Light and Dark

The other evening I went to Lightscape, the immersive holiday lights extravaganza now at the Botanical Garden. For an hour and a half, I shuffled with the crowd along a trail of glowing, strobing, flashing, flickering, lasering, psychedelic, kaleidoscopic, swirling colored light. The final display, Winter Cathedral, is a long, arched tunnel of shimmering LED lights. Stumbling out of it, I felt the need for a very different immersive experience. I craved darkness.

I doubt that’s the reaction Lightscape’s creators were going for.

Culture Creative, the British-based producers of the show, has done similar installations at botanical gardens around the world. They partnered with Sony Music and the public-private Gardens of Golden Gate Park partnership to create a show for the Botanical Garden. Since its opening on Nov. 21, Lightscape has been wildly popular. Some 15,000 attended the first weekend alone. The Gardens estimate as many as 180,000 people will visit the show during its six-week run, and that it will bring in as much as $500,000 in revenue.

The show consists of a mile-long trail through 12 different displays, including giant glowing dragon flies, fiberoptic blades of light rippling like a wave across a meadow, floating illuminated sculptures that resemble water lilies, a tree outlined in neon stripes.

All told, Lightscape fills the garden with one million lights.

The incandescence can be seen for miles. When it first opened, SFGate reported, people in the Sunset and Richmond were baffled by the eerie green and purple glow that appeared above the treetops. “The spectacle set off a mini frenzy online, with Reddit threads titled “Is anyone seeing those lights in the sky” and “What’s happening near Golden Gate Park tonight?,” which filled up with speculation ranging from drone shows to secret city testing and, of course, alien talk.”

I can understand why the Gardens mounted the show as a way to raise revenue and draw people who might not otherwise visit the Botanical Garden. “It is a secular celebration of winter with the plants as the star of the show,” the Garden’s director of experience engagement told the Chronicle,

But it didn’t seem to me like the plants were the star. For most of the trail, the plants were all but lost in the blare. In the redwood grove, trees that are a miracle in and of themselves just about disappeared in the swirl of fake fog and colored lights that shifted and throbbed in time to a techno-New Agey music. Meanwhile, the California Native Plant Society has complained that the crowds, noise and light will disrupt the circadian cycles of both plants and wildlife in the park.

The zen-like Moon Viewing Garden was one of the few areas left relatively dark, the better to see a large glowing moon that hung suspended in a nimbus of twinkling fairy lights. It was like a night sky brought down to earth – utterly enchanting.

I don’t want to be the grinch here, grousing about something that so many others clearly are enjoying. But it all just seemed so synthetic, a Vegas-style grab for amazement, like the Bellagio Hotel fountains.

It also was clearly designed for Instagram. The trail kept clogging as people, including me, repeatedly stopped and raised their cellphones to capture the spectacle:

Looking back through my own pictures, I see how well the scene photographed. In fact, I appreciate the beauty more on the screen than I did in real time.

It left me thinking about the darkness that dominates this season of short days and long nights. As many have observed, the glare of modern life has virtually banished the night sky that for millennia filled our ancestors with awe. “For all of human history, we've walked outside and looked up and thought about our place in the universe, We've thought about our god, our spirituality, our religion.We've thought about who we are,” Paul Bogard, author of “The End of Night” said in a 2016 TEDX talk.

But today, true darkness is almost impossible to experience, unless you trek to one of the world’s designated “dark sky places.” In cities, especially, the night sky is a gauzy yellow grey that obscures all but a smattering of stars. Sky glow, it’s called; a poetic way to describe the light pollution that is radically disturbing the life cycles of all living things on earth.

Lately, I’ve been rising very early and taking my dog out of walks in the park before sunrise. As I’ve written before, pre-dawn is one of my favorite times to be in park.

“Don’t you feel nervous?” a friend asked me. Strangely enough, I don’t. Maybe because I know light is coming soon, I don’t feel scared or wary as I do at twilight.

It’s not really dark, but the dimness attaches a mystery and beauty to all it touches. Disembodied small lights bob toward me, a strange wonder until they’re close enough for me to see they’re attached to a runner or cyclist. A darker something glides by, and it takes my eyes and brain a moment to find a name for the shape. A barn owl, A hawk. A shadow passes near a streetlight and I make out the form of a coyote.

“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizak wrote in “In Praise of Shadows”.^[1]

I think what I like best at that hour is the quiet. There’s not yet the tinnitus of traffic filling my ears. Often the wind is still sleeping, so the trees are still. I hear the birds stirring awake, starting with a few tentative cheeps and chirps of towhee and song sparrows. Next the crows and ravens rouse themselves, squawking as they take to the sky.

In that quiet quasi-dark time in the park I feel at peace and connected to something essential. Night, wrote Henry Beston is “the true other half of the day’s tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or trouble it; it is beauty, it is fulfillment, it is rest.”

How about a show about that?

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^[1] This quote and the one from Henry Beston’s “The Outermost House” come from a gorgeous meditation on darkness by the always brilliant Maria Popova. If you don’t know her online publication The Marginalian, you should!

Dear friends, As befitting the season, I’ll be in hibernation until the new year. I wish you all a happy holidays and a joyous new year. Thank you for your support.