About the Winter Olympics and the Northern Lights

Still recovering from the various disappointments of the Winter Olympics, above all that the American hockey player who I thought operated under the Zola-esque nom de glace “J’accuse” was in fact called Jack Hughes. Then I follow the all-conquering Norwegians back to their homeland, although I travel even further north, inside the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights.

And there I met further disappointment. I was well aware that the garish colours in the adverts were a photographic mirage but when I looked to the skies I saw the extraordinary, looping interactions of solar winds in strict monochrome. As others aah-ed and ooh-ed over a green one and a pink one, I started to wonder whether the whole thing was a practical joke. Was it down to me to suggest that this icon of meteorological spookiness was a naked fraud? But apparently it’s not unknown for some people to be unable to see the colours. It’s not you, Aurora Borealis, it’s me. But when I take a photo, it’s as pretty as, well, a picture. What I can’t capture is the black-and-white that I see. Do my eyes, not to mention technology, deceive me? Well, yes, of course they do.

And inevitably I turn to Baudrillard, who would no doubt have insisted that the image, the simulacrum (which most people see) has superseded the thing that is only seen by people who are daft enough to take a cable car up a mountain in Tromsø in sub-zero temperatures and which is only a different kind of mirage anyway. And I think back to the exertions of J’accuse and his fellow Olympians and remember that so many things (curling for example) just look better on a screen.