8 Meditations on (More Than) Light
Athens, June 2022
In 1972, the military junta ordered an obligatory whitening of all houses in Greece. Maybe purity has always been a lie, a violent truth at least, like all truths; it’s as if someone forced these houses into white dresses, and walked them down the altar.
I painted my fingernails white, like the houses on the island of Hydra. Before mass tourism, before dictatorship even (if there ever existed such a time) houses were washed in white to reflect the heat, of course. The sun, our ultimate dictator —
At Purdue University in India, Xiulin Ruan, a mechanical engineer and his nameless students invented the whitest shade of white, so white it could possibly obliterate air-conditioning. It’s very cool.
In California, there have been projects to paint entire pavements in white or putting thick white stripes on highways in an attempt to cool them down. I wonder if from space it will look like we’re just trying to paint the melting glaciers back on.
Airplanes clothed in white can save up to 300 kg in weight. I look up at the sky, down at my hands. Do I feel lighter?
When the first colonial settlers seized and squeezed indigenous land in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the first symptom of environmental pollution was often acoustic: the constant hum of sharp instruments digging holes and felling trees. White noise.
White, a non-colour, achromatic, also means losing, I guess. An absence, a gaping hole. It’s only kids that are afraid of the dark; scare an adult with light. They make up names to cover up the nothingness: Terra incognita, horror vacui. Hair turns white as we age, as if life is just falling out of our bodies like snow.
And, of course, Ahab. What was he seeing in that damn whale?
Well, look at the Cycladic houses, look at the asphalt; look at the industry, look into the science; look at the blinding light, look at my fingertips —
What are you seeing?
