I’m blaming my fellow columnist Kate Blincoe. Recently, he extolled the pleasure of an ultraviolet flashlight, thanks to which I bought one, became addicted, and now see the world completely new.
Ultraviolet light is a high-energy, short-wavelength light that is normally undetectable to the human eye, but is also harmful to many forms of life. At the end of the Proterozoic, most life flourished only under the sea, until the UV-protective layer, the ozone layer, formed 15 to 30 kilometers above our heads.
If an ultraviolet flashlight is pointed at plants and animals after dark, their photons interact at the molecular level, causing a lower energy light to be emitted again, but in the visible spectrum. In essence, the subjects fluoresce and the beam turns everyday parts of our world into baroque psychedelia. A sandstone wall, for example, becomes a matte red sheet (algae) dotted with bright lime (any lichen stain).
Photography requires a pairing of before and after images so that any viewer can appreciate the resulting transformations. Most miraculous is what happens to the golden saxifrage, a plant that covers the shores of Lightwood with glowing grasses of pure green, until the torch turns them into puddles of carmine confetti scattered across the night floor.
My favorite thing is to look at the mosses in an old quarry where there is a patch of spiky swamp moss. By day, it is a magnificent cushion of the freshest green, with the central flower of each plant fringed by seven or eight side shoots that hang around the head like enormous vegetative spiders. View it under UV rays and the entire organism becomes a dancing group of lavender, aquamarine, turquoise, violet or pink.
Upon receiving these images, a friend asked: “But what does it mean?” Perhaps Henry David Thoreau put it best when he witnessed a rainbow in December 1855. He thought that what we see is only a fraction of the world’s possible radiance and that every drop of rain in a storm has the potential to be a rainbow itself. same. “Beauty and music,” Thoreau wrote, “are not mere traits and exceptions. They are the rule and character (of life).” An ultraviolet flashlight simply gives you new angles on the same old holy miracle.