Rosalyn D'Mello: Celebrating the light inside us

The gesture of receiving light must be so elemental and individual, you cannot entirely transmute the secret to another. All we can do is wish that the other may be able to feel its glimmer. Representation Pic/Thinkstock

Lately I have begun to mis-read words, as if exhibiting symptoms of mild dyslexia. I'd initially excused this increasingly recurrent behaviour as the consequence of being overworked, of editing multiple publications besides my own writing and my own textual research. But the discrepancies have begun to assume an almost poetic demeanour. For example, when, yesterday, I reopened my copy of Stigmata by the French feminist, Helene Cixous, I made my way through her first essay, ‘Bathsheba or the Interior Bible', which is a beatific meditation on Rembrandt's 1654 painting Bathsheba bathing, and soon misread this line:

"Of what secret lights are we made?

Of what densities."

I read destinies instead, which meant I imbibed the semantics of the sentence in a manner vastly different from the original structure. Cixous was trying to qualify the weight of light. I, however, understood light to be a corollary of destiny. When I read the next paragraph, my mistake became obvious: "What Rembrandt gives back to us: the dough, the depth, the tactile, that which we lose, which we have lost, we who live flat, without density, in silhouettes on a screen: the interior radiance."

It was nonetheless a deeply synchronous moment, chancing upon this investigative dyad as we inch closer towards the celebration of the festival of light. Every evening, the lane leading to my apartment looks even more astonishing than the previous night. Fairy lights get added by the hour; by tomorrow, the balconies will be studded with oil-wicked diyas and the city of Delhi will appear flickeringly luminous. This is my first Diwali here in at least three years. I usually plan an escape, either up to the mountains or to another country, depending on who's paying for my retreat. This time around, because I've been over-travelling and have thus been craving the stability of my writing desk, I chose to stay put. The city isn't so much on firecracker steroids as I remember it. It's oddly calm and expectedly resplendent.

The subject of light is one I've been grappling with for over a year, in a philosophical and poetic way. It all started with my having to wrestle with the French mystic, Simone Weil's treatise, Gravity and Grace, where, right at the very beginning, she outlines light and gravity as the two forces that rule the universe, slowly building up to this line: "There is only one fault, incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible." I'm still wrapping my head around this metaphysical idea of this chlorophyll-like dependency on something that exists outside of us for sustenance, as if it is light that recharges our being, and our inability to ingest it is responsible for our state of suffering and our infliction of suffering upon other people.

For the last one week, confined every morning to the safe haven that is my room with my book-lined desk, I have been waking up to listen to the same piece of music, not only to understand more profoundly the many elements that make it so powerfully transcendent I end up weeping, but also to monitor my own intake of the song's majesty. It's a piece composed by David Lang, Simple Song #3, and must, I believe, ideally be heard the way it was intended, as the credits are about to roll at the end of Paolo Sorrentino's 2015 film Youth. The entire film - about Fred Ballinger (played by Michael Caine), an ageing, retired conductor who has been asked to perform his beloved composition at the behest of the Queen of England for Prince Phillip's birthday concert while he is vacationing at a spa in the Swiss Alps - leads to those final six intoxicating minutes. Lang crowd-sourced the lyrics, typing in "When I whisper your name" in Google and sifting through the results. The first line is almost miraculous, just three words, "I feel complete," and just as opera superstar Sumi Jo mouths the second syllable of complete, the BBC orchestra punctuates the moment and begins to play. Somewhere within the song are these lines, "I die/I hear all that is left to be heard/I wish you would never stop/I've got a feeling."

It's been impossible to communicate to anyone else why this song moves me so much. I've tried playing it for a few dear friends who seemed impressed but who didn't boast a frisson. Yesterday, as I was ironing my clothes to get dressed for an artist friend's birthday party, it occurred to me that often, our moments of great happiness are so private, they cannot be shared. The gesture of receiving light must be much the same, so elemental and individual, you cannot entirely transmute the secret to another. All we can do is wish that the other may be able to feel its glimmer. This Diwali, I wish you light in all its radiance.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputed art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com