Light

Tried to change a lamp. Last time I called the electrician and the man from Bulgaria – a former philosophy professor judging from his look – did it in less than a minute. This was kind of a challenge.

Many years ago I used to do it myself too. With those now all but forgotten incandescent bulbs this was a fairly unpretentious operation. Once a year I’d move a chair, retrieve a bulb from the secret stash of three or four and change the dead one. That was it usually, if you don’t count the very first time I did it and put my pliers into the lamp-socket just to check if it was under voltage or not. With a quiet sound the pliers exploded in my hand. I still have a little scar, a white dot on my chin from a little drop of molten metal which landed there. But apart from that profound experience it would later generally take five minutes on average and set me back something of a pound a year or less.

Armed with these sweet recollections I started with this new one, mounted in the fake ceiling. In a minute the tips of my fingers were almost chopped off, the lamp mount was sitting in the ceiling the wrong way and some considerable part of the ceiling around the hole came crashing down on my head. I didn’t know it was so feeble. The house I live in was built of red bricks and sandstone many generations ago and it doesn’t look delicate or infirm at all but I suppose that any recent additions to this formidable edifice were made of dust and saliva. And I didn’t change the wretched thing. No way.

Now, time and again I do try to change lamps around the place I live. I have two types of them: those purplish little round monsters with two little pedicles on the back and the tubes.

The tubes are remarkable. You can only handle them with a piece of cloth, no less. You can’t touch the damned thing with your bare hand. They break when you try to put them into their places. The electrician whispers some more inaccessible passages from Barthes or Adorno, or Wittgenstein in Bulgarian under his nose when he does this. The packages promise you something akin to the life eternal, vaguely, if you don’t use them more than two and a half hours a day, this in a very small print on the back. They go three times a year on average, they cost a fortune and you can only buy them online.

I think I understand the politics of this ordeal. People print a lot of money to finance their ridiculous lifestyles. They need this money to circulate. People also need light. What’s the better way to collect some revenue than to restrict their own access to some absolute basics of their lives, especially if you do it in the name of humanity? In the name of humanity I now have six spotlights in the place of one lamp. In the name of humanity my wiring smells funny and my switches blow once in a while from all the power I use.

We invest in some huge overhaul of the entire industry and it pays back all those trillions we add every year to the global money stock. As we need all those revenues more and more desperately with every coming year we have no time for such niceties as natural development, inventions, experiments, competitive market and so on. We just push what we have at hand and hope that all those lamps emitting ghastly futuristic light heavily tinted with the shades of violet or green will get better with time. They either will or we stop noticing and adjust to the change, as we always do. I mean, if we survived the last century what this little nuisance can do to us?