What form would an interrogation of light assume? Perhaps it would assume the residual shape of an encounter, such as in this particular sequence of images - Primum Lumen.
To an encounter with light, I would like to call coincidence. That is to say, an event, composed of two incidences/incidents, occupying the same portion of space and occurring at the same time: on the one side, the incidence (or incision) of light, on the other, the incidence of the perception of light. I ignore whether outside a metaphysical field, or a domain that would be conditioned by a certain idea of transcendence, we wouldn’t simply be constrained to silence, in the awareness of the hubris of attempting a deeper, and necessarily more forced, description of such event called co-incidence. The answer would very likely be yes.
At the same time, coincidence seems to be, precisely, the right moment to abdicate from the question regarding immediate or ultimate causes to merely interrogate the instant and discover, in the process, the naked scarcity of a precarious vocabulary and grammar in their almost strictly personal making, use and limitations at the edge of the incommunicable, starting right away with the very communication with oneself.
This would be the first rule of the game which very few indeed dare play with attention ⁱ.

The second rule, almost a rule of citizenship, says: to remain within the coincidence that coincides is to abandon oneself, and thereby to necessarily leave aside the construction of theological and/or teleological systems whose ultimate function is the domestication of coincidence and/or its demonising as chance. In order to fight ‘chance’, belief systems have produced the concept of miracle, which serves the purpose of a renegotiation with mystery, as natura, transforming it into the sacrum, the secret. In a sacralised world there is no co –incidence, there are only administrative procedures between humans and humans, between humans and gods, between humans and nature. Another curious aspect can also be derived from this, another automatism within language and art itself (establishing the notion of pure art or of pure artistic taste), i.e., the frequent association of ‘light’ and ‘miracle’, something that would merely amount to bad poetry, were it not for the more profound implications that it had and indeed does have in the conditioning of ethical praxis and spiritual experience, which are held hostage of the belief in a transcendent, alien, ultimate, ineluctable will.

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So, for the time being, we can see these two vectors, these two cones – light and its perception – whose vertices touch each other in one sole point, measurable only up to a certain scale before or beyond which their existence becomes tangible in the occurring of a fusion, in which the encounter with light metabolises, so to speak, when a subject gives it more than a mere glance-like attention.
The same could be said of the encounter of extreme attention with any object, for that unique, exclusive point is where the human and the non-human are at play in mutual presence.
With its frequencies, most of which we cannot perceive, light surrounds us and penetrates us. ⁱⁱ. There is even a light that the brain seems to exude in deep darkness, and from within blindness itself.

We move around the democratic and habitual light of everyday, barely aware of awareness, creatures of pure distraction; untouchable in distraction; impervious to all that is not the conventional stimulus; prisoners of a lexicon of intensities and pleasures, the authorship of which lies beyond us.
Primum Lumen is a sequence made with so little that the verb ‘to make’ has but a spectral presence. This work is an essay on the contra-diction of the sensorial abundance, which increasingly seems to dictate the laws that make the reactions within a human heart.
A whole rhetoric and a whole policy of sensations blind civilization. Paradoxically, we witness an involution in which the human in its full extension, seems to be returning to a merely reactive state. In more and more instances we participate in a reactionary civilisation, from which the value of coincidence is absent.
And one should insist that the transformative, trans-figurative power of coinciding resides, perhaps, in a certain abandonment. In the embracing of possibilities, in the succumbing to the embrace of possibilities which are already there, but also to the embrace of those which announce themselves in our horizon of openness, especially from the point of view of their interconnectedness as a chain rather than from that of their atomisation ⁱⁱⁱ.
The quietism that informs gestures such as these – keepers of a vanishing presence, as it arises and passes away, in its passage into memory- is eminently active, the gestures of someone escorting his own walking during a few steps. And nothing else.

“ I think that the beautiful is not a substance in itself, but just a drawing of shadows, a play of light and darkness […] beauty looses its existence if we rob it of the effects of shadow,” wrote Junichiro Tanizaki in his 1933 work In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows), as he witnessed the rape of the traditional domestic interiors, with their corners and objects, by the growing use of electricity.
The third rule of the game of attention (to light) is the shadows.
In this sequence of photographs, the two produce webs, stains, outlines, textures, irruptions, maps, and lines.
In a morning interior, the first light is the first shadow, chasing away the grainy, hesitating obscurity of the night to consummate the agon of chiaroscuro, of the veiling and unveiling whose rhythm and frequency induce an added intimacy with the flow of time that we populate and that depopulates us.
This observing and recording of the undulation of light-shadow brings to mind also the intuition of Marcel Duchamp (1937) regarding that which he called the infra-mince, the infra-fine or infra-light, a category of states of things at the limit of the tangible, albeit not entirely unsubstantial: molecules of the taste of a mouth left in the smoke of a cigarette; the alteration of volume in a new shirt only worn once, the heat remains of a kiss, etc. Also in Primum Lumen there is something at the limit of tangibility: the supposition of the surfaces upon which forms hover, the drapery of light temperatures, the different speeds and thicknesses of luminescence, the alliance of these aspects with a peculiar almost audible element of these images, as if they were signed by an aural vibration.
Thus, the primordial light, Primum Lumen, which designates this sequence seems to lie there where ‘primordial‘ has the meaning of perpetual passage rather than of fixed point, there where it is encounter and labour rather than decree. There where it is certainly an enigma but not a secret mandate. The enigma of coincidence, often defined as a remarkable concurrence of events without apparent causal connexion...

Light seeks its path until something obstructs it, and that is already a form of extinction. A man walks in his path as long as nothing obstructs his way. When they find incidence, something is set alight, and they both burn.

Rui Cascais Parada
Bangkok, April 2008

ⁱ “In thinking all things become solitary and slow,” Martin Heidegger writes in a brief poem of 1947. These two adjectives could be applied to the game of attention so as to describe the sustained tension it requires and the contemplation that constitutes it surest source and foundation.

ⁱⁱ The human eye detects only a minute portion of the spectrum of electromagnetic waves, the portion with wavelengths located between 0.00038 millimetres and 0.00075 millimetres. That section is known as visible light, and in it is possible to distinguish around ten million variations. The perception of the totality of the visible light spectrum in its whole is called ‘white’. In the absence of certain wavelengths the eyes perceive the spectrum as being coloured. When we see the colour red, in fact we are seeing the wavelength of around 0.0007 millimetres of the electromagnetic spectrum in a situation where the remaining wavelengths are absent.

ⁱⁱⁱ It would perhaps be interesting here in what regards the ideas of interconnected chain and of atomised fragment used in the above text, to note their parallelism in terms of theory of movement and theory of cinema in a comparison and definite difference between Western and Eastern thought. While from the point of view of Henri Bergson, for instance, the movement in the film is an illusion created by the speed of succeeding photograms within a certain unit of time and the individual photograms are real, from the point of view of Buddhist phenomenology (particularly in the Abidhamma) the ‘film’ is real, but its individual parts (its ‘atoms’, or photograms), not being endowed with own self (anatman, in Sanskrit: without soul, without self ), are illusory . Which is to say that the current or interdependent chain of life is real – disproving the common dictum that for Eastern thought the “world is but an illusion” – and the illusion is in not understanding that it is simultaneously empty as it is void of a constituting essence which is stable or eternal and supposedly placed outside the reach of the senses, emanating from an invisible and founding world.