Emulsions: Sometimes the colors are the last to fade |
| by April Freely, '04 |
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Emulsions are thin, gelatinous, light-sensitive coatings on film that react chemically to capture the color and shadings of a scene. Color film requires three layers of emulsions, typically cyan (a greenish blue), yellow, and magenta (a purplish red). As light passes through the layers, each emulsion records areas where its particular color appears in the scene. When developed, the emulsion releases dye that is the complementary color of the light recorded: blue light activates yellow dye, green light is magenta, and red light is cyan.(1) golden beer lemon (sickly) Sunflower caution banana (mourning) school-bus Yellow. In sixteenth century England yellow was a sign of mourning. Sunflowers are yellow- and there must have been lilies in the arrangement too, because I remember the smell of the hot-yellow pollen. Sunflowers are yellow, but I didn't know it then. In that lemon-meringue hospital room; sunflowers, for sunny, for sun. He was called Sonny (for son for Sunny: he who is built around an engine), and for a long time I thought it was spelled Sunny, and into the blue my sun fell one day and proved me right. I belong to this Sunny, whose light was so strong people flocked to him - he saw through them to them, I belong to this Sonny who had enough heart (engine red and strong,) to keep up old arguments while his eyes yellowed and that paper thin hospital gown became thinner, the thin oxygen tubes terribly distracting from his face (though he wasn't thin - he had been gorging himself to save us from watching him fade.) He had put me in charge of taking care of the (sun)flower arrangement and my heart broke (like rays of sun, fragmented) as I poured the golden water down the drain and threw the dying flowers out. (We still have the vase at home. It was useless and too necessary.) Over and over, in my mind, I trot up the aging stairs in our house. I hear a voice chanting, "I'mgonedieI'mgonedieI'mgonedie" and I see him lying splayed out on the cyan bedspread in that egg-shell room and I want to scream, "Heywhat'suphowwasyourday?" The baseball game (thick with silence) is playing on the walls and ceiling at sickly angles and I want to whisper, "Sowho' swinning?" I want to disappear. I go into my room and I close my head and I search for a cardboard box (ripping through piles of paper inside myself), something to put him in before..."the paper goes to a processing plant where it is mixed with hot water and turned into pulp in a machine that works much like a big kitchen blender. The pulp then goes to a large vat where the ink separates from the paper fibers and floats to the surface. The cleaned pulp is [...] made into paper again."(2) I look at the paper and I see that the liquid ink of the pen leaks into the being of the manila ice, occupying it like pneumatic glasses knocked over in the dishwater, the little pockets of dry fiber littering the slide. The ink resides in the self of the paper, it gives a sunlit sense, (illusion), of stability. I wanted to take all of that recycled paper and fashion a cardboard box for him. Or steel, because steel is stronger. I catch a snatch of information as the whispering television blares out: "Automobiles changed the world during the 20th century[...] the so-called horseless carriage [that steel box] has forever altered the modern landscape. The automobile is built around an engine [so is that sun.] Suspension systems, which include springs and shock absorbers, cushion the ride and help protect the vehicle from being damaged."(3) At nineteen, I still don't have my driver's license. But then I never needed one before. He was always the driver (forever the suspension system). I want to put so many things in his gold tone steel box (it's cardboard -cardboard that has been rained on.) I want to keep water-tight the smell of his grill, the microscopic molecules of transformation fire rocketing through the shards of air, overtaking my olfactory receptors, that special art passed down through blood (which is not yellow), the searing sting of smoke congealed making my eyes water, ("Watch out, Shae", he'd say, just like a suspension system). I want to keep the look in his eye (a look the opposite of yellow), the rain in his voice, as he presented me a piece off the grill (this summer Mom and I barbequed. My Mom left me outside with the meat and I burned it. I didn't cry. ) I want to make sure my mother keeps his ties (in a cardboard box in the extra room) so I can keep the long view into the bathroom of him showing me how to tie the tie I picked out for him come SunDay (wear the brown one with black and gray specks with the brown suit, or the white one with black and red squares with the black shirt). I want to keep rubbing my hands over, messing up his soft, salt-n-pepper hair. (At the mustard-yellow funeral parlor, I mussed up his hairstyle one last time. This time I did cry.) I want to keep the sight of the road, the white lines blurring into a banana-tinged whipped cream cloud down the center of the highway, the loud stuttered wind, the smudge of green and brown, engine red, and that other sunswept color, closing us in, smooth suspension like sliding on ice, comfortable, familiar. Safe in a steel box . azure cobalt navy Sapphire cerulean jean cyan periwinkle indigo royal (midnight) powder Blue. My birthstone is peridot, which is green, but it should be blue like his, sapphire for September (Sapphire beats peridot on the hardness scale). My peridot ring is hot and heavy, it weighs down the cycle of my year bending the metal (steel?) into some exaggerated indigo oval. August was when everything happened. August was when yellow became blue. I remember looking at the periwinkle (or was it champagne yellow?) program recognizing the digits, (8. 12. 2000.) thinking that there must be some mistake (I will not, my day of birth his day of death.) So in August, through the silent spaces that bare the absence of the man who helped bring life to me, I grow older, (another year without a license). This August, I sit down on the corner of the bed and wait (for the inevitable blue) while a sound says, "Hey what's up, how was your day?" But this numbing blanket of fatigue makes a soft spot for the weight that chose a comfortable spot on my chest. Every function of each cell in my body halting, the sound distorted like a record slowing down. Body turns from flesh and blood into cement, the dark waters charming (I test the cold waters with my foot again), willing my eyes closed, ("So, who's winning?") Black. Enfolding and surrounding black, blocking out all light bit by bit. The midnight poison fear slowly begins to consume my bloodstream as the cyan shades come down. What is wrong with me? I'm so so so so tired. Tired. In (beautiful) night, my resolve breaks away and I can do nothing but be, tormented by those (colbalt cerulean, midnight) things that were invisible to me in the light. This is how it begins. It begins with light. "When film is processed[...], large particles of metallic silver form in areas of the film that were exposed to light. The resulting image produced on the film is called a negative because the tonal values of the subject photographed are reversed; areas in the subject that were dark appear light on the negative, and areas that were bright appear dark." In that room the colors are reversed, different. Wrong. Where I expected to be yellow there is blue I look for the eggshells in the wall and there is peach, I seek a place for him (for slices of the sun) to reside in that worn area of the carpet where I sit in front of that (silent) television, but he is not there, because there are no longer silver deposits of him, no light making shadows on his face (shadows on the sun,) in that room, that new house. In an instant I became a new house too, my own colors have transfigured, and I smell scorched as I burn my hands until they bleed going down the silver slide trying to slow it down, Slow it down, in that instant I begin falling through my bed, into the midnight, downdown(thereisnoslidehereonly falling)downthroughtheragingtide-thelinesandcolorsmutedsmudgedclosedinshadowbytherainand hailandcloudsandIWAKEUP-andILIVEintheragingtideandtheFalling has become my Home. In the falling, it's the abyss where the sound should be that distracts me, that sound of silence for two seconds before the crashing of the tide. My throat squeezes out a (delicate powder blue) sigh and I hear, faintly, Debussy suspending and resolving harmonies, swaying like the tide, whispering in that Beautiful Night, "Car nous nous en allons comme s'en va cette onde/Elle à la mer, nous au tombeau."- For we must all depart, just as the wave is driven: Waves, to the sea, We, to the tomb.(5)) And I try to hide from the rapid tide in my steel (must be stronger than silver) box. I dream. That it would float over the instantly shifting tide and that somehow the sun doesn't get drowned in the midnight. (I took a trip to the cemetery while I was at home, running from that room in negative, myself in negative, and it was the same and nothing, like I remembered it.) And I am drenched in Blue. Barely floating. Hearts are red, and the engine is the heart of the steel box, so it must be red too. Red
light is the longest wavelength of visible light (so it lingers longest in the dying, setting of
the sun.) And in that room of all wavelengths (from sunlit yellow, to blue of darkest night, and
that red color of the dirt, of South,) I sit down on the corner of the bed and wait. The
baseball game is blaring, rose-kissed light from the screen making ghost shadows on my face.
My day was okay, Shae, how was yours? "Pretty, good." I test the cold waters (of midnight) with my foot again. "So, who's winning?" I have something to tell you. Today I read that because of the circuitry of our nervous system"any perception or action is necessarily infused with emotion content."(6) And that makes sense to me because I think I've always known it. It's in the way I say "Daddy"- it dances, effortless, it moves, with the smooth, slow, rhythm of the south. I am whispering something to you as I meticulously choose your tie of a Sunday morning, (with thought of crimson), adjusting it ever so. It's in the look of rain in my eyes as you explain to me the finer points of honeysuckle-tasting. In every action, every comment, there is a silence that whispers. Can you hear it? And there he is again with that hollow look in his deaf eyes. Through scarlet lenses, I can see him slowly struggling to focus on the both of us at once. Hunh? "Nevermind," I say. It was that engine red heart of yours wasn't it? That suffused you with enough light to last so long, when they said the sun should have died out long before. It was that steel, so strong, that helped you linger past the thinning, past the pain. Someone once told me "Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."(7) And you saw me hiding, waiting, when I didn't know that sunflowers were yellow, you saw through me to me (in my silence, in my screaming,) and you stayed a little longer in the midst of the red. Alright, what did you say before? The game's over- we were shut out 0 to 1. We were shut out 0 to1. As I open my eyes I see that it's too late to listen: the lights from the screen bouncing off of the bare walls Cannot make ghost shadows on his face. Newton's law of inertia states that (light) in motion will remain in motion (emotion), unless acted upon by outside some force. (8) And that lemon indigo crimson light, that light forever emanating from that tired screen, remains suspended, and crashing, silently, into the tired walls in that empty room that I do not know. We wore white to the funeral, white, which is all color and none, reflects his yellow, my blue . Our red. (I still hear the click of switch as the ruby light shone on his casket is ended. It matched the rose I placed there.) We wore white instead of black, that opposite of color. "As light passes through the layers, each Emulsion records areas where its particular color appears in the scene." And sometimes the colors are the first to fade. Maybe, I should have written you in black and white.
5"Beau Soir"- Beautiful Night, poem by Paul Borget, set to music by Claude Debussy 6"emotion" Enclyclopædia Britannica - Online |