Seeing Blue is a Modern Concept? Bah!

Tech Insider is flogging a video version of that annotated Radiolab post (a takeoff of a 2011 BBC production) on the newness of the idea of the word origin for blue by proclaiming: "No one could see the color blue until modern times." Wait a minute! They cite the research of Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London, on a Namibian tribe. His area of expertise is object recognition, color, naming, cognitive neuropsychology. Not art. Yeah, right. Are we having a leap of logic?

Tech Insider's coffee table video pompously opens with that famous, yet troublesome Homeric image, ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον, epi oinopa ponton, the wine-dark sea. As if that phrase alone were proof-positive that no one in the ancient world could actually see, let alone, name the color blue. They (Grace Raver and Kevin Loria) built a hypothesis upon that harebrained notion:

Zeus had blasted and shattered his swift ship with a bright lightning bolt, out on the wine-dark sea. —Homer, The Odyssey, Book V

Homer was using metaphor, or rather, metalepsis—ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον, translated as the wine-dark sea—was not meant to represent blue. It was translated into English from the Archaic Ionic Greek. Things get lost in translation. According to Homer's modern translator, American poet, Robert Fitzgerald, the literal translation is ''wine-faced (or facing) sea.'' From οἶνος wine + ὄψ 'face. But when he translated The Odyssey, Fitzgerald went along with Andrew Lang's 1880s prose interpretation, the wine-dark sea—because it sounded good. And the wine-dark sea has been with us ever since.

Homer, reputed to be blind, named the iridescent metallic sheen of the sea—ερυθρός erythrós, a tawny-red hue of bronze, and the copper-coloured sky, which paired nicely with the wine-faced sea. Homer's literal color palette was named after things of extreme value in the ancient world: bronze, copper, wine. It was about evoking the personification of wealth. Oh, and the Bronze Sea is also an euphemism for the Red Sea (named for its red plankton blooms).

And while we're quibbling, The Odyssey wasn't a book, it was an epic poem from the oral tradition. In ancient Greek, there was κυάνεος kyaneos a dark shade of blue, and γλαυκός, glaukos (or glafkós), pale blue with a pastel hue. (Minos' son, Glaukos, builder of Jason's ship, the Argo, who loved Scylla, ate a divine herb and was changed into a blue-skinned merman with verdigris hair.) Modern Greek also uses thálassi, from the word for the sea, θάλασσα, which stands in for the color blue. So maybe Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! Thálatta! Thálatta! also stood for the color blue and homecoming in Homeric Greek.
 
Then the Tech Insider (aka Business Insider) video goes on to claim that we—none of humanity—couldn't possibly perceive the color blue until modern times. I'm upping my knee-jerk facepalm reaction to flat-out fisticuffs. Someone please tell Tech Insider and Radiolab: It's linguistics, Stoopid! Or maybe semantics. Or a lack, thereof. Or maybe it's a bad case of Linguistic relativity gone awry. But not the ancient world's inability to perceive or comprehend blueness. 

So, fast-forward: according to Tech Insider, the Middle Ages are now Modern Times? OK.... Oh, look! The first written usage of the word Blue dates back to ca.1300 AD. We have: bleu, blwe, etc., from O.Fr. blo "pale, pallid, wan. (Merriman). I won't go into the 98 synonyms for blue, in English alone. But I've compiled a list of some pre-industrial kinds of blue:

sky blue, midnight blue, azure, ultramarine, aquamarine, cobalt blue, bice blue, indigo, woad, sapphire, zaffre, lazurite, ice-blue, slate blue, turquoise, beryl, duck's egg blue, robin's egg blue, peacock blue, smoke blue, cornflower, gentian, hyacinth, periwinkle, madder blue, blueberry, teal, turquoise, cerulean, mazarine, livid (as in black & blue) or dead blue, aka mortuary blue... Pompeii blue, Persian blue, Aegean blue...

Who doesn't know Something borrowed, something blue, folkloric devices used to baffle the evil eye. equated with ancient wedding customs—when it was first notated in 1871. "Belief in the evil eye dates back to Classical antiquity. It is referenced by Plato, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder. In the Aegean,  people with green eyes, and especially blue eyes, are thought to bestow the curse. Thus, in Greece and Turkey amulets against the evil eye take the form of blue eyes." (Wiki) Apotropaic charms (nazars), dating from the 6th c. BC, are still used in the Mediterranean, the Levant, Egypt, and Morocco, the Middle East, and Afghanistan, to repel the evil eye. Blue eyes are still painted on the prows of Mediterranean boats. And even on the tails of airplanes.

A  tree armed with nazars in Turkey. Maybe they should've used goats.—Wiki

The quest for a stable true blue pigment has been a going concern ever since pre-antiquity, and has been documented since the foundation of Christianity to the 19th century, when aniline dyes were invented, because, you know, the Virgin Mary always wore blue. Always. Byzantine images (ca. 500 AD) of the Virgin Mary depicted her wearing her signature dark blue mantle (usually made of precious lapis lazuli stone, or pigment.)

Keeping the Virgin's mantle blue, or the blue sky—blue—in a fresco or a painting, has been a going technical concern for artists—since like, forever. Apparently it's not easy being blue. Most minerals make unstable, or fugitive pigments. Azurite (copper carbonate) aka mountain blue or Armenian stone, azurro della Magna, blue bice or blue verditer, was commonly used since antiquity. It was the chief source of blue during the Middle Age, but it has a nasty habit of turning green.  

Leonardo da Vinci complained mightily to the Almighty about having to use azurite (but it was waaay cheaper). Hans Holbein the Younger painted a field azurite for a blue sky which is slowly turning teal. Teal, I tell you. The mantle of the Madonna in Raphael's Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints has been turning green over the ages because the azurite is weathering into malachite. 

Oil turns azurite green. Bright light, heat, and exposure to air will reduce the intensity of azurite, which can also go completely rogue and turn into black copper oxide. Treatises were written on how to stabilize azurite—or why paintings are varnished. My favorite blue cure—rub garlic on the sky before varnishing it to keep it blue. Would work well for chest colds too. I wonder if the painters were a little peckish.

Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine, and refused to finish his painting The Entombment, because he couldn't get his hands on the prized pigment for love or money. Readily available azurite just wouldn't do. Vermeer mired his family in debt in his quest for the ultimate blue. Lapis lazuli, which literally means somewhere from beyond the sea, which was more valuable than gold. 

Azurite was often substituted for ultramarine blue, because "...the lone source of ultramarine was an arid strip of mountains in northern Afghanistan. ...the color was traditionally restricted to the raiment of Christ or the Virgin Mary." —True Blue, Paris Review.

Blue remains a muse precisely because it is a mirage. “Among the ancient elements,” writes William Gass in his treatise On Being Blue, “blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overheard and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay.”...Eastern spiritualists have long associated deep blue gemstones, such as lapis lazuli, with the sixth chakra, or third eye, the seat of elevated consciousness in the human body. The Egyptian Book of the Dead recognizes lapis lazuli, carved in the shape of an eye and set in gold, as an amulet of inestimable power. Cleopatra, in common lore, wore powdered lapis lazuli as eye shadow.—True Blue, Paris Review.

Cobalt blue, used to make imitation lapis lazuli, wasn't cheap either. Cobalt ores were mined in Azerbaijan, Baluchistan, and Rajputana, India, but "Persia was the chief source of cobalt ores in the ancient world until the late Middle Ages; although there are also minor cobalt deposits in the western desert of Egypt south of Cairo." (Cobalt) 

In the early Middle Ages, cobalt oxide was used to color the stained glass windows of cathedrals. Cobalt is unique in that it is stable under both low and high heat conditions. Underglaze blue and white porcelain was made in the 8th c. T'ang dynasty; the Ming Dynasty (1400s) was famous for its cobalt underglaze ceramics—precursor to our Blue Willow pattern.

Blue faience hippopotamus, Middle Kingdom (2033-1710 BC)—Wiki

Clearly the ancients had a sense of color, and a real fondness for blue. The Sumerians used rare lapis lazuli on artifacts long before the Egyptians who first developed blue faience (they used copper oxide, not cobalt to color the sintered quartz). Egyptian faience was widely exported to Europe—as far away as Scotland. What was the Picts' favorite color? Blue woad, of course.

Egyptian blue or hsbd-iryt (calcium copper silicate), which means fake lapis lazuli, was the first synthesized pigment (1350 BC) was known to the Romans as caeruleum. The word, derived from cael(um, “sky, heaven” is embedded in the name. Clearly Romans and Egyptians knew what blue was. It was popular until the 4th c. AD. 

Another color, the wadjet eye was blue, blue-green, or sometimes the green of the Nile in summer. To suggest that the ancients couldn't perceive blue, (because we assume that they had no name for those colors? or they called it green because they couldn't see the difference?) is preposterously shallow end of the wading pool thinking. They knew what blue was. And they knew how precious it was. The color of the heavens.

Greek and Roman temples and marble statues were painted in gaudy colors, including azurite-based blue. (See the blue-maned lion of Loutraki 550 BC). Ancient Classical mosaic tile murals used blue for sky and water, etc., not for trees. I won't mention Maya blue here because I'm sticking to Old World examples of blue.
 

Ladies in Blue, Palace of Knossos, (Heraklion, Crete) —Wiki

The Minoans, who predated the Greeks, were excessively fond of blue. (The Aegean Bronze Age murals, the bull leaping frescoes. the dolphin, or flying fish frescoes, or the Ladies in Blue—lots and lots of blue was used.) Blue fresco colors could shift, but not vitrified blue-glazed pots. Or mosaic tiles. Copper oxide, iron, or cobalt oxide was used. Cobalt glass (smalt) was ground up and used as pigment. Clever use of color stabilization.

Ancient glassware of the Levant was often colored blue. We're not talking of the natural green hue of iron in glass, but real cobalt blue. Ancient Greek κυανός, transliterated as kýanos, means "dark blue". What color is dominant in Greek villages? Green lintels and doorjambs? Nope. Blue, bleu, blau by any other name.

The ancient Greek word kyanos, κύανος  means dark blue. Another Greek word for blue is sappheiros, blue stone—which probably meant lapis lazul as the modern word for sapphire is hyakinthos; from the Sanskrit śanipriya, beloved of the planet Saturn (which is bluish in the sky.) The ancient Greeks also used a specific word for pale blue, γλαυκός ‎glaukós, “blue-green, blue-grey” which also appears in Homer. ( Proto-Indo-European *gleh₂w-ko.) 

True, there were fluid boundaries between blueness to greeness or even yellowness in many cultures—including Navajo, and Chinese 青 (qīng). But that fluidity is true of many colors. And bruises too. It really came down to context. No one thought the grass and sky were one color. Or that they couldn’t see the difference. That’s myopic thinking on our part.

What evidence is there that blue was a predominant color? Well, let's see, the entire foundation of the Bronze Age was built upon the extraction of copper ore—and copper ore yields azurite, "a soft, deep blue copper mineral produced by weathering of copper ore deposits." They went through many workarounds to stabilize that blue in faience, glass, and pigment.

Fresh mined azurite crystals from Špania Dolina, Slovakia —Wiki

Of course people could see that color wedged between green and violet. Blue is an integral part of the color spectrum. Rainbows never lie. Sure, Xenophanes described the rainbow with only three bands of color: porphyra (Tyrean purple*), khlōrós (light green), and erythrós (ruddy red). But the Greeks also believed the entire universe was composed of three elements: Air, Earth, Water (Fire was a reaction). Purple and red were considered the most costly of royal colors. Besides, it sounds like Xenophanes was describing the interference pattern of a supernumerary rainbow (pink, purple and blue-green hues).

We tend to conventionally acknowledge seven colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV), because Sir Isaac Newton in his prism treatise, Opticks (1704), said so. But the lensmaker was also a bit blind, and originally named only five colors of the visible spectrum. "The originall or primary colours are Red, yellow, Green, Blew, & a violet purple; together with Orang, Indico, & an indefinite varietie of intermediate gradations." (Now the word Orange is a fairly new concept dating from the 16th c. Sometimes colors didn’t have their own names. People could see orange, but described it as yellow-red or even cadmium.)

Goethe's symbolic colorwheel (1809) —Wiki

Bowing to the ancient Greek sophists, Newton later threw in orange and indigo so it would be analogous to the number of notes in a musical scale (which in turn bowed to the Sumerian love of seven.) Plato was pretty keen on the idea of math and music defining the "harmonies of the cosmos." Natural philosophers were not afraid to shoehorn science into popular thought processes.

German poet and artist Goethe wrote a psychological study on the nature, function, and psychology of color in his 1810 treatise, Theory of Colours. "Blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This colour has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye.... As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us. ...light and its absence, are necessary to the production of colour.... Colour itself is a degree of darkness.") (Maria Popova, Atlantic Monthly)

Cyanometer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure 1760 Wiki

Then there's the pursuit of royal blue, and later, royal purple in the cloth dying industry. In Mesopotamia, a 7th c. BC cuneiform tablet preserves an indigo recipe for dyeing lapis-colored wool (uqnatu). The Greeks imported ινδικόν indikón, indigo dye from India. The Romans Latinized the term to indicum. Indigo was in high demand across the ancient world. (During the Edo period, silk was forbidden, so the Japanese dyed cotton with indigo.) In North Africa, to this day, cloth dyed with indigo signifies wealth.

Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in Tyrian purple, 6th-c mosaic Italy

The Phoenicians of Tyre made an indigo dye from a species of marine snail, but Tyrian purple dye from murex shells was a rare commodity. Phoenicia, from the Greek, phoinós means the land of purple, or, dark red. Tyrian purple was also called Tyrian red. The ancient idea of purple was more of a violet-maroon color. They sometimes over-dyed indigo with purple. There are records of the dye in Ugarit and Hittite texts ca. 14th c. BC, but the Minoans may have invented the process of making Imperial purple ca. 20th–18th c. BC, centuries before the Tyrians (ca. 1570 BC).

Then the silly BBC-sponsored video claims there was no word for blue in Hebrew. Really? A slow news day at the office? What color is the tzitzit on the tallit /prayer shawl again? According to a biblical commandment (15:38), a blue thread—tekhelet (תְּכֵלֶת) must be included in the tzitzit (תכלת), and that blue (or blue-violet) is the same color mentioned 49 times in the Torah. A sea snail, Hexaplex trunculus, produces a blue which could be tekhelet. (But it was excluded from this video as a synonym for blue because it can also represent purple or black.)

Modern Irish Color chart. Go raibh maith agat for translating Google image @Tuigim

In Irish, one of the oldest Indo-European languages, gorm is the word used for the color of the sea, and for blue eyes. (Proto-Celtic *gurmos.) Sometimes glas (green) was also used for blue. Or glastum the color of blue dye extracted from dyer's woad (cabbage family—they also used whortleberries for blue dyes). Glas may refer to grey-blue eyes, or green grass, but not bright dyed green, uaine (uaithne). They combined words for more blue shades: gormghlas for azure, gormuaine for blue-green. They also distinguished between gorm and glas and uaine. (Líath means grey or light blue.) Why? Because there are words for blue.

 Post: Edit

Scots Gaelic comes from the Irish, note the similarities.

What color was Krishna again? Oh yeah, blue. Blue symbolizes divinity in many, if not most cultures.

Krishna, from Sanskrit Kṛṣṇa, dark or dark blue, has jambul-colored skin.—Wiki

You can see things without specifically naming them. Aren't we really flogging another version that horse, can one think without words? "Steven Pinker notes that we are not born with language, so that it is not likely that we are engineered to think in words alone." But that's another argument.
 
Yes, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote extensively about how color patterns were connoted in ancient texts. Light/dark, red/yellow; green, purple. Then blue. But if we look at the light/dark idea, colors tended to be divided along that system, vs. names. Blue can be either light or dark. Maybe instead of looking for ancient words to represent blue, we need to look at synonyms for darkness and light.

The silly video asks: Can you see a color if you don't have a word for it? Apparently certain animals can see blue. Satin bowerbirds and chimps can see blue—even owls and pigeons can see blue. So the ability to see blue predates speciation and also necessarily predates language. The human eye can detect a million colors, (and many women, who have four types of cone cells, tetrachromats, can see even more colors), but the ancients couldn't perceive the color blue in days of yore? Hmmmf. Not buying it.

Then the video claims that blue is exceedingly rare in nature. What?

There are wild blue anemones, agapanthus/lily of the Nile, asters, baby blue eyes, bellflowers, bluebells, blue camas, blue-eyed-grass, bugloss, clematis, columbine, blueberries, borage, brodiaea, ceanothus, chicory, cornflowers, campanula, crocus, delphiniums, false indigo,  flax, forget-me-nots, gentian, gilia, hydrangea, houndstongue, hyacinths, irises, indigo, Ithuriel’s spears, larkspur, lilac, lobelia, lungwort, lupine, morning glory, monkshood, nigella, nightshade, periwinkle, phacelia, blue poppies, rosemary, sage, scilla, veronica, violets. And then the birds: bluejays, bluebirds, cerulean warblers, blue buntings, indigo buntings, lazuli buntings, azure tits, blue tits, kingfishers, macaws, quetzalbirds… all the oceans, lakes, oh yeah, and the sky are blue. Rainbows too.

Jules Davidoff's logic, such as it is, is either seriously flawed or it's misinterpreted. His study was based on one primitive African tribe who were probably freaking out just by looking at a computer monitor... Cathodes emit a mixture of three color frequencies and trick the eye into assuming other color exists via interpolation. Had the Namibian tribe been showed something borrowed, something blue from their native environment like a Where's Waldo experiment, instead of using a pinwheel on a phosphor screen, then the study might hold some merit. Of course he would need to be fluent in their language and their culture. Not an outsider looking in.

As it turns out "This striking "experiment" was a BBC dramatization, and the description of its "results" was invented by the authors of the documentary, and not proposed or endorsed by the scientists involved." In other words, bad popular science strikes again. Can you spell FAKE PSEUDOSCIENCE?

Some of this stinking thinking dates back to 1858 when politician (4 x Prime Minister) who championed Irish Home Rule, and Classics scholar, William Gladstone (1809 - 1898) conducted a survey of ancient written languages and noted that the speakers did not name colors precisely or consistently as modern English speakers. In other words, they didn't use the names of colors as abstract nouns. He erroneously concluded that because there was no consistent word for blue in Greek, " ... that the organ of color and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age." And apparently we've been parroting that idea ever since.
 
Winding back to Goethe's emotional equivalences, here's another take on the wine-dark sea:

Homer describes the sea as wine-dark following a tragedy. Odysseus mourns the death of his men after a shipwreck, when they’ve been swallowed up by the wine-dark sea. Achilles mourns the death of Patroclus looking out on the wine-dark sea. 'The idea is that the sea is dangerous, it's captivating, it's intoxicating, just like wine', he says. 'It's much more than just the colour, it's more about what the object-metaphor is encouraging us to think about'. Amanda Smith—Were the ancient Greeks and Romans colour blind?

About that wine-dark sea—let me reiterate, that's a modern translation, Andrew Lang and Robert Fitzgerald's poetic license. Homer actually wrote: the wine-facing sea. He may have been depicting the sea at sunset, or even a toxic red tide algal bloom—always cause for alarm.

In The Sea Around Us science writer Rachel Carson wrote:

The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflected back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays into deep water all the red rays and most of the yellow rays of the spectrum have been absorbed, so when the light returns to our eyes it is chiefly the cool blue rays that we see. Where the water is rich in plankton, it loses the glassy transparency that permits this deep penetration of the light rays. The yellow and brown and green hues of the coastal waters are derived from the minute algae and other microorganisms so abundant there. Seasonal abundance of certain forms containing reddish or brown pigments may cause the “red water” known from ancient times in many parts of the world, and so common is this condition in some enclosed seas that they owe their names to it — the Red Sea and the Vermilion Sea are examples.

What makes this presentist theory, or modern speculation that the Classical world had defective color vision all rather funny is that before Newton's Opticks was published in 1704, even European poetry was a bit bland on the naming of colors. That's why French Surrealist poet, Arthur Rimbaud's 1884 breakthrough poem celebrating colors, Voyelles was such a big hit—it took poetry into the visionary realm of artists.

Blue O, great Trumpet blaring strange and piercing cries
Through Silences where Worlds and Angels pass crosswise;
Omega, O, the violet brilliance of Those Eyes! —Voyelles

Also, our relationship to the naming of color in literature has changed radically since the 18th c. (coupled with the revolutionary discovery of aniline dyes in 1856 which, for the first time produced a wide range of bright, stable colors—the first color? Purple!).

(An aside: The Greeks were astonished that their clients, the neighboring Celts drank their imported Greek wine neat, (and were thusly barbaric), as civilized people always diluted their wine with water.  I've seen Mary Bianchi’s watered down homemade Italian wine turn purple, then blue. Try it sometime with Mogen David wine too. The blueness of the wine might have something to do with the pH of spring water. Oh, and BTW, those green traffic lights are actually azure blue. We just call them green.)

Lapis lazuli, lazulum, stone from heaven's skies. —Wiki

All this talk of blue and I am reminded of Robert Francis's poems: 

BLUE CORNUCOPIA

Pick any blue sky blue   cerulean   azure
cornflower   periwinkle   blue-eyed grass
blue bowl   bluebell   pick lapis lazuli
blue pool   blue girl   blue Chinese vase
or pink-blue chicory alias ragged sailor
or sapphire   bluebottle fly   indigo bunting
blue dragonfly or devil's darning needle
blue-green   turquoise   peacock   blue spruce
blue verging on violet    the fringed gentian
gray-blue   blue bonfire smoke   autumnal
haze   blue hill   blueberry   distance
and darker blue   storm-blue   blue goose
ink   ocean   ultramarine   pick winter
blue snow-shadows   ice   the blue star Vega.

and his

BLUE WATER

Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice,
Another blue for shadows over snow.
The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice-
Both different blues. And hills row after row
Are colored blue according to how far.
You know the bluejay's double-blur device
Shows best when there are no green leaves to show.
And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star.
 
Robert Francis

The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural... The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white. 

~Wassily Kandinsky

Transit of Venus

It's certainly been a month chock-full of fantastic celestial events: A supermoon on May 5th, an annular eclipse on May 20th, another supermoon and lunar eclipse on June 3rd, and the Transit of Venus on June 4th. 

All this celestial grandeur—and solar maximums—stunning aurorae, meandering meteorites, lunar and solar eclipses galore, the Transit of Venus—the likes of which few will have ever witnessed in their lifetime—sans apocalyptic mayhem. 

Like the Rapture, remember that? The Mayan calendar didn't predict the end of the Fifth World—either someone calculated the astronomical alignments all wrong, or something was lost in translation. The date's been moved up to December 12, 2012. We'll see about that. The last Transit of Venus was in 2004, the next one is in 2117. The Venus transits come in pairs. I don't think any of us will be around for the next Transit.

My attempt to view Monday's super lunar eclipse was eclipsed by clouds. The supermoon looked good at 2 AM, all the coyotes in Nicasio thought so too. (Note to self: the coyotes on the ridge above Halleck Creek either need tuning, or take singing lessons. Two-note yips is not a song. Their Sonoma cousins have a full vocal range that spans octaves. I wonder if the piano doctor can fix them?) 

My cousin Sinead and I had plans to go out to Nicasio Reservoir and take photos of the lunar eclipse over Elephant Mountain. But the sky was socked in by 4 AM and spitting pure drizz by 5 AM, but then it got nice and cozy-dark. The pitter-patter of unseasonal June rain on the roof punctuated the end of my eclipse chasing intentions. Not that there was anything to see. Snyxxx! I was out like a light. The birds shut up their dawn yapping too.

That tiny beauty mark is not a fly on the paper, it's Venus!

I did manage to witness yesterday's Transit of Venus. Or maybe it was the transvestite of Venus. It's really a reverse image projected on a TJ's envelope. Upside-down and backwards. Think Camera Obscura. Like the one at the Cliff House at Ocean Beach, in San Francisco. 

I once watched an upside-down sunset unfold over the Pacific from the Camera Obscura—which merely means a darkened vaulted chamber, or room. Waves rolling in upside-down where the sky should be, was unnerving.

I've seen the camera obscura phenomenon in the wild (so to speak). I was once stuck in the nasty dark bellows of an overcrowded accordian-hinged double bus in Leningrad and watched upside-down color images of Nevsky Prospekt whizz by on a baffle bend in the wall like an old-timy movie. I nearly shrieked when I realized what I was seeing. OMG! Pinhole camera. But who was I to tell? The Russians weren't interested.

They say that the Bedouins were the first to notice this phenomenon, the endless Sahara replete with camels on the back walls of their tents. What did they make of it? But Leonardo da Vinci was the one who was credited with the invention of the camera obscura. 

This photo is based on a similar principle. I used a silver-lined beach umbrella for my vaulted darkroom. Trying to track the sun upside down and backwards through binoculars (also upside down—or at least, backwards) without looking through the lens was challenging. I had to move opposite to what was intuitive to find the image.

Then I had to get the angle and distance of the paper right to bring it all into focus. But every time I got everything lined up and in focus in order to take a photo, the bloody sun kept racing across the paper—it was more like chasing the mass-transit of Venus. So things aren't exactly in focus, I had too many factors to juggle, including the wind niggling the paper. Using a digital camera to record the camera obscura image was a new twist on the process.

OK, so it didn't help that the binocuars were broken—one lens fell off at a benefit concert for Mimi Fariña ages ago, so duct tape was my bestest friend—I slapped it back onto the body but the imprecision of alignment made it hard to focus. I finally resorted to ductaping the entire binoculars to a tripod as it was so hard to keep everything all lined up. Far too many variables to keep track of. I could only focus one lens at a time.

Sor Juana Inéz de la Crúz by J. Sánchez. 17th c.. Wiki 

I felt like a modern-day Sor Juana de la Crúz (1651-95), the scientist-poet of New Spain (Mexico's first poet) during the Age of Enlightenment, tracking celestial phenomenon with very faulty equipment. I bet she would've killed to have access to binoculars and duct tape. A digital camera would've seemed like pure magic.

Sor Juana tried to disguise herself as a man so that she could attend university—denied an education (girls were forbidden to read), by age 15, she had read all 5,000 books in her uncle's library, and taught herself Latin, Greek, Nahual, math and science. She became a nun, rather than being forced to marry, and she crusaded for a woman's right to an education—for which she was punished and silenced. The Age of Enlightenment had no place for women.

Neil insisted that the small black dot on my envelope really wasn't Venus, that it was merely a bit of dirt on the lens. So I kept cleaning the lens of cruft, until I realized I wasn't looking at white light on the page, I was actually looking at the silhouette of Venus. That white light was the sun itself with sunspots erupting and sinking and occasional solar flares in living color! Wow. Double wow (it was a bi-nocular event.)

Besides, even if there was cruft on the lens, it wouldn't project with a sharp line. I've scratched camera lenses that work just fine—sometimes there's a bit of shadow, but otherwise the lens obliterates the mar. Yep, it was Venus all right.

I love the way the binocular lens is also a prism, splitting the rainbow—red on one side, cyan on the other side. This is how Sor Juana's contemporary, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), threw off the shackles and plough of farming, and tracked and divided light which gave us Opticks (1704), the scientific treatise on refracted light and the visible spectrum. All this thought strayed from the frayed edges of eyeglasses throwing little diffracted rainbows in a darkened room.

Newton proved that white light was made of all the colors of the rainbow. All that talk of color set the poets off, (Pope, Keats, Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Breton), and poetry itself changed—for the first time poetry was filled with images of color for color's sake. Call it Newtonian poetry.

OK, so Sir Isaac, the inventor of calculus and other beefy things, became rather loony toward the end of his life, mysticism having occluded his lens. They say he has Asperger's Syndrome, but that doesn't fit the profile. Besides, the mere thought of calculus makes me rather loony.

For me the proof in the pudding was watching pale golden sunspots erupting and sinking over and over like little eyes, and Venus, a mouth, or maybe more appropriately, a celestial beautymark on the face of the sun. Transit of Venus.

Puts us all into another perspective.

Partial Eclipse, 7/21/2009

At 6:45 PM, I had an impromptu eclipse date with the sun and moon. I'd forgotten all about it until a friend posted something about the eclipse on Facebook. I dropped everything and made a mad dash for the door. But we were not in the path of totality. My Mylar eclipse glasses from the Hawaiian total eclipse on July 11, 1991, were up in Forestville, I was completely unprepared to view this partial eclipse, what would work? I could think of nothing, other than some old Mylar hard drive bags. Bingo! I dragged a box of computer parts from the morgue, left a constellation of old hard drives and memory cards scattered all over the bed, trying to find a good Mylar bag. I was running out of time. 

I ran out in the street and viewed the sun through the old Mylar hard drive bags, looking like some street loonie. Passersby stared, but I didn't care. However, the fog bank kept thrusting its tongue out. I was determined; something about seeing eclipses changes how you think. So I drove up the hill to the next clear spot in the road unhampered by high rises.

The Mylar bags worked, but were less successful, they were too thin, I couldn't see through multiple layers and the one really dense Mylar bag was too warped or full of minute holes for true viewing pleasure. But I had all kinds of eclipse viewing tricks up my sleeve leftover from childhood. I ripped the cover off a paperback book and punched a hole in it with a ballpoint pen. The pinhole camera idea wasn't working out, nor were the tree leaves cooperating. The sun was too low on the horizon to cast myriad eclipses on the ground through tree leaves. 

* * *

It's a little known fact that trees cast myriad images of the sun on the ground. All those funny little circles of light are really projections of suns. Trees make natural pinhole cameras. During an eclipse, the ground beneath the trees is covered with hundreds of eclipse shadows. You just have to know where to look. A piece of white cardboard helps put it into focus. Oak trees work best. How very druidic. Must be something about the negative spaces created by oval leaf shape of oaks as pine needles are too thin. 

I discovered the pinhole camera effect by accident Feb. 26, 1979, when I was pinning something up on the kitchen wall, I was living in Cotati with Sweet Old Bob, but that's another eclipsed story. 

I was admiring some shadows cast on the wall by a rockrose succulent I had hanging out the kitchen window, they looked very Japanese sumi-e, but there were funny little moving crescents on the wall. WTF? Ants? Small spiders? I went to get my camera to document the strange moving shadows, and then I realized the light outside was strange...it was far too dark for noon, no clouds in the clear blue sky. Hmmm. 

Then it dawned on me: it  was a total eclipse of the sun, I had no idea...my rockrose informed me. Too afraid to look directly at the sun, as we were not quite in the path of totality (Washington to Greenland), I don't remember seeing Bailey's beads, nor the diamond ring, just a slivers of light, like the half moons on my fingernails.

Wherever the rockrose needles intersected each other, they made a natural pinhole camera with myriad "lenses." I madly took photos of eclipse shadows. I made pinhole cameras, used my hands to cast eclipse shadows, I was clean mad with the joy of discovery. Even the eucalyptus tree was celebrating the eclipse....there were eclipse crescents everywhere on the ground. 

Surely this phenomenon had been discovered before, but by whom? Lost in the mists of time. I was a modern day  Sor Juana de la Crúz experimenting with light and shadow. I  was totally in the zone—jazzed by the adrenaline rush of discovery and excitement....but I was home alone, no one to share it with. 

* * *

Chasing the setting sun, I parked the car at the top of MacArthur and Adams Point, darkened the car with my car shades and got innovative, asking "what if..." I set some reading glasses in a beam of light on the dashboard and got little twin eclipses projected onto the car door, but then, too soon, they disappeared. 

I tried using double sunglasses to view the sun as it hid behind a cloud bank, and marveled over the rainbow colors I could see through the polarized lenses, and then it came to me in a flash: I thought, what if I have the wrong day, what if there's no eclipse and I'm looking straight into the sun's corona like a mad dog? Will I go blind due to some cosmic joke? 

I drove home disgruntled, thinking my experiment had failed, only to find I'd caught the ratass end, not the beginning of the eclipse. Then I found out that it began at 6:15, not 7:15. Where did I get that info from? Probably from somebody living on Mountain Time.

But I was pretty chuffed over resorting to reading glasses trick—you know how you can sometimes see rainbow hued suns on the ripples of a lake or on the beveled edge of a rearview mirror? That's what gave me the idea. That, and the crystal heart dangling from the rear view mirror. Association by degree. To use the reading glasses as a projector telescope. Focus was easy, about 2 feel from the door, once I lined the glasses up to the sun. 

I experimented with tilting the lenses, etc., and I was able to make surreal 3-D parallax suns, reminding me that the eclipse image I was seeing was really projecting upside down. Just like when you take a magnifying glass and hold it away from you and everything turns upside down. Add another magnifying glass in front of it, and you can set the world right again. Sometimes I do that trick with kids to blow their minds. That, and using old CDs to throw rainbows across a crowded room.

* * *

It's a little known fact that we actually see the world upside down. Which explains a lot. Our brain processes what we see and sets it right side up. Light bounces off the retina, and crosses paths entering the optic nerve for the brain to decode it. Pretty cool stuff.

So, I was feeling a bit like the unschooled Dutch scientist Antony van Leeuwenkoek (1632-1723), who felt that the best teacher was an open mind uncluttered by scientific dogma. Well, I had that. He valued curiosity, and said to observe, observe, observe, and then experiment—and so I did. 

Son of a brewer and a basketmaker, Van Leeuwenhoek was a highly unlikely candidate for scientist.  Friend of Vermeer, he was attracted to light, he also as a lens grinder and maker of spectacles (lately so relevant in my life), which led to his invention of the microscope: a lens and a pinhole of light. A focal plane. Much like the inner workings of the Nikon camera lens aperture I held in my hand. That, and Gallileo's telescope. 

Unfortunately the photos I took were post eclipse phenomena, I was too distracted by technical difficulties, only able to eke out 2 photos due to dead batteries, but it does illustrate my point, albeit a Khruschev's shoe photo—after the fact.

I marveled at the rainbow fringe cast around the edges of the sun images and was reminded of another lensmaker, an English contemporary of van Leeuwenhoek's who noticed rainbows cast on the edges of a ground lens he was working on in a darkened room. 

This observation led to Sir Isaac Newton's (1643-1727) famous 1704 magnum opus, Opticks: a Treatise on the Reflexions and the Refractions and Inflexions and Colours of Light, and the discovery of the color spectrum revolutionized the work of poets and artists. Suddenly paintings were full of prismatic color and poets harnessed the metaphor of rainbow.

* * *

Reflection, absorption, transmission, wavelength. I tried an experiment with two pairs of reading glasses and discovered that two lenses cancelled each other out and dimmed the image of the sun. But then I had four eclipses projected on the wall!

Sitting in my darkened car, I felt like I was inside the Camera Obscura at the Cliff House in San Francisco watching twinned projected suns on the doors of my car. It worked really well, you could even see the layers of cloud bank in front of the sun. 

* * *

Forgive me Antony van Leeuwenhoek for standing on your gravestone. I meant no disrespect. Coming in from the bright sun into the dimly lit church at Delft, I was purblind. I looked for you in vain, until my friend Vins said, "you're standing right on top of him!" With your lenses you gave us entrance to a cognate miniature worlds of animalcules—inner constellations of foramifera and spirogyra held in a single drop of lake water. And camera lenses. Our world has never been the same, wee beasties, and all.

I'm still seeing sun spots before my eyes.

PS I found the time error, from a forwarded email from Antonia Lamb, who gave lots of astrological implications as a gateway to great power, but listed the eclipse at 7:30 PM. Always double check the facts, ma'am.