory until now, I can trace a certain continuity of myself, an immutable essence pervading all tonalities and shades of my present and past. A common dictum, of course, is that human memory is labile—every time we revisit an event from the past, we unintentionally alter it, leaving behind traces of our current selves. A memory is not a frozen snapshot in time; it is a continuously repainted image.

Being of naturally melancholic disposition, I would often retreat inward, reminiscing about the days when life was simpler, and every second was imbued with sweet, childlike naïveté. I would pick a pleasant recollection from childhood and think of all the millions of iterations of that memory, sealed away somewhere on the periphery of consciousness, access to which I have been denied so unjustly. When visualizing a memory’s structure, I liked to imagine it stretched out, like an accordion, with all the iterations stacked upon each other in vertical arrangement—a layer upon layer in an ever-growing tower of Babel where each successive strata was an almost exact copy of the one below.

I thought of all the hidden recesses of my mind, and how they were meant to be explored—even if they turned out little more than wastebaskets full of artifacts discarded and forgotten. At times, my nostalgia would turn into an almost manic obsession: I wanted to dissect and flay each and every iteration until the bones of the earliest memory emerged from underneath all the accumulated flesh—and become, once more, an awestruck child, an infant, a fetus who knows no malady and no pain, drifting in an ocean of endless virtualities and possibilities.

But memories are not meant to be permanent. Like the sand mandalas of the Buddhists, they are meant to be experienced and destroyed; then reconstructed anew, glanced at, and destroyed again. But beyond that, the idea of catching a memory and pining it like a butterfly carried a subtle hint of perversion; more importantly, it felt futile, like grasping sand with fingers while the spirit of life slowly slipped away. I had to accept that my quest for the pristine and untarnished memory was in vain, for the simple reason that such thing has never existed in nature. Every time I thought I had found it, I would make a wish: “Return me to my primordial state!”—and watch the idol crumble into dust. Everything was as it should be, no more and no less. The beauty of memory and life itself lies in their evanescence, and nothing demonstrated it to me better than the memory of the Light of my childhood.

As kids, we would spend many summer days hiding out in a passage between two residential buildings on our street. There, in the refreshing coolness of building’s shadow, we would play cards, tag, and dodgeball, or chat for hours on end. It was our little sanctuary. Once you walked through the passage on to the other side and climbed up the sand mountain (a legacy of unfinished construction work that no one had bothered to clean up), you could see the entire city sprawled out before you. Far as the eye could see, there stretched red and gray blocks of Soviet-era buildings, wooden houses with decrepit fences and windows, construction cranes, garages, trees, domes and roofs of churches and temples, all juxtaposed against the endless blue sky with clouds so large and low to the ground it felt like you could touch them by merely raising an arm. Far in the distance, one could discern the faint outline of a bridge spanning the Uda river, from which my hometown derived its name. And further still, behind all the architectural cacophony, began the vast expanse of the Eurasian steppe.

But the most striking part of the landscape was the silhouette of white-blue mountains towering above the city. What lay beyond them I did not know—but in the cosmological map of my imagination, they marked the edge of the known physical world. The mountains concealed something far grander than themselves, and I loved them for this unspoken but implied promise.

Every evening, around sunset, a ray of the most beautiful and unearthly light would shine through the passage between the buildings. Suddenly, in a matter of seconds, the whole street would be transformed into a sacred space; every structure and shadow would acquire a new meaning. All natural phenomena paled in comparison to the narrow and straight path of light that stretched across the ground like a bridge leading one to another realm.

The sight of the light always filled me with inexplicable melancholy. Years later, I came across a passage by Mircea Eliade, a Romanian writer and historian of religion, in which he described a childhood memory that so painfully reminded me of my own:

“It was as if I had entered a fairy-tale palace. The roller blinds and the heavy curtains of green velvet were drawn. The room was pervaded by an eerie iridescent light. It was as though I were suddenly enclosed within a huge grape. ... I could later evoke at will that green fairyland. When I did so I would remain motionless, almost not daring to breathe, and I would rediscover that beatitude all over again; I would relive with the same intensity the moment when I had stumbled into that paradise of incomparable light.

I practiced for many years this exercise of recapturing the epiphanic moment, and I would always find again the same plenitude. I would slip into it as into a fragment of time devoid of duration - without beginning and without end. During my last years of lycee, when I struggled with prolonged attacks of melancholy, I still succeeded at times in returning to the golden green light of that afternoon in Rimnicu-Sarat. But even though the beatitude was the same, it was now impossible to bear because it aggravated my sadness too much; by this time I knew the world to which the drawing room belonged - the green velvet curtain, the carpet on which I had crept on hands and knees, and the matchless light - was a world forever lost.”

Eliade called it a “hierophany”—an act of manifestation of the Divine in the material world. For the first time in my life, I knew someone who had experienced the same epiphany as I did and felt the same longing and nostalgia as I did.

For a while, I was unwilling to share this—or any other special memory of mine—with anyone for fear they would be ruined forever by profane eyes. As time went on, they weighed heavily on my mind, making me increasingly more agitated until it became clear that the only solution was to release the grip. Let others reinterpret and reimagine the memory as they see fit! I will set it free—and by doing so, I will set myself free from the attachment.

These days, when I visit my hometown, I always go back to my old neighbourhood. It has changed a lot. The passage between the buildings had been obstructed by new construction, making it impossible for light to come through. I have lost all contacts with old friends, and the few that remain do not remember me—most people’s memories are, after all, fickle and short-lived. My parents have moved to a different part of the city, and I have moved to a different country. And yet, here I am, walking down the same block I have walked countless times before; everything I touch is covered in memory dust, but no one recognizes me anymore, and I do not recognize anyone. The hierophany of childhood will never be repeated.

I make my way to the other side—the sand mountain has been dismantled, but I can see the city well from the playground that was erected in its place. The panorama is not the same; but far on the horizon, shrouded in mist, I see the only remnant of my former world—the white-blue mountain range, standing unchanged as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.

But I would see the glimpses of the Light again. I have come to recognize it in different shapes and forms, symbols and languages, in visions and episodes of everyday life, and every time, I would be struck with an indescribable sense of the old familiar yearning that I know is not yet meant to be fully satisfied. When I dream, I am consumed by the Light’s luminosity; I become both the Light and the memory of the Light, the dream and the spectator. I wake up, and wait patiently for the day when I see the Light again. Then, in the faraway lands lying beyond the white mountains of my childhood, I will be reunited with it once and for all.