0:00

This is the BBC. I'm

0:30

Sophie Colombo and in this

0:32

new Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas

0:34

podcast, I'm joined by two researchers who have

0:36

been thinking and writing about exactly that. With

1:00

me is Dr. Nicoleta Ashutto of

1:02

the University of York, whose research

1:04

argues that different ways we've produced

1:06

light throughout history have changed the

1:08

very ways in which we think.

1:12

Nicoleta, welcome. Is

1:14

it possible to pinpoint a moment in human

1:16

history where light itself changed? Yes,

1:19

absolutely. I mean, for me, it has to

1:21

be the end of the 19th century. We

1:24

could go even more specific by saying the night

1:26

between the 21st and the 22nd of October, 1879.

1:31

That is specific. Very specific, possibly

1:33

a dark and stormy night, I

1:35

should add. So on that night,

1:38

T.A. Edison, the famous inventor, but

1:40

rather also entrepreneur and

1:42

kind of businessman, was able

1:44

to have his first successful

1:47

experiment with incandescent electricity. He

1:49

needs laboratories in New Jersey. In

1:52

the United States, from that moment on,

1:54

things change forever, likewise. A real

1:57

light bulb moment. Yes. Well, we'll

1:59

hear from you. more about that

2:02

soon but first let's go over

2:04

to the dark side and meet

2:06

Dr. Jacqueline Yalup of Aberystwyth University

2:08

who's been probing darkness from all

2:11

sorts of angles and asking why

2:13

it matters. Jacqueline, what's your first

2:15

memory of really

2:17

seeing absolute darkness? My

2:20

first memory goes back to when I was

2:22

about seven or eight years old and

2:25

I was on holiday with my parents.

2:28

We turned up at a farmhouse quite

2:30

late. I remember driving down the sort

2:32

of narrow tree lined lane to get

2:34

there in the dusk and arriving in

2:37

the dark. We were living

2:39

at this point I should say in an urban

2:41

area, normal sort of street lights, that kind of

2:43

thing and mum and dad

2:45

went out, turned the lights off and suddenly

2:48

there I was in the dark

2:50

and it was the first time that

2:52

I had experienced that moment of sort

2:55

of levitation almost. You know you put your hand

2:57

in front of your face, you can't see it,

3:00

you can touch yourself but you

3:02

don't know where that action is coming

3:04

from and that stuck in my mind

3:06

and is still stuck in my mind

3:09

as that very first experience of total

3:12

bobbulating darkness. And

3:15

how did that make you feel? That sounds

3:17

almost like an attractive feeling levitation. I

3:19

think it was. I mean I wasn't frightened

3:21

or at least I don't remember being frightened.

3:23

I remember enjoying the strangeness of it and

3:27

it feeling a bit like a kind

3:29

of exploration and out of body experience

3:31

and I think it's that curiosity and

3:34

enjoyment actually that has stuck with me

3:36

and I still really enjoy

3:39

being in the dark. And that rendition

3:41

of that moment, that

3:43

experience on your Welsh holiday and

3:45

your childhood, that's one of the lynch

3:48

pins of the book that you've written

3:50

came out recently into the dark

3:52

and you've got a really fascinating

3:54

background which combined creative writing, academic

3:57

interests and curatorial work in museums.

4:00

How did those interests all combine to shape

4:02

that book you wrote? I,

4:04

as you say, have quite a

4:06

varied background. I have a first degree

4:08

in English literature and have always been

4:11

very interested in what you

4:13

might consider cultural production, theatre,

4:16

literature, art. And

4:18

I moved in various ways

4:21

into the museum world. I worked at Wordsworth's

4:23

house, Dove Cottage in the Lake District, which

4:25

is a very dark area. And

4:28

so, subsequently, I became curator of the

4:31

Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield, which

4:33

looks after Ruskin's collection,

4:35

which he put together for the working

4:37

people of Sheffield. One

4:39

of the Ruskinian ways of thinking, I think,

4:41

which has stayed with me ever since, is

4:44

the connectedness of things. You

4:46

know, Ruskin talks, for example, of looking at

4:49

a rock and thinking of a mountain, and

4:51

this idea that the natural world and the

4:53

cultural world and the human world are all

4:55

interconnected in what we see and what we

4:58

experience and what we feel and things like

5:00

craftsmanship and so on. And

5:02

so, when I became a writer,

5:04

so I subsequently became a novelist,

5:06

then the actual prompt for this

5:09

particular book came when

5:11

my dad started to

5:14

experience dementia. And

5:16

it became clear to me that one

5:18

of the symptoms, for once

5:21

for the better word, in his particular

5:23

case, and obviously dementia is very different

5:25

for different people, was a

5:27

preoccupation with light and darkness,

5:29

but particularly with darkness. And

5:32

not so much a fear, as a

5:34

sort of a fascination and

5:36

an awareness of the darkness.

5:39

So, I remember very clearly, for example, watching

5:41

him in the garden one day on a

5:43

sunny day, and he was

5:46

at that point between light and shadow

5:49

and was ecstatic, wasn't

5:51

able to move. There

5:54

was almost a kind of physical barrier

5:57

for him there between light and

5:59

shadow. He would see things in

6:01

the dark, you know, people or people he

6:03

knew. You know, he wasn't again, he wasn't

6:05

particularly frightened of this. It was just a

6:08

darkness was made manifest. It was tangible. It

6:10

became a thing. And this made me very

6:12

curious and linked back, I suppose, to my

6:15

own interests and then to my enjoyment of

6:17

being in the dark. And I've been lucky

6:19

enough to live places that are very dark.

6:21

When I was writing, I spent 10 years

6:24

or more living in rural France, which is

6:27

very, very dark. And all

6:29

those ideas came together and I started

6:32

to ask questions about, well, then what

6:34

is this then that dad is experiencing?

6:36

And how do we think about darkness?

6:39

And why is it so

6:42

kind of intrinsic to who we are and

6:44

what we do, but often

6:46

ignored? We don't think about night,

6:49

particularly. We just turn on the light. We don't

6:51

think about, you know, getting dark, turn the light

6:53

on. That's about it. And yet darkness on so

6:55

many levels is so important to us. And I

6:57

think that was the starting point

6:59

for this research project. Thank you. Lots and

7:01

lots of questions there. But just to siphon

7:04

off one in some ways, the million dollar

7:06

question, what is the

7:08

dark? I don't know.

7:11

OK, let me put it a different way. And

7:13

can you give us an idea of

7:15

some of the key debates you've encountered

7:17

or the difficulties you've had to wrestle

7:19

with in trying to answer that question?

7:21

Which have, I should be fair, perplexed

7:23

philosophers, scientists and artists for many centuries?

7:25

Absolutely. And that's what interests me, actually,

7:27

the fact that it's in

7:30

some ways unresolved. You can say,

7:32

well, there's a scientific explanation for

7:34

dark. And if you take the

7:36

sort of optic explanation, darkness

7:38

inflicts this where we can't see light,

7:40

where our eyes are not capable of seeing

7:42

light. So on a human level, that seems

7:45

very straightforward. But then when you start to

7:47

think about, well, can we

7:49

see darkness? That's the

7:51

question that scientists and philosophers have juggled

7:53

with for quite a long time. You

7:55

know, we can see that something is

7:57

dark. We can see that a room

7:59

perhaps. has no light. And

8:01

is that the same as actually

8:04

seeing darkness? Because darkness, as

8:06

an absence of light, is nothing.

8:09

And this idea of darkness as

8:11

absence, I think, seems odd

8:13

to us because most people, I would

8:16

say, like me, feel

8:18

that you can experience darkness. So one of

8:20

the things I do in the book is

8:22

I walk in the dark and I talk

8:24

about that experience. And if you're out somewhere

8:26

in the dark, I would argue that you

8:28

can feel what darkness

8:31

is. It is a thing. It

8:33

feels real and tangible and

8:35

something other than an absence. But science

8:37

would tell us that

8:40

darkness is actually just an

8:42

absence. But there are other conundrums.

8:46

So if you think about dark matter,

8:48

if you think about the way the universe is constructed, and

8:50

I don't know a great deal about this, but I

8:52

know enough that dark matter and dark

8:55

energy are fundamental

8:57

to current thinking about what the universe

8:59

might be, although I know that is

9:02

in some quarters being challenged. But

9:05

that would suggest that 95% of the universe is actually dark,

9:12

but might not therefore be nothing. There

9:14

is dark energy by its name. There

9:16

is an energy there. There is something

9:18

happening. One of the

9:21

really nice things I like to think

9:23

about is when Aristotle was thinking about

9:25

darkness, and Aristotle did lots of very

9:27

interesting experiments in thinking about color and

9:30

light and dark. And he

9:33

suggested dark and light

9:35

existed side by side, so kind of like

9:37

salt and pepper, and that

9:40

they were both equally present.

9:42

They were both equally tangible.

9:44

Now current scientific thinking would

9:46

say, well, that's not true.

9:49

Darkness is simply an absence of light.

9:52

It's where light isn't. But

9:54

I quite like that philosophy

9:56

of Aristotle, because I think that's more like the

9:59

way I expect. experience darkness as

10:01

being something in

10:04

its own right. You say you don't

10:06

know much about the science but actually your

10:08

interest in science I think really shone throughout

10:10

the book. That was one of my favourite

10:12

aspects of it. I thought there was a

10:14

wonderful joy almost kind of a glee in

10:17

the way that you communicated some of the

10:20

mind bending things that you discovered. Would you

10:22

share with us just what's one or two

10:24

of the quirkiest things that you learned about

10:26

the science of darkness? I did

10:28

really enjoy exploring the science of darkness

10:30

and I'm glad that came across that's

10:33

brilliant. One of my favourite facts is

10:35

that if you stand outside in

10:38

your garden for example on a fine

10:40

evening when the sun is dropping low so

10:42

you have a long shadow and it

10:45

might be you know summer's evening, your

10:47

shadow will weigh more than you do. Wow. And

10:50

I really like that because of

10:52

the weight of the air in

10:54

the shadow. So I did come

10:56

across some really interesting facts and

10:58

really interesting historical facts. It

11:00

was a very intriguing

11:03

research journey. I'm actually

11:05

going to get a little bit personal here.

11:07

You mentioned earlier that your investigations

11:09

were partly prompted by observing a

11:12

change in the way that your

11:14

father experienced darkness. And

11:17

for me this aspect of the book prompted

11:19

some reflections on a very personal area of

11:21

my own life. There's a mention in the

11:23

book that it's generally understood as sort of

11:25

a universal thing that between the ages

11:27

of about two and five children tend

11:29

to be afraid of the dark and

11:31

of course I think that's what most

11:33

people find. My daughter

11:35

who is just five is not.

11:38

She craves the dark. She closes the

11:40

shutters against the sun in the middle

11:42

of the day. She can't wait to

11:44

turn the light out and when

11:46

she's in the dark she's incredibly

11:48

active. She's rolling and jumping around

11:50

and singing with great gusto. She's

11:53

also autistic and as

11:55

such she experiences the world sensorily

11:58

speaking very differently to her father and I. So

12:00

I bring this up to

12:02

really ask, out of great

12:04

curiosity, whether you encountered anything

12:07

about neurodivergence and differences

12:09

in how dark is processed or

12:11

experienced. That's a really

12:13

interesting kind of comment about your

12:15

daughter's reaction to darkness. I

12:17

didn't and it sounds as

12:19

though there's a whole new area there that

12:21

would be really interesting to look at. I

12:24

think one of the things

12:26

that I did look at was the

12:28

idea of darkness as kind of safety

12:31

and solace and containment and

12:33

maybe that's one of the things that

12:35

your daughter is reacting to and the

12:37

idea that our senses other than

12:39

one of the things that interested me was the way

12:41

in which we tend

12:43

to prioritise sight as

12:46

the main sense but actually the

12:48

experience, the sensory experience of getting

12:50

the darkness is much richer or

12:52

can be much richer because we

12:54

allow other senses to come to

12:56

the fore and because we become

12:58

engaged with our other senses and

13:00

again maybe that's something that your

13:02

daughter is experiencing. And

13:04

did your experience of observing and

13:06

interacting with your father help you

13:09

come to any of those conclusions

13:12

about the dark sort of comforting

13:14

or enclosing aspects or was that

13:16

something quite different that you saw in

13:19

his responses? I think he

13:22

was quite different and I think that's probably

13:25

reasonably common for

13:27

people living with dementia. I mean there are two

13:29

things. One, sundowning is a

13:31

very common reaction in people

13:34

with dementia so that period

13:36

around dusk when they

13:38

tend to become very anxious

13:40

they might need to try

13:43

and escape the house, they

13:46

might be frightened, they might even become

13:48

quite violent where the

13:50

encroachment of darkness is in some

13:52

way felt as perhaps a danger

13:54

or a threat. So that's quite

13:56

common and dad certainly showed

13:58

elements of that. became anxious around

14:01

dusk and so on. And then

14:03

as the dementia progressed, light

14:07

became important to him and

14:09

he needed a much

14:11

more constant type of environment.

14:14

So he kept the lights

14:16

on, he had all the

14:18

lights on. He was a

14:20

man who when I was growing up used to

14:22

have all the lights off unless you absolutely needed

14:24

one. So this was a big change in behaviour.

14:27

He'd have all the lights on. And finally when

14:29

he went into his care home,

14:31

that was an

14:33

environment which was very carefully consistent

14:36

in terms of light levels. Again,

14:38

lights were on all the time.

14:40

So I think as the

14:43

dementia progressed, the darkness became more and

14:45

more difficult and threatening. And it is

14:47

a sense in it of being basically

14:50

cobbled up by an internal darkness

14:53

by your brain becoming darker and

14:55

it's probably no surprise that

14:57

you might like to have the lights on. So

15:00

having finished this book and

15:03

been through this journey, how

15:05

do you feel about the dark

15:08

now? Do you feel that you understand it

15:10

better? I do understand it better

15:12

and I still really enjoy it.

15:14

So I still like being outside

15:16

in the darkness and

15:19

I feel it's a very important

15:21

habitat and it's

15:24

a shame and probably a danger

15:27

that it gets overlooked so often. We think

15:29

of the dark as being something to get

15:32

rid of. Let's turn

15:34

the lights on, let's turn them

15:36

up, let's change the natural cycle

15:38

of day and dusk

15:40

and dark. I think we

15:43

need to start thinking of darkness as a

15:45

habitat in the same way that we think

15:47

of the oceans for example or the

15:50

mountains. There's been a lot of

15:52

really interesting and good work

15:54

done on the importance of the oceans and

15:56

the pollution in the oceans and much

16:01

more to the forefront of people's imaginations

16:04

and people's knowledge. The same thing in

16:06

some ways needs to happen with darkness

16:08

because we need the dark physically and

16:10

emotionally and philosophically. But

16:12

we need as humans elements

16:15

of darkness in our lives and

16:17

to just think well we can just

16:19

get rid of the dark is

16:22

a sort of slippery slope really. So

16:24

I think it's made me more

16:27

aware of the dark and more of

16:29

an advocate for darkness I think. Yeah

16:32

I think if there's one key takeaway that

16:34

I brought with me when I'd finished reading

16:36

your book it was that darkness,

16:39

real darkness, is an

16:42

endangered species. And

16:44

that this has brought you into contact hasn't

16:46

it with some fascinating groups and

16:48

individuals who are concerned about that and

16:50

want to do something about it. Yeah

16:53

and I'm pleased about that

16:56

really but there are in the UK

16:58

already dark sky parks, there

17:00

are a couple in Wales, Bracken Beacons is one

17:02

and there are some across the UK where people

17:05

are working very hard to not

17:07

only preserve the darkness of the

17:09

sky but also to make it

17:13

clear to people that this is important and this

17:15

matters. And I think it's something like

17:17

99% of

17:19

the world's population will never have the opportunity to

17:21

see the Milky Way. And if

17:23

you've ever seen how fantastic the Milky

17:25

Way is on a very dark night and

17:27

in fact all the other stars it

17:30

is absolutely breathtaking, it is

17:32

amazing. And of course we

17:34

all have that reaction to that kind of

17:36

site where we remember how tiny

17:39

and insignificant we are and how huge

17:41

darkness is. So there are lots of

17:43

people across the world actually who are

17:45

doing work on dark skies. I did

17:47

an interview podcast for a Canadian

17:49

organisation that is working to preserve

17:51

darkness in the wilderness in Canada.

17:53

So people are becoming more aware

17:55

that we need the dark, that

17:58

our bodies are more secure. function

18:00

better when we have a natural

18:03

cycle between light and darkness and I will

18:06

be delighted actually if the

18:08

book goes some way to shoring

18:10

up that activity and just to

18:12

making people aware that actually darkness

18:14

can be enjoyed. We need to

18:16

be safe, we need to take

18:18

care but we needn't necessarily be

18:20

frightened of the darkness. We can

18:22

enjoy it. Thinking about what

18:25

various populations have the opportunity

18:27

to see or not, this

18:30

seems like a great moment to turn to Nicoleta.

18:32

Nicoleta, you're fascinated by this

18:35

moment in human history where

18:37

people witnessed the shift from

18:39

guest lighting to electricity. So

18:42

if you could break this

18:44

down for us, what sort of

18:47

surprising or mundane or perhaps surprisingly

18:49

mundane differences did the advent of

18:51

electric light make to ordinary people's

18:53

lives? Quite a lot of

18:55

big changes really. So

18:58

one which I guess I discovered or

19:01

realized rather early on in my

19:03

research and perhaps might be obvious to

19:05

some and certainly some who have maybe

19:09

have experienced the gas light. It's

19:11

certainly that gas light is warm

19:14

so it's also it makes rooms

19:17

or the environment a much warmer

19:19

place. That idea of

19:21

you know some 19th century paintings with

19:24

the rosy or fuzzy feel

19:26

of light is very

19:28

much a gas aesthetic or gas that's

19:31

really hard to replicate with anything

19:33

else really. Electric light

19:36

didn't have that added feature so

19:38

one thing that people

19:40

reported was that rooms felt much

19:42

colder with the electric

19:44

light. Electric light didn't have the added bonus

19:47

I guess of having a kind of a

19:49

dual function rate of heating up rooms as

19:51

well as lighting them up. Gas

19:54

light is noisy in a way that

19:56

some early electric light was but not

19:58

electric light today so So gas

20:01

lights would have this kind of

20:03

a crackling sound, like almost a

20:05

fire light. That electric light, suddenly

20:08

today we're not used to thinking

20:10

that electric light has a

20:13

sound. So there's an element of,

20:15

it's not just about sights. That's

20:18

so interesting. You made a little caveat there. You

20:20

said early electric light maybe had a sound. What was that?

20:23

So our collides, so big, big street

20:25

lamps that we used only

20:28

outdoors because they were noisy,

20:30

our collides which function on

20:32

a technology that actually revolved

20:34

on carbon electrodes, those had

20:36

a hissing noise and

20:39

people hated it. So the first

20:41

experience of electric light was not good for

20:43

most Victorians or for most people in the

20:45

19th century because it had this disturbing noise.

20:48

The light was too strong. So it

20:50

could only be used in kind of big public spaces,

20:52

so boulevards or avenues

20:55

or stadiums or things like that.

20:58

There's a great passage in Robert

21:00

Louis Stevenson who experienced

21:02

the early electric light and by which

21:05

I mean our collide I think, that's

21:07

what he experienced in the 1870s. And

21:10

she said that light should only be

21:12

used to shine

21:14

on murder and public crime. It's

21:17

not fit for the living room

21:19

or the bedroom. Yeah,

21:22

he's absolutely horrified by it.

21:24

And many people were

21:26

understandably. And also

21:28

just places felt

21:30

and looked different. So imagine

21:34

walking out of your house in

21:36

the 1850s and everything is

21:38

lit up by gas lamps. You

21:40

probably have to watch your steps because streets

21:43

will be quite dark but with, say,

21:45

pockets of light around each

21:48

gas lamp. But when electric light comes about

21:50

you can see everything really well but to

21:52

a point that you see things too well,

21:54

that it's almost disturbing.

21:57

So it was perceived as a move from

21:59

crackling. to hissing from soft

22:02

to hard but also maybe

22:04

a kind of exposure of

22:07

evils you know with that Stevenson

22:09

the amazing Stevenson quote which recalls what

22:11

Jacqueline just said about people wanting to banish

22:13

dark so maybe there was that side of

22:15

it. What drew you to this

22:17

subject? You're a literary scholar by training what

22:19

made you want to think about light? I've

22:22

been researching light in

22:24

in poetry specific for a long

22:27

time but I was

22:29

actually interested in I think what you

22:31

both said about you know children and

22:33

thought because I think I can remember

22:35

quite well how my mother would complain

22:37

that I always turn on all the

22:39

lights in the house when there was

22:41

no need for all the lights to

22:43

be on. So I think maybe my

22:46

fascination goes goes way back to

22:48

moments that I can you know barely

22:50

remember but when yeah when I

22:53

decided to come to the UK to study

22:55

for a PhD I

22:57

decided on a topic which very much revolved

22:59

on light and dark but was specifically

23:01

looking at just the work from a

23:03

single single offer was T.S. Eliot. In

23:06

part I think perhaps because of my

23:08

innate fascination with light as

23:11

I said kind of something almost subconscious

23:13

I guess so as I

23:15

did that I was actually studying

23:18

a lot of kind of what

23:21

mystical light felt or what kind

23:23

of more religious imagery

23:25

to do with light and dark especially

23:27

in a later poetry but as I

23:29

did that I realized that

23:32

his early poetry was full

23:35

of lamps and darks

23:37

and twilights and just exciting

23:40

exciting shades of color in the sky

23:42

and it made me think why that

23:45

was and so when I

23:47

after I after I finished my

23:49

PhD I decided to kind of

23:51

expand on that and look at

23:53

whether other writers were interested in

23:55

the similar patterns of light and

23:57

that's how my current book brilliant

24:00

modernism has come to be, I

24:02

found a whole host of writers

24:04

who I actually called brilliant modernists

24:06

because I think they're drawn to

24:09

the light. I mean, it's fair to say

24:11

they're drawn to the darkness as well, but

24:13

they're drawn to that combination of the two

24:16

because I don't think you can be brilliant

24:19

in full light. You can only be

24:21

brilliant against darkness. Yes, indeed.

24:23

In your book, you think about a lot

24:26

of different poets and poems. And I think

24:28

you've brought along one of those today, which

24:30

is a really interesting insight into

24:32

how the awareness of a different electric

24:34

light could make the route within popular

24:37

culture. Why don't you tell us a

24:39

bit about this and then maybe share

24:41

a snippet or two. So the song

24:43

is entitled The New Electric Light, and

24:45

it's from 1879. So that very year that I

24:49

was telling you about when Edison

24:51

had his successful experiment with the

24:54

condescent electricity. So

24:56

the song would have been performed

24:58

in a kind of musical setup.

25:02

I think it was written by

25:04

two authors, F.W. Green and Alfred

25:06

Lee, who were famous for

25:08

pantomimes and musical shows.

25:12

What I love about this song

25:14

is it kind of summarizes

25:16

the key concerns

25:18

that people had when

25:21

early electric light came about

25:23

and was available thoroughly in public

25:26

spaces. So I think I'll just

25:28

read a couple of lines

25:30

from the first answer and then

25:32

another snippet. Have

25:35

you heard the latest news of how the

25:37

words to be soon

25:39

lighted up from pole to

25:41

pole by electricity? The

25:43

light of day will be a clip soon

25:46

by the light of night when

25:48

all the earths illuminated by electric

25:51

light. Clearly, you know, in

25:53

1879, this was a big thing. It

25:58

was everywhere in the news. friend

26:00

and mentors were trying to come to

26:02

the same, you know, this, how can

26:04

we make electricity portable and

26:06

suitable to the home, like not just those

26:08

big, big arc lamps that I told you

26:11

about. I love, I love the

26:13

pun, you know, pole to pole, obviously,

26:15

the proposal electricity and,

26:17

and the light of night, which is possibly

26:20

an easy wordplay. But that's what comes

26:22

a lot in the works of the poets

26:24

that I study later. I think it's really interesting, Nikoletta,

26:26

isn't it as well, that that was happening,

26:30

like you say, you know, everyone was talking about

26:32

it, this, this is on the musical stage, because

26:34

in some ways, light was democratizing

26:36

things, wasn't it? And one of the

26:39

things that interested me

26:41

about light and darkness and the gradual

26:43

creeping of artificial light was how before,

26:46

that's like before electricity, the ability

26:48

to light up the night with

26:50

candles or pageants or whatever

26:52

was very much an expression of power

26:55

and authority of church and state.

26:57

And so it's interesting that this

26:59

period, you know, the late 19th

27:01

century, people were starting to lay

27:03

claim to light, ordinary people were

27:05

starting to lay claim to light.

27:07

Yeah, absolutely. It becomes part of popular culture,

27:09

I guess, in a way that maybe

27:11

it wasn't necessarily before. But also, the

27:14

thing you said about power is really

27:16

interesting, I think. We'll

27:18

see it in the next few lines that I'm going to read.

27:20

So shall I do that? Please

27:22

do. I will show

27:25

us all the funny things Falk did

27:27

when he was dark and let us

27:29

see some spooky couples kissing in the

27:31

park. Policemen down the

27:33

area then must look out or we

27:35

might find where our pies and

27:37

called me to go to by electric light. So

27:41

there's, there's this idea of

27:43

it being the light of night,

27:45

there's this flavor of democratization. And

27:47

there's this idea of electric light

27:49

as a sort of detecting beam

27:51

that will that will show up all

27:53

the sorts of goings on whether those are spooky

27:56

couples in the park or policemen

27:58

stealing pies. is, as

28:00

you said, a really early example actually.

28:02

Going a little bit later, who

28:04

are your brilliant modernists and what do they

28:06

have to say about life? I've

28:09

got a range of poets

28:11

and visual artists as well for

28:14

painters and photographers. One

28:16

of them is TS Eliot but

28:18

I also look at the

28:20

work of women poets, especially in

28:23

the faults of the avant-garde movements,

28:25

or in fact, more

28:27

broadly American modernist circles.

28:29

One of them is

28:32

Lola Ridge who

28:34

is a fascinating figure born

28:36

in Dublin. She moves to

28:39

New Zealand as a small child. She

28:41

actually would not have

28:44

had access to electricity from

28:46

her diaries. She lived

28:48

in rural New Zealand with

28:51

kerosene lamps. A

28:53

lot of darkness I would imagine, a lot of dark

28:56

skies that you were mentioning, Jacqueline. But

28:58

then she moves to the United States

29:00

and that's when around 1910 she moves

29:04

to San Francisco and then New

29:06

York. This poem that I want to share

29:08

with you is from a collection Sun

29:10

Up and other poems from

29:12

1920. A bit later

29:14

she's living in New York and so

29:17

you can imagine 1920s

29:19

New York to be the absolutely brilliant

29:22

and radiant glowing spectacle

29:24

that it was. And

29:27

she's using electricity to describe actually

29:29

a very private union. Electricity

29:33

out of fiery contacts,

29:37

rushing auras of steel, touching

29:40

and whirled apart, out

29:43

of the charged fallacies of

29:45

iron leaping, female

29:47

and male, complete

29:50

indivisible, one

29:53

fused into light. In

29:56

this poem she's imagining a union between a

29:58

man and an adult. and a woman

30:00

and it's a sexual union that's

30:02

consummated. By light it becomes light.

30:05

That's something that I found profoundly fascinating.

30:07

It's something that comes up quite a

30:09

bit in several of the women poets

30:11

and visual artists work is that it

30:14

precisely imagining the union

30:16

between man and woman

30:18

as light, like as

30:21

burning, but also absolutely

30:23

glowing with light, which I think

30:25

itself is something that could only

30:27

come out of this moment of

30:29

the beginning to understanding

30:32

electricity. She mentioned the female

30:34

and the male, almost like the two poles of

30:36

electricity that show up in the song that

30:38

I read earlier. And certainly

30:41

she also refers to the

30:44

phallic shape of light bulbs as

30:46

well. That's just how they would have

30:48

been perceived by a lot of people. Were

30:51

there any methodological challenges to doing

30:53

this? Or to put it another

30:55

way, how do you know what

30:58

this early electric light looked

31:00

and felt like essentially down the line? Or

31:02

how did you go about getting such a thing?

31:05

It's a really good question. I

31:07

read a lot of handbooks that

31:10

were published around this time explaining

31:12

how electricity work, some of them

31:14

explaining to women too. So

31:16

the- Oh, how to be in

31:19

the electric light. Yep. Oh, okay.

31:21

In part that was because many people

31:24

were, as I said, concerned about electricity.

31:27

They were worried about it. So these

31:29

texts were aiming to

31:31

make electric lights or electricity

31:33

more large, more accessible to

31:35

everyone. The idea that

31:38

light or indeed darkness can be

31:40

gendered is really, really fascinating to

31:42

me. And I'm sort of wondering about

31:44

the effects that the advent of electric

31:46

light may have had on women's abilities

31:48

to move around more freely. It's

31:50

kind of, it's still a subject of public

31:53

discourse, a lot that urban

31:55

planning doesn't take women's different needs

31:57

into consideration when they're planning which bits of

31:59

the- city to light, etc. on

32:01

unlit streets and parks are more

32:04

unsafe. But then I was thinking

32:06

about that and there's an interesting contrast with the

32:08

freedom and confidence with which Jacqueline in her book

32:10

seems to move through the pitch black countryside.

32:12

And so I wondered whether

32:15

either of you had thoughts you wanted to

32:17

share on what it means to be a

32:19

woman in the dark or the light? It's

32:22

a super interesting question. So I think right up

32:25

to kind of the end of the 19th century

32:27

return of the 20th century, okay, maybe this is

32:30

a bit generalizing, but the only women who would have

32:32

been out at night

32:34

near a lamp would have been prostitutes

32:36

by and large. But

32:38

then with the electric light, as Jacqueline was

32:40

saying, you know, we really see democratizing and

32:42

also an opening up of who can actually

32:44

go out at night.

32:47

And we see many more

32:49

women actually roaming freely about

32:51

cities at night. Suddenly, Mina

32:53

Loy has many poems where

32:56

she imagines women

32:58

walking around New York. This is

33:00

because she was walking herself around

33:02

cities such as New York or

33:04

Paris or Florence even. So electric

33:07

light, it makes it a safer word in

33:09

some respects, it suddenly makes it a

33:11

world where women can more easily go

33:13

out and about. I'm

33:16

not convinced that it's

33:18

entirely gendered, actually. I

33:20

mean, I think Nicolette is right, you know,

33:22

the big cities, New York is a prime

33:24

example, took light in the 20th century, but

33:26

in some ways are moving back

33:29

towards more control of that.

33:31

So, you know, I know that in New

33:33

York, for example, they now try and turn

33:35

off the lights in the tall buildings through

33:37

the night because it's causing too much disruption

33:39

to natural history to the birds in particular.

33:42

But, you know, thinking about that question

33:44

of safety when you

33:46

look back, you know, before the

33:49

18th and 19th centuries, before these experiments with

33:51

light, the dark was

33:54

seen to be a threat

33:56

whether you were a man or a woman. So in

33:59

the Middle Ages, curfews were imposed

34:01

in order to keep people safe.

34:03

You know people shut their houses,

34:05

went in when darkness fell and

34:08

stayed in because they felt threatened by the

34:10

dark and if you went out you had

34:12

to carry a light not

34:14

just so that you could see your own way

34:16

but actually so that people could see you so

34:19

they could identify the markings of who you were

34:21

so you know what were you wearing, were you

34:23

were you important, what was your status and so

34:25

I think it's not just a

34:27

question for women and darkness is

34:30

not just a kind of gendered thing

34:32

in that it's not just women

34:34

who who might feel threatened by having to

34:37

walk across a park in the dark for

34:39

example so I think

34:41

it is an interesting one. Now we've

34:43

been talking largely about darkness and light

34:45

as if they can be somehow treated

34:47

in isolation from one another but of

34:49

course as you both I think have

34:51

have hinted they're much more interdependent than

34:54

that more like two sides of the

34:56

same coin. Jacqueline was there

34:58

anything particularly interesting you found out

35:00

about light while you were on

35:03

this mission to pin down darkness?

35:06

All kinds of very interesting

35:09

contrasts that I think were one

35:11

of the things that I wanted

35:13

to bring out in the

35:16

talking about darkness that you can't talk

35:18

about the dark without talking about light

35:20

so the book is structured through the

35:22

phases of the moon and

35:25

when I'm talking about full moons that's

35:27

the opportunity to talk about light and

35:29

dark because obviously our experience of night

35:31

under a full moon is completely different

35:34

to our experience of night under a

35:36

new moon when there is no light

35:39

so we're already attuned

35:41

or we could already be

35:43

attuned to this natural cycle of light

35:46

leaching into dark and becoming lighter and

35:49

lighter and then fading away again as

35:51

the moon rings through the cycle. I

35:54

was really interested in and Nicolette

35:56

has kind of touched on this in

35:58

the way that darkness

36:00

and light are set up as

36:02

opposites in language, in writing,

36:04

also in religion, the

36:06

way in which the binary

36:09

is so embedded in particularly kind

36:11

of in Western culture and Western

36:13

religion and I think it's interesting

36:15

that in some Eastern cultures and

36:18

Eastern religions and in Maori culture for

36:20

example darkness and light are seen much

36:22

more as different expressions

36:24

of a complete whole whereas

36:27

I think one of

36:29

the things that happens in kind of Western culture

36:31

and which has come out in the readings that

36:33

Nicolaia did is this sense of light

36:35

banishing dark you can have one or you can have

36:37

the other but they can't exist together

36:41

next to each other and so that was

36:43

one of the interesting areas that I found

36:45

looking at the language of contrast

36:49

and then teasing that through

36:51

so a fairly short step

36:53

from the embedded language of

36:55

light and dark in Western

36:58

religion and particularly you know the idea

37:00

of the darkness and evil and lightness

37:03

as and good and the way

37:05

in which they're seen to be you know completely

37:07

opposite it's a reasonably short

37:09

step there to questions of kind of

37:11

skin color and how we perceive you

37:13

know darkness in other physically

37:16

and metaphorically and

37:18

so that was quite an interesting and

37:20

obviously sensitive area for me to research

37:22

as well. Yeah so

37:25

yeah I'm really I think I'm really intrigued with what

37:27

you said and I think it's in

37:29

my experience it's

37:31

a complicated thing but I

37:34

guess I'm worried that you

37:36

know some of what I've said about

37:38

you know people finding the world could

37:41

be safer by electric light for example

37:43

my leaders do think that there was

37:45

a sort of obliteration of darkness or

37:47

that dark was intrinsically perceived as evil

37:49

because actually that isn't so much

37:51

of what I found and in fact while

37:54

I think while I'm here as a as

37:56

the representative of light as it were I

37:58

think of light I think

38:00

that in the work that I've done and the text that I've

38:02

read, you can't really detach

38:12

the light from the dark. There's a sort

38:14

of combination of the two. So I've been

38:16

writing a lot about the night, but it's

38:18

always an illuminated nightscape that

38:20

we're talking about. But in a

38:22

way, I find that it's

38:25

almost like the electric

38:27

light frames darkness. It makes

38:29

it visible and it makes it tangible.

38:31

It makes it possible for

38:34

photographers or painters or

38:36

even poets to

38:38

preserve it in a way, to

38:40

capture it. So thinking

38:42

out alphabetically, it's like lots of

38:44

landscapes of cityscapes of New York,

38:47

which actually I'm not sure whether our

38:49

eyes should look at

38:52

the lamps or the lights or the dark

38:54

silhouettes of the

38:57

trees, of the cars, whatever it is that's

38:59

on the fore sun. Which

39:01

feels, doesn't it, as though that's following

39:03

on from the tradition, the

39:06

painting tradition of chiaroscuro and

39:08

where you have to have

39:11

those very highlighted

39:13

areas in order to throw darkness at

39:16

you. Yeah, that's right. Because otherwise, how

39:18

are you going to present it to

39:20

other people? Yeah. Well,

39:22

we may not have exactly pinned down

39:24

what light and dark are, but we've certainly

39:26

been to some interesting places. Here

39:29

in Salford, the light is fading fast and it's

39:31

time for us to bid you farewell. But

39:34

I can't go gentle into that good night

39:36

without thanking my guests, Nicoleta

39:38

Ashuto and Jacqueline Yalup, my

39:40

producer Lola Greaves and my

39:43

technical producer Helen Williams. Jacqueline

39:45

Yalup's Into the Dark is out now,

39:48

while Nicoleta Ashuto's brilliant Modernisms will be

39:50

out in early 2025. This

39:53

new thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas

39:55

podcast was made in partnership with the Arts

39:58

and Humanities Research Council, part of UTS. To

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40:03

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