LIGHT FANTASTIC LIBRETTO
1. Hymn to Light
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.
-- William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, I:1,77
2. Sundown Lights
This is the hour for strange effects in light and shade – enough to make a colorist go delirious – long spokes of molten silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in there brightest, tenderest green), each leaf and branch of endless foliage a lit-up miracle, then lying all prone on the youthful-ripe, interminable grass, and giving the blades not only aggregate but individual splendor, in ways unknown at any other hour. One broad splash lies on the water, with many a rippling twinkle, offset by the rapidly deepening black-green, murky-transparent shadows behind, and at intervals all along the banks. (Ah!) These, with great shafts of horizontal fire thrown among the trees and along the grass as the sun lowers, give effects more and more peculiar, more and more superb, unearthly, rich and dazzling.
-- Walt Whitman, Specimen Days
3. First Meditation: Nightfall (Instrumental)
4. Night’s Paddock
When we meet at night,
this is what I feel:
you are moving under dark trees.
I am those trees, those shapes.
You’re the stars moving down the plain.
You’re the stars moving behind
the motion of that move,
the inwardness of mood
by which stars and night modify
their space inside a moving mark,
a restless mark, a figure of moons,
of present and absent moons,
of darkness shining on the water tank,
of dark motion at the edge
of dark matter, holding it, cupping it
as if it’s water-glitter in the mind
or a single thread of memory
moving like a herd across the dust:
my own night within me,
miles of fences under the night hovering.
-- Martin Harrison, The Kangaroo Farm
5. Sun of the Sleepless
Sun of the sleepless! Melancholy star!
Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,
That show’st the darkness thou canst not dispel,
How like thou art to joy remember’d well!
So gleams the past, the light of other days,
Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays;
A night-beam sorrow watcheth to behold,
Distinct, but distant – clear – but, oh how cold!
-- Gordon, Lord Byron
6. Second Meditation: the Light at Midnight (Instrumental)
7. Sunrise Among the Asmat
The sun sets now between two thin arms of land that
reach around Flamingo Bay. It glows blood red while
rays of light like spotlights waver. A canoe moves
endlessly east to west, three men naked, standing there,
paddling, a woman seated in the middle. Color changes,
brilliant scarlet in reflection, caught in a timeless
moment. I float on cloud and find my own way into
eternity.
-- Tobias Schneebaum
7. Final Hymn to Light
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.
-- William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, I:1,77
Martin Harrison’s poem is used by kind permission of Paper Bark Press, PO Box 59, Brooklyn, New South Wales, 2083, Australia. Tobias Schneebaum’s poem was written expressly for this work.