Green Flash

If you stare at the sun anytime in the tropics and then immediately look at the sand or close your eyes, you will see the sun’s image reproduced on your closed eyelids, even superimposed over what you are currently looking at, like some kind of bat signal. This is a retinal memory, and it always appears not in its original color, but in its complementary color, as if the eye had a memory bank in which it stored color charts, as indeed it does.

Red light is bent the least when traveling through the air, so the red image of the sun “sets” first, leaving its opposite, or complementary color, green, behind. Words in language come to mean their opposites, as the linguist Mario Pei has demonstrated. But colors as well morph into their opposites as soon as the opposite leaves the room. This should lead all of to us to think about what Hegel said, that the mind can believe in two opposing views simultaneously, leading to his theory of systematic pluralism.

Goethe discussed this dichotomy in his monograph on color theory.

I’ve seen the green flash through sunglasses and through a car’s tinted glass which would have filtered it out had it been coming to me from the world, but in fact it is being created inside us by ourselves: like most miracles, it is man-made. The call is coming from the basement.

If produced by a distortion of the atmosphere or the bending of light or color in the thicker air lying at the visibly flat horizon of the oceanic tropics, then you would see the green flash in reverse, at dawn, before the sun comes up, as the air is similarly thick. That never happens, and I’ve tried it on those bedraggled mornings when involuntary departure (voluntary in the winter weeks when reservations were made, before genuine reservations set in as the warm sun proves addictive and return becomes reluctant, a grim motion undertaken solely at the behest of moral obedience to the now-forgotten self which booked, presumably more sanely, a physical retreat from a more hedonistic spiritual retreat), when departure forces the human spirit to sit disconsolately in airports at ungodly hours, when the green flash is demurely mute because we haven’t been staring intensely at a too-bright yellow orb for a few minutes which then vanishes, but instead have been spacing out at a green sky, which then, were it to vanish suddenly and be replaced by some meek background blandness, would be reproduced in yellow.

But of course the day doesn’t disappear with the sun, it grows brighter and drowns out such delicate ocular phenomena—only the sun vanishes with the evening, leaving us alone with our inner Egyptian eyes.