Vantablack
July 5, 2023
Vantablack
Vantablack was created in Britain in 2014. It traps 99.965% of the light spectrum and is the blackest thing in the world. If you went into a room painted in vantablack it would fool your eyes and your brain and you would be unable to perceive texture or depth.
When I think about black, I see my mother's hair and her thickly painted black eyebrows that scared my daughter when she was little. I see her black skirts and high heels as she sips a martini on the arm of the couch. I think of all of her sophisticated blackness against her red lips. Black is royalty. Mom was royalty.
I think about the rich black silt deposited by the Nile after the rainy season. I think about the darkness of winter and the distance of the moon. I think about the underside of thunderclouds, Bible covers, obsidian arrowheads, and the jet black statues made by the Romans.
I think about graffiti and words written in white against a black background, I think about protests and power. I think about edits and words that are stricken. I think about the past merging with the future somewhere else in the universe. I think of God conjuring light out of the darkness and secret messages on tiny scraps of paper.
I think about the inside of fortune cookies before I open them, and I think about the secrets within closed clam shells. I think of Malevich's Black Square paintings, , David Driskell's Ancient Dance, and the mess of charcoal dust on my fingers. I think of the shadows captured by Francisco Goya and ebony trees in West Africa.
When I close my eyes to sleep at night, I see the black field created by the closing of eyelids and as I watch it, people appear, unknown faces, sometimes together, sometimes on their own, one after the other they appear, and as one poofs away another takes center stage. The movement is black. I think movement is often black. Dancing, walking, shuffling in old age. Walking down a sidewalk with the sun behind me is black.
Islam makes me think of black. The word for ink in Arabic is midad, a word that is closely related to divine substance or divine matter. The author, Qadi Ahmad said, "The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr. Black is strict for some, but black is often shy and malleable, too, like a tiny bird hiding in a shadowy bush.
