The immateriality and uncertainty that characterizes light requires sometimes elaborate efforts to capture and represents it in its complexity or to domesticate it to fit certain standards or to perform certain specific tasks. in its ephemerality, light is comparable to time, with its non-linear flow. Western civilization has done almost anything to conquer darkness by designing lights that would illuminate the pathway, would show the way, would turn the chaos and entropy that characterizes light into a linear, ordered and malleable material. So is time. metaphors that associate light to reason not only link the power of mind to something shining that definitely stands up, but also something whose task is always to order, classify, make sense of things. when it comes to time, similar connections are true: the standardization of time following the invention of the clock was crystallized forever by the metaphor of the “clockwork universe,” a measurable universe.
In the case of Pamela’s Kladzyk’s massive survey of sacred locations across the border between Poland and the Eastern countries of Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia and Moravia, light is the locus of spirituality. in these sacred places, including churches, prayer houses, mosques and synagogues, every detail in the architectural design or in the composition of furniture and even the choice of colors is accurately arranged and directed to capture light and to direct to illuminate a specific location (for instance where the scriptures are on display) or to convey the sense of spirituality and sanctity emanating from the place itself.
To operate a connection between light and time, Dan Falk pointed out how the flow of time has to do with the way human consciousness experience time, not with the way the clock ticks and tells us the “artificial time”. ways to conquer time, paradoxically, are abounding, but, somehow, always relegated to the domain of science fictional narratives or theoretical universe. think about the endless fascination with time travel and time machines in scifi stories like Heinlein’s “All you Zombies” or the countless fantasies about wormholes.
find the short story here:
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~mfedder/zombies.html