What was also astounding for Carson that night was that she saw a firefly hovering over the water, his reflection ‘like a little headlight’, and it dawned on her that he thought the sparkles in the water were other fireflies. She rescued him from drowning in the ice-cold sea, putting him in a bucket to dry his wings. The woman whose later work, Silent Spring, would ignite the modern environmental movement, wrote: ‘It was one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves . . . Imagine putting that in scientific language!’ Indeed.
As their understanding of these otherworldly phenomena grew, scientists refined their terminology. Light released by natural substances or organisms (usually re-emitting absorbed heat) had been known as ‘phosphorescence’ since the 1770s; in the early twentieth century the term ‘bioluminescence’ was coined to specifically describe biochemical light emitted by living creatures. Studies of living light proliferated, and attempts were made to measure and harness bioluminescence. But, while the US Navy continues to study it today, and is reportedly attempting to develop an undersea robot that could track and monitor bioluminescence to help war efforts, work on its predictability and potential usefulness has never achieved the hoped-for broadscale harnessing of light, nature proving hard in this regard to bend to our will. In Roman times, the philosopher Pliny the Elder claimed it was possible to transform a walking stick into a torch by wiping the end with jellyfish paste, but this does not appear to have caught on. The ingenuity of Indigenous Indonesians in employing bioluminescent mushrooms as lights in the forest does not appear to have been replicated either. On land, attempts by miners to light caverns with bottles filled with fireflies or phosphorescent dried fish skins were also unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, researchers are still trying to fathom how to use light-producing creatures, whether fireflies or bacteria, for street, decorative or domestic lights. There are hopes bacteria like a genetically engineered form of the intestinal E. coli will be able to produce enough light to replace electricity in a ‘biobulb’. Some scientists are even more ambitious. In biomedicine, living light is incredibly important: scientists tweak and yoke various genes from jellyfish, coral and fireflies to light up cancer cells and nerve cells, and to test drugs and monitor biochemical reactions.
But there’s something gratifying about knowing such natural wonders cannot be completely plundered or exploited, particularly for the purpose of destruction. Today, sightings of living light remain rare, magical and often unpredictable. Consequently, some people devote years to hunting it, seeing it and recording it. In recent years, I became one of them.
FOR A LONG STRETCH of time in my twenties, I preferred lamplight to sunlight. I wasn’t gothic; I was nocturnal. I danced marathons under lasers and mirrored globes in lambent clubs and strobe-lit warehouses. But outside, along the rim of our broad coastline, I hunted for sunlight trapped in water. At the end of the week, my friends and I would often throw tents into car trunks and drive north of Sydney for several hours until we reached, in darkness, a place called Seal Rocks. Painted in large white letters on the road that curved down to the ocean were the words: ‘THE LAST FRONTIER’.
The beach there was unspoiled, untamed, brimming with wildlife. We’d park our cars and run into the black sea, diving and swirling under the moon, watching a silvery, sparkling ribbon of phosphorescence trail behind our limbs. The tiny little sea creatures that absorbed the light of the sun were stirred up by our thrashing; we were streaming sequins, or galaxies, in our wake. In truth they were phytoplankton that were reacting chemically to movement — generating energy from sunlight (photosynthesis) to drive light-producing chemical reactions when stirred up — but it seemed magical. These living lights became a kind of symbol of joy and abandon for me, and I tried to find more ways to experience them and companions who would love them as much as I did.
I LEARNED RECENTLY THAT humans glow faintly, even during the day. All living creatures do, apparently. In recent years, scientists have been trying to discern if and, if so, why our bodies emit a varying visible light. In a study published in 2009, five healthy, bare-chested young Japanese men were placed in dark rooms sealed to keep light out, for twenty-minute intervals every three hours for three days. They were only allowed to sleep from midnight to 7 am. A highly sensitive imaging system found that all of the men glowed, most strongly from the face, at levels that dropped and climbed during the day. Yes, it’s a small sample size, and the study does not seem to have been repeated, but it’s a delicious thought.
The authors of the study, Masaki Kobayashi, Daisuke Kikuchi and Hitoshi Okamura, concluded that we all ‘directly and rhythmically’ emit light: ‘The human body literally glimmers. The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes.’
Maybe it’s just that we’re all made of stardust.
EVERY NOW AND THEN you actually do encounter someone who glows: someone who radiates goodness and seems to effortlessly inhabit a kind of joy, or seems so hungry for experience, so curious and engaged and fascinated with the world outside their head that they brim with life, or light. These people are simultaneously soothing and magnetic.
The inspiring punk musician Henry Rollins proudly told me that he gets ‘tired but never jaded’. Talking to him is like sticking a fork into an electrical socket — you walk away infected with his craving to do, know and be more, to span seas and conquer weakness and fight for the rights of those who cannot, or should not be forced to, fight for themselves.
Tired, but not jaded. Yet it’s hard to hold onto that glow. And very often life seems to snuff it out. So how can we find bellows to blow air on fire and fan flames? What can be done to nurture our inner lights, and guard them as jealously as an Olympian does a burning torch?
In recent years, those studying the still-nascent science of happiness have tapped into our cells, probed the flow of blood to our hearts and brains, and measured the variables in our daily moods to try to find what brings contentment, well-being and joy. And now we have a few well-established core truths. Being altruistic makes us happy, as do turning off devices, talking to people, forging relationships, living with meaning, having a purpose and delving into the concerns of others. Eating good food and going for a few runs, swims or workouts help too.
This is all very well if you are healthy, fit and strong, or in an easy, harmonious relationship, certain about the future and your family. But are we in fact asking the wrong question — instead of how do we stay happy, should we ask how do we survive, stay alive or even bloom when the world goes dark, when we are, for instance, overwhelmed by illness or heartbreak, loss or pain? Is it possible to experience what monk David Steindl-Rast calls ‘that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens’? When our days are shadowed and leached of meaning, when circumstances shower us with mud, how can we be sure to re-emit lessons we absorb in the sunlight?