Partly queazy, with a chance of (… what?)

 

There is something

not  quite  right

about that light.

 

Some thing  a bit

bent-around-the-edges --

crinkled, if you will --

 

a kind of

Unreliable Brightness,

harboring something

up deep

in its shimmering, silken sleeves …

 

Hearken to the horizon:

a thunder-rumble?

No, none.     Not  yet.

 

And yet,

still, there is Some Thing

nót   quíte   ríght …

about that light.

 

Ill Will / Sick Light

I just finished reading an engrossing and intricate novel.  These snippets may either whet your appetite for it, or warn you off;  either reaction would be appropriate.

 

a fuzz of dust on the lampshades

that made the light seem dull and dirty

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

The pool emanated 

a chlorinated glow.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

 

Not a monostich (lacks the requisite rhythm and concision), but in the spirit of such depictions of dim/ill light:

 

There was a kind of dimness about northern Ohio light as it approached the winter solstice, a kind of suffocating lack of direct light.  On days like this, you could scope the sky for the sun, but couldn’t pinpoint its location, the cloud cover was so thick.  It made me think of the neurology class I took in college,  the professor talking about eigengrau -- intrinsic gray, brain gray.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

This queasy-swimmy novel itself  might be dubbed, not quite noir, but eigengrau.

 

And:

 

Things      were going

            bad

between them.

Now there were four cigarette butts,

like four little people,

twisted into poses of decease.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

Illumination from the Cuckoo’s Nest

 

 

Except for the white powder of light from the Nurses’ station

 out in the hall,

the dorm is dark.

-- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

 

 The white tubes in the ceiling

begin to pump  their refrigerated light.

-- ibid

 

There was a cold moon at the window,

pouring light into the dorm

like skim milk.

-- ibid

 

~ ~ ~

 

The wind lay down  and the sun got higher,

chrome-plating the east side  of the deep green swells.

George  aimed the boat  straight out to sea.

-- ibid

 

George told the doctor he’d have to land his fish

or cut it loose,

because there was a bad sky coming down on us.

-- ibid

 

Light, Losing it

 

a     wan   sun

  appeared

in the   gray  sky

 

-- Janet Malcolm,

 

 

From gaol:

 

Outside,

the day may be blue and gold,

 

but the light that creeps down

through the thickly muffled glass

of the small iron-barred window

beneath which one sits,

 

is grey and niggard.

It is always  twilight  in one’s cell.

-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)

 

 

The Reading Room of the British Museum:

 

Some of the fog had seeped into the great domed space, increasing the gloom, so that the desk lamps seemed like so many street lamps in a miniature city of crecents and circuses  as he prowled in search of Amber.

… gaslamps, each with a halo  of irradiated fog.

-- David Lodge, A Man of Parts (2011), p. 241-3

 

 

Atom-bomb test:

 

A hundred-times-sun-sized sun

mottled itself with lesser whiteness,

 

bulked up,

became the perfect sphere…

 

Tumors of light   more brilliant than the sun

sprang up on the mathematical sphere;

yet these,  less blazing than the fireball,

appeared as blacknesses.

-- Philip Wylie, “The Answer”

 

Impending weather

that baleful and livid tint

predictive of a storm

-- Washington Irving, “Mountjoy”

 

 

There was a queer, lurid sort of sky

over the garden,

though there was a fair amoung of   fitful sunshine

almost as capricious as lightning.

-- G. K. Chesterton, The Paradoxes of Mr Pond (1936)

 

 

The bright  hot  morning

had changed slowly to a grey,

oppressive afternoon;

a heavy bank of clouds,

with the yellow tinge  of coming thunder,

had risen in the south.

The branches of the trees

drooped motionless …

-- John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)

 

Dakota Summer

Apprehension on the prairie,

amid frightening light:

An ominous change had crept over the plain.

The winds were hot and dry,

and the grass, baked on the stem,

 had become as inflammable as hay.

The birds

were  silent .

The sky, absolutely cloudless,

began to scare us with its light.

The sun rose through the dusty air,

sinister  with flare  of horizontal heat.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 247

Glimpses of Sick Light

Chicago on fire,  seen from afar:

the thickening haze

through which the sun shone

with a hellish red glare

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

In the red darkness

glinted

innumerable rubies

-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ch. 3 

(In context, the implication is likewise hellish,
 since the locale is the laboratory manufacturing babies.)

Dust Bowl:

In the spring of 1934, only sun, and no rain … A powder of humus and colloids, the topsoil of the country  blowing away.  And still the sullen sun shone.

On and on  the clouds whirled, some into the astonished East, spreading their baleful orange and amber aura.

-- Arthur Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (1959), p. 69

Note: “baleful” is an apt adjective here, as it echos the word balefire.

Compare, during an eruption of Vesuvius:

A lurid, baleful light  hung in the heavens.

-- Washington Irving, “The Story of the Young Italian.

The sky, darkened by moving storm clouds

was one of those invented by Gustave Doré

to emphasize important Biblical calamities.

A colorless light   filled  the empty quay.

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

Mauritian Monostichs

Bad Infinity

sugar cane  and    sugar cane,    

ending in the sea .  .  .

-- V. S. Naipaul,  The Writer and the World (2002), p. 108

Bad Light

A rainy Sunday afternoon,

overcast  yet full of glare,

and sticky  between the showers

-- V. S. Naipaul,  The Writer and the World (2002), p. 114