On Lighthouses

Yaquina Head

We arrive in Portland, Oregon, to stay with Willey, my aunt’s boyfriend. In his youth Willey had been an EMT and a member of the Black Panthers; he had a daily routine that included a full breakfast of ham, eggs, wheat semolina, and toast, reading the newspaper, and smoking two or three cigarettes on the balcony of his home.

I don’t smoke, but during my first day in that house I spent a long time on the balcony watching the river with its boats and seabirds. I guess that’s equivalent to smoking. The following day we took the highway south. My cousin—two meters tall—and I were squashed in the back seat of the red pickup Willey referred to as my baby. We spent a night at the snow-capped hotel where The Shining was filmed, en route to the crater of an extinct volcano that is now a sapphire-blue lake.

Two years later, when I returned to Portland with my mother and aunt, Willey drove us to the coastal city of Newport. It was September. In that same pickup, we traveled along a wooded highway, stopping at a diner halfway to our destination to eat cupcakes made from locally grown marionberries, served by a couple of kindly old men. I remember that I had my headphones on, and was looking out the window at the forests of bare trees with trunks that were first dark, then white, and finally red. In Newport, I felt I’d never before seen an ocean so gray, so cold. Even in summer, the whole city is shrouded in mist, and you have to search for your hotel among the clouds.

*

The great majority of my collections have been failures. When I was small, I used to admire those children who had all the Knights of the Zodiac figures, or the series of collectable toys that came in bags of potato chips. I tried my very best, but never achieved that form of prowess. Two collections that became quite extensive though were my gemstones (I now know they were all varieties of quartz) and my marbles. I was fascinated by the colors and texture of those glass spheres, which is possibly the reason for my choice. My collection of dried flowers also prospered: I still have it, specimens from the gardens that have been part of my life.

My largest collection is of books. As a child I used to read them the day they were bought. Up until adolescence, every book I owned had been read. Then came the moment when I had more books than time to peruse them, and I soon realized that I’d probably never read everything on my shelves (there is a Japanese word for it: tsundoku). I’m now able to divide that collection into two categories: the books themselves, as objects, and the reading experiences, which can also be coveted and amassed.

*

Even before I ever saw a lighthouse, I dreamed of one; it was abandoned, far from the coast. At the foot of the building was a garden and the house where I lived with my parents. In my childhood dream, I asked my father what he’d found during his exploration of the crumbling rooms. Just the skeleton of a bat, he said. I insistently asked for reassurance that the animal was dead, but he only muttered to himself, like someone in the trailer for a horror movie: Dead, but alive. The tip of the tower was visible: a dark garret where the bony hands of the bat’s skeleton stirred a cauldron containing a potion. The camera then zoomed in on the skull, which in a squeaky voice said, I’m brewing my revenge on the person who killed me.

*

In Moby Dick, Melville says that human beings share a natural attraction to water. At one point Ishmael offers an explanation for why people fritter away their savings and bonuses to visit such places as that sapphire-blue lake in the crater of a volcano, or a waterfall so high that the liquid evaporates before reaching the rocks, or a series of pools in the middle of the desert that are home to tiny prehistoric beings, or a natural well deep in the jungle. He explains the amazement we feel at the sight of the color now called International Klein Blue, or the turquoise of the Bacalar lagoon in Quintana Roo. Ishmael suggests that all men’s roads lead to water, and the reason why no one can resist its attraction is also why Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. […] It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

That reflective power of water made Joseph Brodsky believe that if the Spirit of God moved upon its surface, the water would surely reproduce it. God, for Brodsky, is time; water is, therefore, the image of time, and a wave crashing on the shoreline at midnight is a piece of time emerging from the water. If this is true, observing the surface of the ocean from an airplane is equivalent to witnessing the restless face of time.

No civilization bordering the sea, with lakes, or with important rivers has been immune to the need to navigate those waters, to explore the furthest reaches of the oceans, to transport or be carried on the waves. And yet mariners appear as vulnerable aboard their ships as penguins do ashore. Although familiar and necessary, water is also unknowable and menacing. Despite the fact that it makes up the greater part of the human body, it can also take human life.

The earliest lighthouses are the product of a collective effort to signal dangerous areas or the proximity of coastlines and ports. Shipwrecks may be less common nowadays, but for a long time they were everyday occurrences: 832 in English waters in the year 1853, according to Jean Delumeau; the author quotes Rabelais’s character Pantagruel confessing to his fear of the sea and his terror of death by shipwreck. And citing Homer, Pantagruel adds, it is a grievous, abhorrent and unnatural thing to perish at sea.

The Hells of many mythologies can only be reached by boat, they are surrounded by water because, as Delumeau notes, in antiquity the ocean was associated in the collective mind with the most awful images of pain and death, the night, the abyss.

The Maya used to build monuments lit from within to signal places where it was possible or perilous to bring a boat ashore. The Celts used beacons to send messages along the coast. But it was the Greeks who gave these lights the name Pharos.

Fire indicating the sea’s end. In The Iliad, Homer speaks of burning towers with bonfires that had to be constantly fed, like the sacred flames in temples dedicated to Apollo. He compares the lustrous glow rising to the heavens from Achilles’s shield to the blazing fire from a lonely upland farm seen by sailors whom a storm drives over the plentiful deep far from their friends.

Apparently during the Trojan Wars there was a lighthouse at the entrance to the Hellespont, and another in the Bosphorus strait. Suetonius says there was once a lighthouse on the island of Capri, and Pliny the Elder mentions others in Ostia and Ravenna (he also warns of the danger of mistaking them for stars). Herodian refers to towers in ports which by the light of their fires bring to safety ships in distress at night. These are the precursors of the lighthouse whose name passed into so many Romance languages: faro in Spanish and Italian; phare in French; farol in Portuguese; far in Romanian. Precursors of the Pharos of Alexandria. On the island of Pharos, visited by Odysseus, which has a good harbor from which vessels can get out into open sea, there was a huge guardian lighthouse that Ptolemy I, the Macedonian general of Alexander the Great, ordered to be constructed in the third century BC.

It was a tower of some 135 meters, constructed from pale stone, with a glass dome crowned with flames and a statue of the god Helios. It’s said that its architect, Sostratus of Cnidus, chiseled his name in the stone, plastered over it, and then inscribed that of Ptolemy on top, knowing that the plaster would eventually crumble so it would be his name that survived. The flame was tended day and night, and ships’ crews could see it fifty-six kilometers offshore. It remained in existence longer than the Hanging Gardens, longer than almost any other of the seven wonders, until, in 1323, an earthquake brought it down. But Alexandria will always be the city of the lighthouse, a huge ghost set down in history.

The same streets and squares will burn in my imagination as the Pharos burns in history, says the