Archive of Light
Literary Passport:
Announcement
A hundred-year-old streetlamp holds the stories of everyone who has ever passed beneath it. On its last night, it decides to break its one rule.
Hashtags
#MagicalRealism #PhilosophicalParable #Light #Love #Sacrifice #Incubator
About the Literary Project
THE INCUBATOR™ is a cycle of philosophical novellas by Iskandar Kadyrov at the intersection of intellectual prose, psychological drama, social satire, and dystopian literature.
- Literary Project: INCUBATOR™
- Cycle: I. "The Threshold"
- Author: Iskandar Kadyrov
- Age Rating: 18+
- Novella: "Archive of Light"
- Genre: Magical realism · Philosophical parable · Lyrical prose
- Slogan: Lampposts are stars fallen to earth.
Announcement
A hundred-year-old streetlamp holds the stories of everyone who has ever passed beneath it. On its last night, it decides to break its one rule.
Hashtags
#MagicalRealism #PhilosophicalParable #Light #Love #Sacrifice #Incubator
About the Literary Project
THE INCUBATOR™ is a cycle of philosophical novellas by Iskandar Kadyrov at the intersection of intellectual prose, psychological drama, social satire, and dystopian literature.
The Archive of Light
By the southeastern gate of Central Park there stood a Lamppost. He was neither the tallest nor the newest in the park — far from it; but at his summit rested five crystal globes, which, you must agree, is a rarity no other lamppost in the world can boast, however many city councils may have voted for its installation.
"He is undeniably handsome," the Weathervane on the roof of the neighboring gazebo would remark of an evening, turning this way and that so as to be seen from her most flattering angle, "but really, what use has one lamppost for five globes? It is rather like wearing five hearts in a single body — most impractical, and, I fear, in rather poor taste."
"He burns brighter than any other in the park," observed the Nightingale, passing overhead, though so softly that no one heard him except, of course, the Lamppost himself, who heard perfectly well everything said within the reach of his golden light, and was far too well bred to answer remarks made about his own appearance.
The truth of the matter is that the Lamppost had a secret, known neither to the Weathervane nor even to the Nightingale, in spite of that bird's celebrated perceptiveness in matters of the heart. Every night, when the park emptied, the Lamppost looked up through the elm branches at the sky — to the place where, among a thousand stars, one burned brighter than the rest, with that particular tenderness peculiar to stars who believe themselves unobserved.
"She is winking at me," the Lamppost would tell himself, with the modest self-satisfaction pardonable in anyone who has been in love for a hundred years running without once having had occasion to declare it. "Though it is, in all likelihood, merely a trembling of the atmosphere, of the sort the Street Thermometer is fond of explaining to me. But I prefer to think otherwise. After all, what is the use of being a lamppost, if one cannot occasionally be beautifully mistaken?"
So passed his evenings — in lending light to the trysts of others, and in silent confessions addressed to a sky which, in the manner of all skies, was in no particular hurry to reply.
The twenty-first of June arrived — the shortest night of the year — and the Lamppost, without quite knowing why, lit himself earlier than his appointed hour.
"How strange," the Weathervane observed. "You are usually so punctual."
"Lampposts, like people, have their name-days," he replied. "Today, I believe, is mine."
He did not tell her how he knew this so precisely. There are things one feels through the whole of one's cast-iron base, and to explain them aloud would be as pointless as explaining to a weathervane why the wind blows.
They appeared at dusk — a girl with eyes in which the reflections of not-yet-lit lamps were already trembling, and a young man carrying on his shoulders the weight of words he could not quite bring himself to say aloud, as though they were family silver, and he not smartly enough dressed for such an occasion.
"Look," she said, tipping her head back, "the lampposts. Like shards of the sun, forgotten on the earth."
"Or stars, fallen from the sky," he answered, and in his voice the Lamppost detected not so much tenderness as doubt — not, of course, doubt of her, but of himself, a condition common to nearly all young men in such circumstances, and one the Lamppost felt ought to be forgiven them in advance, wholesale, without inquiry into individual cases.
He turned up his light — first one globe, then another — and with every moment understood more clearly what, presumably, every lamppost in love comes to understand: that light given away is sweeter to keep than light hoarded for oneself alone.
They danced until morning — with no music, only the rustle of leaves — and the Lamppost was at once their stage, their audience, and their orchestra, which, I confess, is a great many roles for one lamppost to fill simultaneously, though he complained of none of them.
"We won't part before dawn," she whispered.
"Not while the lamps still burn," he answered, and the Lamppost, hearing this, felt that particular sensation known to anyone whose name suddenly finds itself a synonym for someone else's happiness — a sensation both flattering and faintly alarming, for synonyms, as everyone knows, are obliged to live up to one another.
By the blue of the coming dawn they had gone still at his foot. The girl lowered her lashes — they trembled like the wings of a captured butterfly, which, we may note in passing, is an enviable fate for no butterfly whatsoever, captured or otherwise. The young man was silent, and that silence was heavier than all the words he had never managed to say. He looked at the Lamppost with the wordless entreaty of a man who wishes to believe, but does not dare believe himself.
"Give me a sign," said that look. "I must know for certain."
And then all five of the Lamppost's voices spoke at once — the Way, the Warmth, the Love, the Memory, and the Eternity — and these voices, conferring among themselves with the haste peculiar to those who have already made up their minds and are merely searching for a respectable justification, arrived at a single conclusion: the sign must be unconditional. Half-light is the refuge of the timid. And the Lamppost, whatever the Weathervane might say of him, was not timid.
"I shall give everything," he said to himself. "Light is not a store to be husbanded. Light is what one becomes only when one lets it go entirely, down to the last atom of glass."
He did not say this aloud. Lampposts, as a rule, prefer to announce their greatest decisions after the fact — as, I suspect, do a great many people, and this is the one point on which lampposts and people are in perfect agreement.
He gathered into himself everything he had stored over a century: the light of a hundred confessions, a hundred kisses, a hundred small secrets, entrusted to him under cover of darkness by those who assumed a lamppost capable only of illuminating, never of remembering. His five flames merged into one — and he gave it all away at once, entirely, without remainder, in a short white discharge that flared brighter than propriety permits any self-respecting source of illumination.
The globes burst without a sound, showering down in a crystal rain — the way, perhaps, things weep for themselves when they have nothing left to weep with. The cast iron went dark.
The young man saw that flash reflected in her eyes — and understood, without proof, for some truths, frankly, have no need of it.
"It's you," he said. "It was always you."
They kissed as the glass dust settled, and the Lamppost, fading, heard, as his very last sound, her laughter through tears — a note he judged a fitting finale for a lamppost of his reputation, and his reputation, I venture to say, had been impeccable.
The departure of a lamppost is not darkness at all, whatever the pessimistically inclined Thermometers may claim. It is only the cessation of the particular form in which light had grown accustomed to thinking of itself as a lamppost.
For a moment the world went entirely white — without edge, without depth — and then the light departed. Not upward, as everything we are accustomed to calling a soul is said to rise, and not outward, as water runs from a cracked jug, but the way tension leaves a severed wire: without direction, without any trace of motion, without the slightest regard for the dramaturgy of the occasion.
Above, among a thousand indifferent stars, one suddenly flared a little brighter than usual — and then, seemingly embarrassed by its own candor, resumed its ordinary flicker as though nothing had happened. We shall not claim that this was the very same star. But neither shall we claim the contrary: there are, after all, stories whose ending is better left to the sky than to the storyteller.
In the morning the parkkeeper stood a long while beside the blackened iron, without touching it.
"Ruined," he said at last, without any particular regret, for parkkeepers, as a rule, are not disposed to sentiment at the start of a working day.
The lamppost was never replaced. Not by any decision, and not out of memory — simply, one of the reasons for lighting that particular corner had, quite unnoticeably, ceased to seem necessary, and inconspicuous reasons, as is well known, are the least likely of all to find their way into a city budget.
"A sad end," the Weathervane remarked, addressing herself now to the Nightingale, since her other companion had fallen silent forever. "To give oneself away entirely, without remainder, for two people scarcely acquainted with one another — that, you must agree, is the very height of imprudence."
"Agreed," replied the Nightingale. "The very height. What a pity there are so few of us left who are imprudent."
And the two of them walked on now through the city, hand in hand, offering neither confirmation nor denial of what had happened that night, pausing now and then, quite without agreeing to, in the particular places where the light behaved just slightly differently than everywhere else.
Some say that many years later, when the whole affair had become a piece of family legend, retold to grandchildren by tellers who did not entirely believe it themselves, an Angel, flying over the city on business Angels are not in the habit of reporting, once came down into Central Park and gathered up from the ground two things: a shard of crystal globe, and a dried elm leaf, from beneath which those two had stood on that short night.
"Bring me the two most precious things from that city," the One who had sent him is said, by the legend, to have asked.
And the Angel brought exactly these two — the shard and the leaf — for, as anyone with even the slightest understanding of such matters knows, the most precious things in a city are rarely kept in bank vaults. More often they lie scattered along a park path, and it takes an angel to notice them in time.
Should you happen to walk through Central Park on a June night, do not look for the center of the light. It is no longer to be found in any one place. It has scattered across the surface of things, and reveals itself only as a feeling that the space remembers more than it can explain — which is, I confess, the most Wildean of all the forms of immortality known to me.
By the southeastern gate of Central Park there stood a Lamppost. He was neither the tallest nor the newest in the park — far from it; but at his summit rested five crystal globes, which, you must agree, is a rarity no other lamppost in the world can boast, however many city councils may have voted for its installation.
"He is undeniably handsome," the Weathervane on the roof of the neighboring gazebo would remark of an evening, turning this way and that so as to be seen from her most flattering angle, "but really, what use has one lamppost for five globes? It is rather like wearing five hearts in a single body — most impractical, and, I fear, in rather poor taste."
"He burns brighter than any other in the park," observed the Nightingale, passing overhead, though so softly that no one heard him except, of course, the Lamppost himself, who heard perfectly well everything said within the reach of his golden light, and was far too well bred to answer remarks made about his own appearance.
The truth of the matter is that the Lamppost had a secret, known neither to the Weathervane nor even to the Nightingale, in spite of that bird's celebrated perceptiveness in matters of the heart. Every night, when the park emptied, the Lamppost looked up through the elm branches at the sky — to the place where, among a thousand stars, one burned brighter than the rest, with that particular tenderness peculiar to stars who believe themselves unobserved.
"She is winking at me," the Lamppost would tell himself, with the modest self-satisfaction pardonable in anyone who has been in love for a hundred years running without once having had occasion to declare it. "Though it is, in all likelihood, merely a trembling of the atmosphere, of the sort the Street Thermometer is fond of explaining to me. But I prefer to think otherwise. After all, what is the use of being a lamppost, if one cannot occasionally be beautifully mistaken?"
So passed his evenings — in lending light to the trysts of others, and in silent confessions addressed to a sky which, in the manner of all skies, was in no particular hurry to reply.
The twenty-first of June arrived — the shortest night of the year — and the Lamppost, without quite knowing why, lit himself earlier than his appointed hour.
"How strange," the Weathervane observed. "You are usually so punctual."
"Lampposts, like people, have their name-days," he replied. "Today, I believe, is mine."
He did not tell her how he knew this so precisely. There are things one feels through the whole of one's cast-iron base, and to explain them aloud would be as pointless as explaining to a weathervane why the wind blows.
They appeared at dusk — a girl with eyes in which the reflections of not-yet-lit lamps were already trembling, and a young man carrying on his shoulders the weight of words he could not quite bring himself to say aloud, as though they were family silver, and he not smartly enough dressed for such an occasion.
"Look," she said, tipping her head back, "the lampposts. Like shards of the sun, forgotten on the earth."
"Or stars, fallen from the sky," he answered, and in his voice the Lamppost detected not so much tenderness as doubt — not, of course, doubt of her, but of himself, a condition common to nearly all young men in such circumstances, and one the Lamppost felt ought to be forgiven them in advance, wholesale, without inquiry into individual cases.
He turned up his light — first one globe, then another — and with every moment understood more clearly what, presumably, every lamppost in love comes to understand: that light given away is sweeter to keep than light hoarded for oneself alone.
They danced until morning — with no music, only the rustle of leaves — and the Lamppost was at once their stage, their audience, and their orchestra, which, I confess, is a great many roles for one lamppost to fill simultaneously, though he complained of none of them.
"We won't part before dawn," she whispered.
"Not while the lamps still burn," he answered, and the Lamppost, hearing this, felt that particular sensation known to anyone whose name suddenly finds itself a synonym for someone else's happiness — a sensation both flattering and faintly alarming, for synonyms, as everyone knows, are obliged to live up to one another.
By the blue of the coming dawn they had gone still at his foot. The girl lowered her lashes — they trembled like the wings of a captured butterfly, which, we may note in passing, is an enviable fate for no butterfly whatsoever, captured or otherwise. The young man was silent, and that silence was heavier than all the words he had never managed to say. He looked at the Lamppost with the wordless entreaty of a man who wishes to believe, but does not dare believe himself.
"Give me a sign," said that look. "I must know for certain."
And then all five of the Lamppost's voices spoke at once — the Way, the Warmth, the Love, the Memory, and the Eternity — and these voices, conferring among themselves with the haste peculiar to those who have already made up their minds and are merely searching for a respectable justification, arrived at a single conclusion: the sign must be unconditional. Half-light is the refuge of the timid. And the Lamppost, whatever the Weathervane might say of him, was not timid.
"I shall give everything," he said to himself. "Light is not a store to be husbanded. Light is what one becomes only when one lets it go entirely, down to the last atom of glass."
He did not say this aloud. Lampposts, as a rule, prefer to announce their greatest decisions after the fact — as, I suspect, do a great many people, and this is the one point on which lampposts and people are in perfect agreement.
He gathered into himself everything he had stored over a century: the light of a hundred confessions, a hundred kisses, a hundred small secrets, entrusted to him under cover of darkness by those who assumed a lamppost capable only of illuminating, never of remembering. His five flames merged into one — and he gave it all away at once, entirely, without remainder, in a short white discharge that flared brighter than propriety permits any self-respecting source of illumination.
The globes burst without a sound, showering down in a crystal rain — the way, perhaps, things weep for themselves when they have nothing left to weep with. The cast iron went dark.
The young man saw that flash reflected in her eyes — and understood, without proof, for some truths, frankly, have no need of it.
"It's you," he said. "It was always you."
They kissed as the glass dust settled, and the Lamppost, fading, heard, as his very last sound, her laughter through tears — a note he judged a fitting finale for a lamppost of his reputation, and his reputation, I venture to say, had been impeccable.
The departure of a lamppost is not darkness at all, whatever the pessimistically inclined Thermometers may claim. It is only the cessation of the particular form in which light had grown accustomed to thinking of itself as a lamppost.
For a moment the world went entirely white — without edge, without depth — and then the light departed. Not upward, as everything we are accustomed to calling a soul is said to rise, and not outward, as water runs from a cracked jug, but the way tension leaves a severed wire: without direction, without any trace of motion, without the slightest regard for the dramaturgy of the occasion.
Above, among a thousand indifferent stars, one suddenly flared a little brighter than usual — and then, seemingly embarrassed by its own candor, resumed its ordinary flicker as though nothing had happened. We shall not claim that this was the very same star. But neither shall we claim the contrary: there are, after all, stories whose ending is better left to the sky than to the storyteller.
In the morning the parkkeeper stood a long while beside the blackened iron, without touching it.
"Ruined," he said at last, without any particular regret, for parkkeepers, as a rule, are not disposed to sentiment at the start of a working day.
The lamppost was never replaced. Not by any decision, and not out of memory — simply, one of the reasons for lighting that particular corner had, quite unnoticeably, ceased to seem necessary, and inconspicuous reasons, as is well known, are the least likely of all to find their way into a city budget.
"A sad end," the Weathervane remarked, addressing herself now to the Nightingale, since her other companion had fallen silent forever. "To give oneself away entirely, without remainder, for two people scarcely acquainted with one another — that, you must agree, is the very height of imprudence."
"Agreed," replied the Nightingale. "The very height. What a pity there are so few of us left who are imprudent."
And the two of them walked on now through the city, hand in hand, offering neither confirmation nor denial of what had happened that night, pausing now and then, quite without agreeing to, in the particular places where the light behaved just slightly differently than everywhere else.
Some say that many years later, when the whole affair had become a piece of family legend, retold to grandchildren by tellers who did not entirely believe it themselves, an Angel, flying over the city on business Angels are not in the habit of reporting, once came down into Central Park and gathered up from the ground two things: a shard of crystal globe, and a dried elm leaf, from beneath which those two had stood on that short night.
"Bring me the two most precious things from that city," the One who had sent him is said, by the legend, to have asked.
And the Angel brought exactly these two — the shard and the leaf — for, as anyone with even the slightest understanding of such matters knows, the most precious things in a city are rarely kept in bank vaults. More often they lie scattered along a park path, and it takes an angel to notice them in time.
Should you happen to walk through Central Park on a June night, do not look for the center of the light. It is no longer to be found in any one place. It has scattered across the surface of things, and reveals itself only as a feeling that the space remembers more than it can explain — which is, I confess, the most Wildean of all the forms of immortality known to me.
Novels
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