Marina Manoukian is a reader and a writer who sometimes dabbles in collage art. She currently resides in Berlin. She is pursuing a Masters in English Philology.
SKY LIES
The sky appears blue because you can’t see it any other way. It’s not the sky that’s blue but a
by-product of all the particles crammed inside —stuck in a layer or bursting to get out. It’s
not blue though. It’s also red. Sometimes it’s just more blue than red.
Most people don’t know what the word cyan means. It’s a bit of a pretentious colour,
eliciting a curt ‘excuse me’ if brought up unexpectedly. It’s satisfying to see a flicker of
the unknown.
It’s not easy to say why the sky looks blue. In part it’s due to solar radiation scattering against
molecules and suspensoids in the atmosphere. Sometimes they scatter blue more than red.
It’s also due to the fact that humans only have three types of cones cells. Mantis shrimp have
twelve but they’re probably not interested in the sky.
Some people with aphakia, the absence of the lens of the eye, have reported the ability to see
into the ultraviolet range. Receptors for blue light are said to see ultraviolet better than blue;
just a thin lens standing in the way of ready and willing eyes. Even flowers have distinctive
patterns that are seen in ultraviolet. Maybe then we’d finally know what the bees do. But
then we’d suffer a lack of focus. The more you widen a spectrum the greater you distort the
picture.
Would anything change if the sky were another colour? Printers and computers now use
cyan magenta yellow rather than blue red yellow. They can’t look at the sky yet but they’d
probably see it better than we do.
It’s unclear if one can be colourblind to the sky, but it might look like Homer’s wine-drunk
sea. The sea is blue because the water absorbs most of the red light. It’s also blue because it
reflects the sky.
What does it mean if you can see a blue sky? That it’s daylight. Why does it matter that it’s
daylight? Because that’s what we’ve decided is important. Humans don’t necessarily have to
function in the daytime. It’s unclear whether or not agriculture is to blame for this. Whether
or not by putting food under lock and key we resigned ourselves to the light to a disdain for
the dark for the unseen for the unknowable.
Blue used to be the colour of women. A colour for the earth. Now it’s the colour of fake
periods. Now it’s masculine. Overarching. Again, does that matter? If it changed once it can
be changed again. Everything runs out eventually.
Blue eyes don’t even fucking exist. They only look like that because of light scattering. Just
like the sky, they possess no blue pigment. Green eyes are a lie too. If you ask me the book
should be blue and brown rather than good.
**
Photos by @deanastacia