Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Light is whittled down each day with the winter solstice approaching. As November turned into December and I walked to catch the tram for work, the almost-full-then-full-now-less-than-full moon was a cameo in the morning gloom. Yeats’ ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’ has shaped my response to recent books I’ve been reading that use light and materiality to explore particular places or states of mind.
Although it is evident in the poem, I’d never properly appreciated the tactility of Yeats turning day, dusk and night into swathes of material. There’s a theatricality in this desire to whisk down the world’s soft furnishings for the beloved, a courtier’s flamboyance. I imagine red curtains and painted stage backdrops, recalling that Yeats himself was intimately involved with the theatre.
During a conversation with Yūko Tsushima in 2004, Annie Ernaux praises the novelist for being ‘attentive to the material aspects of everyday life’, saying that Tsushima’s texts have shown her ‘just how much drama is contained within women’s work, how much of it deserves to be articulated and contested.’
This quiet drama of the everyday is depicted in Territory of Light, initially serialised by Japanese literary magazine Gunzō in the late 1970s, which I read in Geraldine Harcourt’s translation. It relates a year in the life of an unnamed woman in Tokyo trying to find her footing after separating from her husband. She moves into a fourth-floor flat primarily made up of offices with her young daughter. It is ‘filled with light at any hour of the day’:
I crowed to myself that this was the apartment for me. The red floor blazed in the setting sun. The long-closed, empty rooms pulsed with light.
In an earlier treatise on aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows (1933), Junichiro Tanazaki wrote: ‘Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty. Our ancestors made of woman an object inseparable from darkness, like lacquerware decorated in gold or mother-of-pearl. They hid as much of her as they could in shadows […]’
I’m not certain whether Tsushima was explicitly responding to Tanazaki’s ideas, but I find it striking that her novel depicts a modern woman’s messy subjectivity while living in a place defined by the opposite of shadows. Most chapters contain other forms of light — sunshine, sparklers, fire. The quantity of illumination is not comfortable. Yet it pushes firmly against such smooth objectification.
In Territory of Light, it is men and patriarchal expectations that are associated with shadows. Several characters throughout the book advise the narrator to reunite with her (rather feckless) husband. When she imagines asking her boss whether she will always be tethered to her marriage in some way: ‘All at once, countless shadowy figures loomed around me, agreeing vigorously.’ Later, after her husband unexpectedly picks their daughter up from daycare and brings her home, she sees the pair in chiaroscuro. Her child is ‘radiant’ with ‘dazzling light’ while the father is a ‘dark shadow’.
By contrast, experiencing unsettling reveries alongside mundane struggles, the protagonist’s new life is a period of unsteady yet accumulating growth. Something organic, needing light and water for nourishment:
an invisible, rickety, misshapen mass that not only kept its precarious balance but was actually sending out roots and even tentative new shoots that only my eyes could see.
One day the narrator and her daughter walk by an embankment in the park, a ‘spot clad in flowers and fruit trees, where the sun seems to have congealed’:
I used to think I must never tell anybody about this discovery of mine. No one else must know about this place that made me yearn to dissolve until I became a particle of light myself.
Another ‘territory of light’ is Maesglasau valley in Angharad Price’s The Life of Rebecca Jones (2010), translated by Lloyd Jones. This elegiac story of a Welsh farming family, told in words as judiciously poetic as Bible verses, reminds me that we use light as a measurement of distance. It recounts the drastic changes of the twentieth century across one place — changes in war, technology, education, landwork, gender roles and language.
Rebecca, Price’s great-aunt, intersperses her narrative with meditations on nature, family photographs, poetry and englynion (a distinctive form of Welsh short verse), and quotations from her ancestor Hugh Jones’ Cydymaith yr Hwsmon (The Companion to Husbandry, 1774). Her life is defined by Maesglasau. ‘Its boundaries are my boundaries’, she writes. Price’s original title for the novel is O! Tyn y Gorchudd, which translates as ‘O! Pull back the veil’, from a hymn by Hugh Jones. Suggestive of revelation and Yeats’ cloths of heaven, the line also calls to mind the idea of ‘a thin place’, where the border between the valley and the metaphysical dissipates.
The narrative is often characterised by a certain brightness. The first word of Rebecca’s artistic younger brother Ieuan, who dies as a child, is golau (light). When hydroelectric power comes to the farm, Rebecca calls the water turbine ‘a machine which could turn water into light’, observing that, ‘the waters of Maesglasau, you might say, brought light to the world.’
Vision infuses Rebecca’s memories of the valley and her family. This seeing is just as imaginative as it is physical. She looks back on her own life and other scenes not personally witnessed. The initial words of the first chapter is ‘I see [my emphasis] my mother beside her husband in the cart, a handsome couple on their way to their new home at Tynybraich.’
The novel muses so much on different ways of seeing because three of Rebecca’s brothers are blind, and must navigate the world differently. Gruffydd and William are born so, while Lewis’ sight deteriorates in his early years. They must be sent away to attend special schools that give them a gentlemanly Anglicised education, the cost of which necessitates the curtailment of Rebecca and oldest brother Bob’s own schooling.
All three brothers are later featured in a BBC news programme in 1964, making them local celebrities. Gruffydd becomes an Anglican vicar. William returns to live at Tynybraich, working as a copyist and editor of braille texts for the Royal Institute of Blind People (RNIB), maintaining careful routines around the farm and its environs. Rebecca or her mother help him check the braille typescripts, smoothing out erroneous dots with a knitting needle.
After retiring as a telephonist, Lewis starts to paint, even receiving a European prize in Luxembourg. Rebecca writes: ‘who understands the meaning of colour better than Lewis?’, who had seen bluebells for the last time at six years old, and ‘saw blue turn to grey.’ Yet, through the expressive medium of painting ‘There came a second sight in the wake of his blindness.’
Life of Rebecca Jones evokes Yeats’ poem in drawing connections between materiality and expressions of devotion. For Rebecca, this is a devotion to pulling back the veil, telling the stories of her family who have dwelt in one place for nearly a thousand years. In fact, she names Yeats as one of a number of poets her Sunday school teacher taught to her to as a child.
As a seamstress, Rebecca likens her life to a textile. Her parents age and pass away. Stitches are unpicked in the fabric of her existence. Towards the end, her writing becomes a soft shroud:
For the quilt is made of paper. Written words are the material. The thread: my family’s story. The seams: the clauses of generations. The stitches themselves: life’s mutations […] This work is unfinished. And thus it will remain until the end of the family, until the end of the cwm.
With the reveal at the end (which I’ll only hint at here), Yeats’ recourse to dreams becomes poignantly apposite. The book we have been reading is transformed into its own kind of longing, a shadow-life: ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’.
if you’d like to read more
‘In Jerusalem’ (2007), a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah:
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. [...]
‘The Poet of Palestine’ by Brigid Quirke for Tribune, on Darwish’s life and work:
Darwish’s words speak to poetry’s transformative and imaginative potential. Art, in its articulation of beauty, has long been seen as a mode for defiance. Poetry offers a site of resistance precisely because of its ability to comprehend beyond.
Author Isabella Hammad’s 2023 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture ‘Recognizing the Stranger’, published online by the Paris Review:
In the language of both law and literary form, then, recognition is a kind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognizing. Great effort is required to ensure that such a moment marks the middle of the story, and not the finale. Another act must follow.
You can find Territory of Light here and The Life of Rebecca Jones here (UK).