Startled by Existence

Ode to the eye  3 /90

Patterned on the backmost curvature of eye,

The great Retina-Dome--Rod and Cone—

Inner-Cup Coliseum

captures the illumed world

and decodes with the aid

of some many million

R & C sense-cell minicams.

 

Do you remember rod and cone cells?

Bio 101 Refresher:

Consider your eye in form

A lollipop, with

lash attached and leering from the bone

like the part of a clam which shows,

between the parted shells:

Stereo tadpoles

bulbous in the skull;

tails streaming backward

at your brain …

Consider your eye, this time within:

Mini-twins

of the Houston Astrodome.

(This works best while lying on your back)

The spanning bubble roof with the skylight hole

corresponds to your iris,

The coliseum wrap with arena base –

your retina.

Billy Graham is preaching.

Every inch of stadium is full.

 The CONE-heads in the center all wear

colored shades and sip a chosen hue:

lemonade, cyan, or red.

The RODgers on the rim

are colorblind and love dim rooms.

Now do you remember Rod and Cone cells?

The greater part of poetry would celebrate

the lesser part of any eye:

A marble-colored muscle, shinning life

and riveting our gaze.

But …

REAL seeing is a corporate vision.

The sum of each myopic rod and cone,

Siphoning a pixel, feeding a mosaic.

Remember –

Your first act of faith

is believing what you see.

Assorted Eye Quotes:

What any eye is, God only knows.

( George McDonald )

Girl with the crystal chip eyes

You look into mine, and affirm to me worth

Sharing an ember through glass.

KJ.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree . When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility

Charles Darwin: the Origin of Species. "Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication".

Note: I read from browsing on the Internet, that Evolutionists show that Creationists distort Darwin’s intent, when they quote the first part of his eye-comment, but fail to include the latter. I don’t want to distort his intent -- or affirm his view, but I will join him in his incredulity.

Yet they say, The Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. Understand ye brutish among the people: and ye fools, when you will you be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear: He that formed the eye, shall He not see? Psalm 94:2

Here is a monument that rises up behind us.

Here the sun falls severing the radiant dome of white,

piercing blue above – and below,

Here is the muffled throb of tourist,

as we move in and out of each other’s blurred snapshots .

Steve Scott—excerpt, Snapshots of the Taj.

 

His eyes are as the doves of the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.

Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes.   (Song of Songs 5:12, 4:9)

( If she could do that with one, just imagine what she’d do with two)

The most amazing component of the camera eye is it's "film" or retina. This light sensitive layer, which lines the back of the eye ball, is thinner than a sheet of Saran-Wrap and is vastly more sensitive to a wider range of light than any man made film. The best man-made film can handle a range of 1,000-to-one. By comparison, the human retina can handle a dynamic range of light of 10 billion-to-one and can sense as little as a single photon of light in the dark! In bright daylight, the retina bleaches out and turns it's "volume control" way down so as not to overload.

The light sensitive cells of the retina are like an extremely complex high gain amplifier. There are over 10 million such cells in the retina and they are packed together with a density of 200,000/mm{2} in the highly sensitive fovea. These photo-receptor cells have a very high rate of metabolism and must completely replace themselves about every 7 days! If you look at a very bright light such as the sun, they immediately burn out but are rapidly replaced in most cases. Because the retina is thinner than the wave length of visible light it is totally transparent.  (OOps I can not now find where I "borrowed this from.)

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eyes be bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness.  Jesus. (Mathew 6:22-23)

I did not know that I was blind until I looked into your eyes… (Lyric fragment, Randy Stonehill)

Brenda, your camera never lies … (lyric fragment, Bill Malone – Vigilanties of Love)

Magnolia:

Ladle bowl unbending

sending scent and catching male

As we, and they

sail pale, like translucent artichokes

thick under bloom’n moon.

In the Dark of the Luna Sea

I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers; down through the firs; now in jet shadows; now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rocks; past the huge ghost of South Dome rising weird through the firs; past the glorious fall of Nevada, the groves of silhouette; through the pines of the valley; beneath the bright crystal sky blazing with stars. All of this mountain wealth in one day! One of the rich ripe days that enlarge one's life; so much of the sun upon one side of it, so much of the moon and stars on the other. John Muir - Steep Trails

Tonight, the moon on the sky is football, tilted for the kick. I try to envision where the sun should be, given the angle of the thing. Sometimes though, it doesn’t make sense. The sun couldn’t be where it seems it should be given the angle of everything. Does the distance create an illusion or distortion? It seems that it should be just under my knees and to the left and casting something of the same blast on the earth; but then, you’d have to be in space to see it.

I had an odd thought tonight. There, in the dark, in the part that hangs between the moon and me, runs a great river of light. Not just a stream, but a racing ocean. In fact, I am looking through that very flood, to see the lit plane of the moon. And this is strange. Looking though light to see light? Does the light clash?

We know that the moon is not a light unto itself. It bounces a cold bone flame, borrowed from the sun and modified on a surface of chalk. But what if the moon weren’t there. That ‘place’ -- apart from stars -- would be dark. And what if we swung the moon closer, into the present dark between us. It might refract even harder. So it hit me. Light is flowing though that space between the moon and I. And not only there, but all about the moon. Up, down, forward, back. Indeed, If we were to litter the night with moons, every one bending light from the dark, our night might shine like the noonday. But how can this be -- the thing that we call night and see as dark is not a “true” dark at all. The thing is a bastion of unseen light!

So what is the night, but the day, just waiting for a hundred moons to reveal it! HA!

How does this work? Invisible light is coursing through space … dark bright light, with hardly a trace of temperature (?) – I don’t know about this. And not just the local part where our moon is … but the whole sun, star, and galaxy-soaked universe. This whole bastion of darkness is so soaked in light that just a speck of dust in the vacuum of space would weed out the light like a blinding atom.

Frankly I don’t get this. I guess it belongs to vacuums – that light can zoom through space and leave no trace till “lit” by some particle of matter. Is light made known, only by the presence of matter? And then what does it do …. to reach my eye? Does something of that same light bounce from the object to my eye? Certainly my eye does not go to the moon to gather the light. So something from the moon comes to me.

Given the phase of the moon, something of that light would have to spray off of the surface at about an 80-degree angle from the full-lit side. The light would then have to cross a channel of raging unseen light and not get swept away in the process.

I know that light is spoken of in terms both particle and wave. Is there a chance that some of those rays collide in the intersection? And just what IS a ray of light. A speeding dot, a single line, or a continuous stream or pulse of particle?

For the moment, I will think of it as a zooming powder, so fine that each part is like a proton. In fact, I think they call it a photon. I understand that light has mass. Not much, but mass nonetheless. And I’m glad that is does. Apart from Spirit, it seems impossible to think of something without the qualities of “substance.”

So what kind of mass does light have? If cotton candy shrivels on my tongue to indicate the size of the source.. Does light compressed equal something like a pea in the Universe? Is all that “powder” at once everywhere and thin, and how does it pass through glass?

(Splice)

On the first Day, God made light. But what does that mean? No eye but His to behold it? Had He been in the dark before? And if there were no thing for that light to strike --- would it look like the light of space – pure black. Or, on the contrary – pure white. Now here is the thing. When I see the sun, what do I see? A kind of zooming photon ocean spitting from the flame that has no meaning in the dark until it collides with some dust or water hanging in our air which burst it to life so that it can be seen – in the bluing of the sky – but even more as it pours into my eye and collides with blood and nerve. . Does some piece of energy direct from the sun really bullet through space into the back of my eye? And if it does, how does my eye contain it? It would seem any thing traveling that fast should blow out the back. … A shotgun of light against a cobweb of retina. And maybe that is why no one can see God. Maybe His light is denser and really would blow out our eyes like an arc-welding fist.

Tulips moon, or bullet train .

Today I think about the strangeness of all that dark space, soaked in light.

What for the moment, if we were to plant tulips on the moon? They (the flower part) would drink in the green and reject the red, just as they do on earth. The full spectrum of color laced light flows over the moon. And this is a shame. A waste. All those buckets of empty dark, those great voids in-between without moons or tulips … nothing but dark to show for all that light. If there had only been tulips, the light might make a colored show!

And then another thought came on it. Our earth speeds through space. While I know, given a larger reference, even the orbital path of the earth is not a static hoop, but wheeling or moving out with relation to still some larger thing … I will think for the moment of that space, just before the advancing earth as fixed.

A fixed cube, just dangling and stuck in space. I don’t know how many miles per second the earth plummets down its path, but then, I think for the second. That space, which had been dark, just before the bow of the speeding planet, smashes with light. For some brief millisecond, that cubed inch of void flashes with the color of thin air then thick, maybe a strobe of gnat wing or pollen, then something like a red hot flash -- as tulips careen into space on the driving edge. Then, a billionth of a second later the inch goes dark and hard as the earth moves through it. Then to heavy, hot, and molten. Out the other side and with the pale of setting day.

Think! That Square inch of space goes from almost zero mass and little energy to one thick spot of activity. The earth is a match, igniting unseen light hiding in the dark, then passing, giving glory to some square of space if even for a blink – and leaving it again silent and maybe forever. How does the inch survive it?

Ugh. A corollary thought. Dark deep pure space. An ocean of unrealized light. And then. SLAM for a

millisecond. A slice of a knife… the stain of a thought, lust and greed careening and igniting the virgin dark with a passing pulse of sin. A square inch of defiled space.

The next day: corollary odd thought number 527.

Today, all day long, millions of little cubes of former dark space passed through my body.

Point of View 4/90

To be sung:

The moon is a flying fingernail

A sail on an unseen boat, A secret code I am sending

The message of which I am lending to you;

The moon is encoded, “Say cheese.”

The moon and its related tidal force are pulling at the waves of my brain, again … HA! … Just kidding. But I’ve read that Lunatic and Lunar share a common root, and I can imagine why. Why, a couple weeks ago, when the moon was waning into watermelon rind, it grinned at me between the passing clouds, luming in and out, in and out. And it came to me how Lewis Carroll got that image for his cat: Cheshire palpitating moon it was! Now the moon is fat again, and I with wife am standing on the riverbank, starring at a U-turn in the sun.

When it first rose of the distant shore it sat buoyant and bright like a cue ball…. No, like a golf-ball on a tee. You see that moon cut a torch stretching to our feet. You would have seen it too if you’d been there … Something like a cobblestone skim milk path…or, an inverted explanation point, or a part in the black hair of the world, or … Dear, I might be taking this a little far, but see, I was standing there, then began to walk downstream and it followed me like a little sister, or a shadow that just wouldn’t leave…. Just like that! I mean the light that hung between the moon and me. Then I asked my wife who was twenty feet away and she claimed that that light stretched straight to her.

How very odd; Could it be that that light which fell into my eyes as flowing ink, the water just before her feet, was really full of light and if a thousand people lined the bank everyone would find the same and then we would conclude that the whole dark mass was truly brilliant after all?

 

And If I were a centipede, a mile long, with an eye above each leg – I’d walk along the river thinking it to be a road of flame.

 

 

Moon 2 excerpt.

The moon is looking down into the canon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow ." John Muir, Steep Trails

How many moons are there:

One,

Or one pair,

For every set of seeing eyes?

Now here is our moon. A pebble stuck in space -- so small by contrast to the omni-ball of sun. It intersects some tiny fraction of the whole and reveals it. Tonight, where the moon is full, it shows the fullness of light that it weeds. (Of course, the moon is always full … just not full to the people on earth.) And what does it do with this light?

It hurls it at us like hose. The moon is a hose, watering our eyes with light. And what does it hurl? Here I’m not quite sure. I guess a kind of tube like circle … a tube so long that it stretches from the moon to me … a kind of speeding cylinder that punches through the portal of my eye. The eye grabs the front end of the oncoming rush, inverts it and makes it small like a movie on the back of my eye. Somewhere on the back of me, caught in the retina net is a little circle punch of light triggering yet another electric pulse that tells my brain about the thing hitting my retina. Of course, as I’ve said before, this is not one circle inside me but two. Could they be the size of a paper punch hole, or are they smaller? Whatever, I have two little circles of light inside me, Upside down and burning like a magnifying glass applied to the back of the curve. (If I stand still long enough will my eye catch on fire?)

So I think of me with these circles inside me, even as much of the rest of my inner eye is at rest. Then I think of these other millions of looking eyes. We all wear little circle burns inside us. We have glowing embers of moon light in us, little fragments of the sun echoed and faint but alive and filling us – I hope – with loveliness. And now here is the thought. Not only we, but the animals too. Do a million cows stand with me in the world? The moon is dotted in the eyes of cows and coyotes, salamanders and fish, flamingoes (if they are awake) – and wolves.

And now. Oh Dear. A fly is looking at the moon. Does he see one --- or a thousand? Is the moon to a fly like a thousand balls --- or does it fall into his mind like a shattered mirror.

So here, I close my eyes and darken the world with my mind until all that I can see are dots of light resting in a billion retinas. Retinas of snakes and eagles, high floating fish, and folks in love resting on their backs. The world tonight is dusted in retina light – something like a map of the states at night by satellite. A fire-fly paste…. Patches specks and faint murmurs of light cover this side of the planet, in every eye where little ricocheted suns reside. The moon is logged in a million eyes. We think of it as large. But it is so much glowing pollen scattered over earth caught in jelly bowls.

5/01

(This poem is not intended to celebrate any misuse of God’s good gift, but rather applaud divine secrecy.)

Tonight

Beneath the vaulted stars

Beneath the arching sheets

Beneath a bridge of bone

The world is being made

Again, and again

And again.

In the beginning

God created light,

And he separated the light

From the dark,

Then called it a day.

And he found

Both the brilliance

And its vanquish

To be good.

God said, “The night is Good.”

Tonight

As a monolithic shadow

Curves 'cross the earth

Like a bowl of partial blindness

Tonight

As beasties creep from their dens

and men enter theirs,

Click the switch and grope

Into the mystery

Tonight

As secret gardens bloom

Underneath the moon

and bridegroom farmers

Plow the virgin soil

Tonight

As mingled wants converge

In beds of wanton lust or love

Conquest or courage,

Dreams of parenthood or status...

Tonight

In the play of hot blood or cold,

Duty or delight,

In the pain of giving

Or having been had …

Tonight

In the sea

That waves

Or cries, like a wounded wolf

Folding us into its arms …

Tonight, in the heat of an ancient beat

Thundering hearts, or the poly-rhythm

That rocks our world as

It rolls, splits --

breaks into new life.

We shut our eyes

As spirit twines with chemistry

Tonight

In a million hidden spaces,

In the wood between the worlds

With all these hidden words

In the dark

The good good dark.

Someday, (maybe it was yesterday)

They will turn the light on mystery

Put it out for all to see

Like a naked running child – with Napalm on her back.

Something we were never meant to see,

In a photo – or a petri dish.

Spread the legs of DNA,

Chart the inner space,

Turn up the floods on the interplay of cells

And see

If the “product of conception”

Measures up.

Does it come

With high IQ,

Or a chance for cancer

Does it come with pedigree, or status

Will it tax the system, or be taxed

Will it match our dishes or display

Our name in ways that we see fit?

Might we with a little luck, fine tune,

Ratchet up the code,

Tweek the parts,

Build the perfect man.

BUT tonight

In the holy dark

In the holy recess of his will

In that place of grand abandon

Where no eye can peer

And no heart approve

In that place

Where no will is safe

From the tug of war of wants, and drives

Where not even planners have their way,

And no amount of Latex or one-child laws can

Dam the flow;

In a land where wedding bands are nice

But never checked

In a place where nappy broken bodies merge

And common sense, intelligence, and status

Go out the window

Tonight

In the hidden

Sheath

Of body and of dark

The Maker

Grows a world,

Peoples his kingdom

Says:

The dark is good

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value. Claude Monet

May:

The Earth is fat

in light

n’ white

n’ dim

n’ dark

n’ day.

Today the world is kicking color … batting it and slamming it like a moving Monet. The whole thing is surging and blinking. Big wet cumulous and wind. One minute under gray, the next under gilded wash and hot white of cloud fringe. Everywhere the color flies … lavender and lilac, wet-water blue and robin’s egg, daffodil and dandelion, Forsythia and … Oh what do you call it?…. Those first purpled flowers of announce. The world is in the first trimester of spring, past the mud chill and first-green and today with the fresh loud of Red Bud. How they ever thought to call this thing a red bud is beyond me. I have seen a few lean Concord grape but the norm is pure pastel purple … Lilac.

And now …A new thought. If the moon shows us the light raging in the dark, does the Redbud show us color hidden in the light? I think of these branches just a week ago. Silver-brown with little points of caged bud. And now the flowers pressed out like Playdough through the branches. Plado-machine branches! But I think of this, before the bloom. Sunlight passed over these branches and the color lilac – or whatever – was somehow hidden in that light. But it flowed by “unused”. And now, a brilliant honey light flows across the branches and breaks out in lavender spill.

This is weird. The tree now blowing into the wind leaps into the light and fetches out the lavender. Or something like that.

If I understand color theory, white light --the light of sun -- is comprised of all the colors in the spectrum. Or better yet a rainbow. And those same tones in turn, in combination with each other or more white or dark, give us all the colors that we see. Now, I don’t know if the white light of sun is like a single wave with all the other wave lengths of light caged inside, or if the different colors and waves all ride together like a bundle of sticks. I suspect the former.

So, when I see this tree, waving in the wind, and I see each bloom leaping into the light and showing lilac… I am seeing some color that is somehow in the light, sandwiched in the white. Again, if I get it right, for something to look purple, that thing must absorb the opposite of purple, which is something like orange or gold... And so the blooms drink beer and bat out lilac. Each waving bloom is like a fine meshed net, holding out the purple somehow hidden in the light.

And this is strange. While I think of color as grand addition to the world, it is really a subtraction. If the flowers or the branch or the sky or the street or the ground were to reflect the full spectrum of light found in the light, they should all look white.

A ground covered with snow is a ground that has showed us what the light is. It is every color minus none. A full spectrum thrown at our eye.

Today I ride my bike in the minus world. Every color, every tone, is minus something of what it could be.

That’s because the colors are drinking. That because the colors are colors … and not white.

Next day:

And this is odd. This multi-hued world, seems more that the "All" world to me. I am, right now, sitting on the back porch underneath our towering oak, eating macaroni shell noodles with butter and A-1 Sauce. The sauce is drinking in light, but also the shells. They look almost white. But hold them against real white and we see them like yellow teeth in a clown's mouth. So now - I hold them toward my face -- if nothing was held back -- if the shells did not drink in and mute the light -- they would be like mirrors on my fork. My macaroni would blind me. And then … I couldn’t see my hands. The world would be brighter than leprosy. Brighter than snow under sun. No room for shadow. Nor room for form…and the stuff about me would disappear into a blinding angel hue...white.

Odd thought number 452:

So, how’s this for thought. Rembrandt never added color to a canvas. Rather he removed it. With each stoke, he deleted some portion of the spectrum. He is like the sculpture working in reverse. If Michelangelo cuts away all the rock that doesn’t look like a David, then Remnant blots away all the white-bright light that doesn’t look like a Dutch master.

To do at home:

Throw a red Frisbee® through the air. Consider what it means that the disk appears to be continually red throughout its journey. Think of the Frisbee® as a whirling color revelalator that continually manifests the red hidden in the air between you and your target. Tell your friend that you will prove that there is a lot of red in the air. Throw the Frisbee®.

Manifest pink (or brown or black or tan) by waving your hands in the air. Show everybody all the flesh colored light zooming all around them. Run into the flesh colored light.

Take an apple into total dark. Consider its color.