Download Darkness Of Day
Landers Hoang
Human vision is unable to distinguish colors in conditions of very low luminance because the hue-sensitive photoreceptor cells on the retina are inactive when light levels are insufficient, in the range of visual perception referred to as scotopic vision.
The perception of darkness differs from the mere absence of light due to the effects of after images on perception. In perceiving, the eye is active, and the part of the retina that is unstimulated produces a complementary afterimage.[1]
In terms of physics, an object is said to be dark when it absorbs photons, causing it to appear dim compared to other objects. For example, matte black paint does not reflect much visible light and appears dark, whereas white paint reflects much light and appears bright.[2] For more information, see color. An object may appear dark, but it may be bright at a frequency that humans cannot perceive.
A dark area has limited light sources, making things hard to see. Exposure to alternating light and darkness (night and day) has caused several evolutionary adaptations to darkness. When a vertebrate, like a human, enters a dark area, its pupils dilate, allowing more light to enter the eye and improving night vision. Also, the light detecting cells in the human eye (rods and cones) will regenerate more unbleached rhodopsin when adapting to darkness.
The material known as Vantablack is one of the darkest substances known, absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light (at 663 nm if the light is perpendicular to the material), and was developed by Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom.[4][5] The name is a compound of the acronym VANTA (vertically aligned nanotube arrays) and the color black.[6]
Artists use darkness to emphasize and contrast the presence of light. Darkness can be used as a counterpoint to areas of lightness to create leading lines and voids. Such shapes draw the eye around areas of the painting. Shadows add depth and perspective to a painting. See chiaroscuro for a discussion of the uses of such contrasts in visual media.
Color paints are mixed together to create darkness, because each color absorbs certain frequencies of light. Theoretically, mixing together the three primary colors, or the three secondary colors, will absorb all visible light and create black. In practice, it is difficult to prevent the mixture from taking on a brown tint.
As a poetic term in the Western world, darkness is used to connote the presence of shadows, evil, and foreboding,[8] or in modern parlance, to connote that a story is grim, heavy, and/or depressing.[9]
The first creation narrative in Judaism and Christianity begins with darkness, into which is introduced the creation of light, and the separation of this light from the darkness (as distinct from the creation of the Sun and Moon on the fourth day of creation). Thus, although both light and darkness are included in the comprehensive works of God, darkness was considered "the second to last plague" (Exodus 10:21), and the location of "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 8:12).
The use of darkness as a rhetorical device has a long-standing tradition. William Shakespeare, working in the 16th and 17th centuries, made a character called the "prince of darkness" (King Lear: III, iv) and gave darkness jaws with which to devour love. (A Midsummer Night's Dream: I, i)[10] Geoffrey Chaucer, a 14th-century Middle English writer of The Canterbury Tales, wrote that knights must cast away the "workes of darkness".[11] In Divine Comedy, Dante described hell as "solid darkness stain'd".[12]
I know, I know. Dying of cancer in a bog would not look or sound pretty or peaceful. Hidden from view in this dream scene is the suffering, is the agony. Is the needle, and the morphine pump, unavailable to the salmon, eyeless, its wordless mouth opening and closing, body swaying in its tattered, whitening skin.
Thank you for speaking so plainly, and so eloquently, about death, nature, and living in a body. I will remember your words and share them: nature is not dead, we are in nature, and our bodies know how to be born and how to die. Blessings to you and yours.
This article was sent to me by a colleague. I am currently writing my dissertation on befriending the darkness and just finished a chapter on befriending death. I too am a cancer survivor, and felt your words so deeply. I also am deepening my relationship to the other-than-human world and find that i am learning so much in that journey- particularly about death.
Please, please look into cannabis oil as it has been shown to reduce and even cure many cancers (see the documentary Run From The Cure). Also, do some research on the scientific work now being done on the positive effects of psychedelics (such as mushrooms) in helping to overcome the fear of death.
Eva,
I knew from the moment I started reading that this was going to be an Alaska story. Alaska has taught me everything I know. Like you, I am living with incurable cancer, but it is in my husband, not me. It changes everything.
I am an Episcopal priest, not a wildlife biologist, but Nature has been my teacher, my theologian, the one who calls me to education and action. She is my truth, in all the gory glory you so eloquently describe.
I regret the pain and loss you are undergoing and have experienced just the slightest hint in my own life of what you have go through. The pain takes on a presence of its own and yet becomes sort of a companion, strangely.
I have found in his writings the stuff to carry me past the weeks of having pieces of my spine floating loose and the reality of heart disease. Paul not only writes of what there is in this life, but the stuff of the next.
Dear Eva,
Thank you for one of the most moving personal reflections on nature and life and death that I have read in a long time. It is a reflection that will stay with me for the rest of my life. And thanks to both you and Orion for sharing it, and for letting us hear you read it. Your words are a great testimony to our common humanity. Best wishes for the days ahead.
Sincerely, Wyman
Eva, thank you for your moving and, I believe, ultimately joyful reflection on dying. So hard to take comfort from the gritty dying itself! What you offer here is what our death-phobic culture needs, not just in relation to our own individual dying but also in relation to the wider crisis of nature, a crisis we have fomented precisely by hating and fearing the breathing-out half of life. Thank you for your courage and your wise and comforting words.
Eva, Your beautiful words reached me in New York City by way of an excerpt reprint in the publication, The Week. Thank you for sharing your experiences and reflections and reminding us life is lived in the moment. You have touched many lives and will be remembered.
Thanks for sharing such a beautiful story. I am a hospice nurse, and a breast cancer survivor, and the sister of someone who right now is dealing with metastatic breast cancer. Your words meant much to me and touched me. May your journey be meaningful, my friend. Please keep writing and sharing your experience.
Janice
North Korea is perhaps the darkest place in the world. The country lacks electricity; everything is gray and monotone, and the only light is given to the Great Leader, an authoritarian, godlike persona now worn for the third generation by thirty-three-year-old Kim Jong Un, who is considered the sun, though that sun exudes no warmth for its people. No other contemporary country is so entirely devoid of light.
I have always been afraid of the dark. I rarely dream, and I used to sleepwalk as a child to escape the pitch blackness of being asleep. Even now, I cannot turn the light off at night. This is a dreary habit since artificial light is so disruptive that I almost never sleep well. But my fear of the dark is overpowering; I would rather forsake good sleep if it means keeping the darkness at bay.
These questions always give me pause. Perhaps it is a natural human instinct to look for a neat, rational motive for any story that seems incredible. Readers often want to identify with their narrator and the reasons for her action, or perhaps they just want to be assured that the author of a story is not out of her mind. Some years ago, when I published my first novel, there were readers who seemed to take personal offense at the story being open-ended. A few even told me I should write a sequel to redo the ending with a proper conclusion.
Each time someone calls me fearless, I think of this blind spot, as I believe it helps explain my time in North Korea. I do not mean to suggest that I was naive to its dangers, but that each time I thought about being caught, I blocked the matching pangs of fear that came, attempted to usher them away from the front of my consciousness as well as I could.
In Pyongyang I was allowed to leave the campus only in a group with minders for a few hours on weekends, and my days were meticulously mapped out, so the only break I got was to jog in a circle around the tiny campus. I wore the mini USB sticks containing the notes for my book on a necklace as pendants, and I always feared that the strand might loosen and slip off me while I was not paying attention. In those passing moments, when the possibility of being discovered struck me as an impending, inevitable doom, my breath would catch, and as a kind of survival mechanism, I would shut my eyes and push away the thought.
It often seems to me that the desire to comprehend fear strikes at a mystery at the center of life. We breathe toward death; each moment alive is a clock tick toward not living any longer. There is no happy ending, and to help all this make sense to us, we repeat histories, fight needless wars, recite prayers, and fall in love, often more than once, with people who will break our hearts. Life is born from those blind spots, with each mishap, every accident.
Because I identify with fear, I turned out to be, as much as one can be, well suited to pursue North Korea and to bear each frightening day there as if I were a researcher at a laboratory working on a case. I did not count on caring so much for my students, but I did, and that consequence was afforded to me by my own blind spot. Each interaction surprised me, shocked me from unknowing to knowing, gave me names and faces toward a deeper understanding of the North Korean horror. The dark stopped being dark for one illuminating second at a time, and even if night returned each time to blacken the sky completely, the darkness that followed was never quite the same.
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