The Unknowable

On the bus to work about a week ago, I was thinking about what I had written about the cloud of witnesses in the book of Hebrews and suddenly I recalled my experience of a cloud in an exhibition.

In 2007 I went to Antony Gormley’s solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. There was an installation work called Blind Light. It was a huge glass cube placed in the centre of one of the galleries. On one of the walls beside the installation, there were photographs of foggy scenes, landscapes swathed in mist. Some of these were taken in woods, in the hills, in mountain areas; some of them were of houses with gardens, or anonymous-looking roads and garden sheds.

The viewer can enter the glass cube, as large as two conjoined living rooms of a HDB 3-room flat, through a narrow doorway. The walls of the cube are made of glass, but the viewers outside cannot see the people inside. There were small nozzles inside the cube that filled it with mist. The cube was also drenched in a brilliant white light.

Entering the cube, I was immediately seized by fear and the desire to make an about turn and quickly get out. I could not see anything, not even my hand held out in front of me until I brought it right up to my face, close enough to touch my nose. In fact, I did exit the cube after taking about seven or eight steps inside. I walked along its perimeter, putting my palm on to the glass at one point when I saw someone else’s hand on the other side. I followed this person’s hand for a bit and after that I went to look at the photographs on the wall. I was buying time, trying to work out if I really needed to go back inside the cube.

Eventually I did go back inside. I walked very slowly. When I was deep inside, I stretched out my arms. I did not touch anything. I remember thinking, this is like being inside a cloud. Later on I read a scholar’s description of it in one of the essays in the catalogue as a “captured cloud”. Inside the cube I could hear some talking, one or two nervous laughs, but mostly, there was silence. The air felt very moist. All the time I was worried that I would walk into someone or that someone would walk into me. Even though I knew the ground was level, I could not help but worry that I might trip and twist my ankle.

Is this what it is like to be disembodied? I wondered. Is this what it feels like to be in heaven? To be in a place that contains other persons, to be bound together in a place but to not see their individual faces and bodies? To be in this place that is filled with so much light that one cannot see?

In an interview in the catalogue Gormley says that for him the most important thing about the work is suggested by the title: “the idea that light itself can be the opposite of illuminating.” He was also interested in undermining assumptions of a room or architecture as being the “location of security and certainty”, that it is “supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty.” He created a room that was filled with light, a room with solid glass walls, but it would provide an experience of disorientation, an experience of “losing the bonds of certainty about where or who we are.”

I did not think about architecture whilst I was inside the cube. But I did think about losing my body, or to be more exact, losing my sense of where my body starts and where it ends. So much of what we know is determined by how we experience the world around us as sentient bodies. What is it like to be bereft of the body? How does the soul cope with its impending separation from the body when the body is dying? 

(to be continued)