The earth spins on its axis and shows a new face to the sun’s light. Indiscriminately, the sun sending its electromagnetic radiation into the universe, illuminates this face with all its wrinkles to see which nocturnal beings have signed their name. To read the etchings of this past night on this new day. Which litter born, which leaf consumed. Which cactus flower, the day before a bud of soapy promise, now complete in its midnight liaison. A moth passes love notes to its neighbour.
a moth passes love notes to its neighbour
Coral reef fish sing a prismatic dawn chorus in spectral radiance. Giant clams rimmed with unblinking eyes yawn towards the light so their algal guests might bask. Below, leagues of tumbling waves and coursing flows wipe clean the reds so that little fish no longer see them. In this dark place predators make their own crimson search lights in draconian invisibilia. To their prey these deep-sea dragons are the stuff of myth. Unseen and unreal until the moment of death in dark embrace.
Like those silvery small fry, our apparitions of the world are formed from what reflections and subtractions of light our eyes can sense. To us the ultraviolet tessellated conversation between insect and flower is silence. To them a clamorous beckoning call. Baby birds fill their mouths with infrared and we remain oblivious. They may grow to see the earth’s magnetic field, while the swift satellite eyes of mantis shrimp rove arrays in less time than a blink.
baby birds fill their mouths with infrared
Meanwhile the subterranean happenings of fossorial life remain uninterrupted by this new brightness. Circadian rhythms of blind creatures follow their own score. Their eyes regressed to sensorial beginnings or their noses tactile eyes. They have escaped the rigid cycles of planets by burying themselves deep within one.
Seeing is to grasp at hints from the world and paint visions in our mind.
The hallucinations we assent to.