The Poetics of Fluorescent Light
I was a curious lad. For example, as a child I learned through my reading that mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, and later also learned that it is not particularly reactive but is capable of forming highly toxic compounds. Of course, being in this culture, I learned that mercury is a thing, a substance, a chemical element.
That’s what it IS! This is not just a way of talking about it.
That’s how it was presented.
To his old-fashioned credit, I recall my fourth grade teacher Mr. Schmunk once handing me a small plastic vial containing a blob of mercury and being surprised by how much it weighed as I tilted it back and forth to see it move like liquid silver. I wasn’t taught that mercury represents a spiritual quality, an energy, a profound mystery, or anything about why it happens to share its name with both a planet and an ancient Roman god. But I wondered.
In fourth grade I also probably did not yet know as I held that plastic vial of toxic metal in my hand that I was viewing it, to use conventional scientific terms, under 120Hz flickering light produced by electrical ionization of mercury vapor. This ionized metal vapor emitted black light, which in turn stimulated emission of visible light in the phosphors lining the fluorescent tubes overhead in our classroom. I didn’t know that I was seeing mercury by the light of technology in which mercury plays a critical role.
Fluorescent. It’s a strange light to put people under. People can get used to it, but let’s be honest: it’s not super friendly feeling.
It flickers — semi-strobes, if you will — at a rate of either 100 or 120 cycles per second. So in effect it’s flashing all the time. Then there’s the light emitted by the phosphors after being “excited” by the UV light. The phosphors are the powdery white coating lining the inside of the tubes, if you’ve ever broken one. When you look at the light emitted using a spectrometer or an ordinary prism, you’ll see that the spectrum is discontinuous: bright bands of light separated by darkness. (See photo, above, taken through the instrument shown in the photo below.)
So it’s been quite the grand experiment, hasn’t it? “Let’s see what happens when multiple generations of people live, learn and work under the light emitted in narrow bands of wavelengths that simulate white light, with most of the rainbow missing. Oh, and make it flickeringly stroboscopic, so you’re sort of sitting in the dark half the time, working in a subliminal discotheque without knowing it. Sounds good. And then we can train ourselves not to notice. I mean, if any of this were a problem, other people would be upset, irritated, talking about it or maybe freaking out, right? I’m not seeing that. They’re upset with one another. Or freaking out about other things. It’s not the light. So, there must not be a problem. Right?”
Right?
And of course we’re gonna do this entirely for practical reasons: Fluorescent light saves electricity! Nowadays people say that replacing incandescent with compact fluorescent light (or the often more pronouncedly flickering LEDs) will help us “Save the planet!”
But please don’t think there’s anything metaphorical about any of this, because we are taught about metaphors in a different class. We’re talking about Physics and Chemistry here, not Poetry! Totally different subjects. If you want to learn poetry, then you’ll have to go down the first hall on the left to the third door on the right. (Knock first— I hear that this Scholz guy who teaches it can be a bit of a crank. )
Ah, “education”. Everything atomized, even atoms. It’s the discontinuous spectrum again, writ large upon us, burned into our brains. Huge gaps that few people seem to notice or talk about, so I guess they aren’t there or don’t matter. And by this we are to illuminate our experience and find our ways.
Still, one might be aware of how, when office workers, teachers, store clerks and others can get away from that infernal, half-missing light, many of us will as if by instinct choose instead to expose ourselves to the rays of the sun on a beach somewhere. I mean, hey – that’s a privilege we’ve earned by slaving under that light in an office cube 50 weeks of the year! But overall, beware of the sun. It’s dangerous, we’ve been told. And tell the children it’s dangerous. And, to get them ready for the life that awaits them, let’s put them under fluorescent lighting from an early age. With brief intermissions, let’s raise them under it, preferably looking at illuminated screens. It’s not as if we’ve built an incubator for lost consciousness, creating people acclimated to a weird toxic light that disguises its own gaps and darkness, or to a society that by some strange coincidence seems hell bent on doing the very same thing. That’s just crazy talk.
And if all this just comes across as so much “whining-about-what-is,” please understand that I’ve looked into the risks and problems of other kinds of lighting technologies. As part of my environmental education work, I read up on the risks of exploding kerosene lamps, I spoke with an education advocate about schools that can’t open in some places because they lack a budget for diesel-generated electric power, and I learned from multiple sources about the boon of adding energy-efficient and reliable lighting technologies to people’s lives. So yes, I get all that.
At the same time, it’s important to note that we’re seeing, defining, and solving problems like these “by our own lights”— in other words, through a kind of consciousness that has been shaped by exposure to our current technologies and institutions. Time and again we make unwitting tradeoffs, such as when we turn night into day by installing municipal street lighting for public safety, only to later find out about the disruption this causes to human hormonal balance, which in turn introduces other kinds of risk to health. Or we buy expensive computers, then pay extra for blue-filtering eyeglass lenses to remove the destructive light they produce. Perfectly normal.
So many consequences, so many “side-effects” seem to fall into the “dark bands” of our conscious spectrum. We tend to ignore these. Yet they are real, even so. I think we will ultimately discover that light is more than just “photons”. I think we’re going to appreciate on a much deeper level that the quality of light matters. And finally, if there’s a simple takeaway I can offer here, it’s that maybe now is a good time to find our places in the sun.