William Sylvester

Explaining the Dark

Now I will explain opponent colors.

Opponent colors are called opponent

because they don't get along with each other.

Color a blank sheet of paper with a bright red circle

(or square or triangle)

peer steadily for a minute

then look at a blank piece of paper.

You will see a

GREEN

circle, the opposite color.

The circle remains the same

but the color flips

Stare at a green circle

then a red circle will appear on blank paper.

Notice that circleness squareness triangleness

are invariant under transformations of

flipping colors.

Have you ever seen a reddish green or a

greenish red?

Our body recoils from the opponent color.

How do we get insight?

By going into the dark.

Have you ever thought of going into a closet

and what that means?

What happens as you close the door?

It grows dark

It grows very dark

Why

does it grow dark?

The colors are all outside

If you leave the door open

a teency weency crack

you can see how all outside colors 

have turned gray

(your eyes have shifted

from rods to cones.

Or cones to rods

Whatever.

Forget holistic thinking.

Enjoy binary reality.)

Red and yellow turn gray,

hues have drained away

All cats are gray in the dark

as Benjamin Franklin so astutely observed

(he meant of course

doing you know what with an old woman

not a nice thing to say

Benjamin Franklin was not nice

but he was astute

all cats

are gray in the dark)

red and yellow both turn gray in the dark

but the intensities shift

the Purkinjes shift

outside red more intense than yellow

turns to a less intense gray in the dark

than yellow's fierce gray density.

That's the Purkinjes shift.

During moments of supreme physical delight

(you know what I mean)

what happens?

what really happens?

You close your eyes that's what happens.

You're in the dark.

If you don't close your eyes

you're not concentrating.

Concentration usually comes by

peeling back our eyes.

(The mind-body problem shines in the dark.)

You may come out into politics, but

no matter how you do it

or with whom

every human has a closet

locking up an unacknowledged heterosexual

who wants to roar: "More! More! More!"

In the dark, with your eyes closed

You don't see the color yellow

you feel the fierce dense gray

yearning never satisfied

far more powerful

than all those bloody red thoughts

driving you mad in day light.

There now,

You never knew

the Purkinjes shift

explains Mimnermus.

Don't laugh as if you knew it all along.

You don't even know Mimnermus

Tis de bios ti perpnon ater xruses aphrodite

tethnaien

Tethanaien: third person perfect optative

from thnesko

meaning I am dying

now you know.

--William Sylvester

fr. War and Lechery

[Ashland, Ohio: Ashland Poetry Press, 1995]

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