Vakkotaur

When was the last time you experienced true darkness? Not evil, not bewilderment, but the utter absence of light. Chances are it wasn't recently, if at all.

During the day, well, there is daylight. And at night there is the moon or stars if the sky is clear. Also there are all the lights. Porch lights. Security lights. Advertising lights. Mercury vapor and sodium vapor lights. Automobile lights. Red lights on towers, or worse, strobe lights. That's outside. Some of those are necessary, but many are not.

Inside there can be darkness. The lights of night can be shut out with shades, or blinds. And the lamps can be switched off. At least the main ones can be. But chances are there is an electric clock which emits light, even if dimly. If there is a stereo system of some kind or a VCR, there is another light. Some phones will even blink. But these can be masked or covered. And then there is, finally, darkness.

I found, or perhaps I should say made, darkness last night. And I watched it. It wasn't dark in the dark. That is, it was not just an inky blackness to my eyes. This wasn't a matter of healthy eyes and vitamins from carrots giving me good dark-adaption. I was seeing something that wasn't quite really there.

If I close my eyes in light I can see, for a bit, the afterimage of the things of the last scene I viewed before closing my eyes. What I saw last night wasn't an identifiable afterimage. It was sort of the ghost of afterimages, slowly fading and growing less discernable. As time went on what had been a jumble of faint lines became more nebulous. There was a patchiness to the bits. What I saw had the eerie almost-there look of a faint nebula just on the edge of visibility. I wonder how much was afterimage and the slow chemical restoration at the ends of optic nerves and such and how much was processing noise of the eye-brain combination trying to get something as input.

There were other images or 'lights' as well. If I strained to aim my eyeballs far in one direction or another I could see flashes at the periphery of vision - something like can be seen from a powerful cough or sneeze, but not as pronounced.

The curious thing was that while I had complete absence of light, I didn't see the darkness. I saw my eyes trying to see. It was lighter than other less dark darknesses. That seems odd, but what I saw last night was a dim grayishness with lighter bits in it rather than blackness. Far away from artificial lights (a harder and harder place to find now, alas) I have seen a 'dark' sky punctuated with stars. Between the stars there was a blackness blacker than what I saw last night. But there was also starlight. I had stars to look at and to provide contrast with the places where they weren't. Perhaps light can be defined by dark, but dark is more defined by light, it seems.