Greg Boettcher
Open Up Your Eyes and See the Day
In the ancient period, the most popular theory of light was that it flew out from the eye in the form of a visual ray, and that consequently, vision took place when that ray contacted a visible object. Empedocles, Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy, among others, all subscribed to this visual ray theory.
Open up your eyes and see the day.
Not too hard to fathom what you’re seeing:
light goes out and travels in a ray.
People don’t think much about it. They
wouldn’t, before Pythagoras’s teaching,
open up their eyes. But see the way
people see: they look, and thus convey
a beam upon an object. Their fleeting
sight goes out and travels in a ray.
Take the case of touch. To touch a tray,
reach to it. And seeing’s just like reaching.
Cut open an eye. You’ll see the way
beams go out, like servants for a tray.
My conclusion and my only meaning:
light goes out and travels in a ray.
Sophocles described it in his play:
don’t be like Oedipus, blind and bleeding.
Open up your eyes and see the day.
Light goes out and travels in a ray.
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Greg Boettcher is a fiction writer and poet living in Minneapolis, where he works as a software developer. He has been previously published in Thema Literary Journal.
Author’s Notes/Backstory: In college, I took a physics course for non-physics majors. The professor allowed us to submit creative writing in place of a midterm research paper. Soon I was reading about the history of optics, starting all the way back in the ancient period. This was also around the time when I was learning about traditional poetic forms. From there, the poem almost wrote itself.
Editor’s Comments: A villanelle, with slight variations. “Visual ray theory, or Extramission Theory, is an ancient idea (from Empedocles, Plato, Euclid) that vision works by rays of “visual fire” or light emitted from the eyes to touch and probe objects, forming a “visual cone” of perception, rather than light coming into the eye. Though scientifically disproven (Intromission Theory, where light reflects from objects into the eye, is correct), it influenced optics for centuries, with Euclid mathematically defining these straight visual rays, and it surprisingly persists as a common misconception today [www].” (Image Credit: Rene Böhmer on Unsplash)
Also, you might find this YouTube interesting (static image but there’s voice): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzmVxn39wLw&t=12s