Sunset

Photos, paintings and poems of sunsets abound. Almost as numerous as mental images of lifetime peak experiences of spectacular sunsets stored in minds determined or hopeful to remember.

The mind cannot, however, be entrusted with such a task. Durable recordings have the advantage of retaining detail. Still, nature tops all its replicas. Recording technology and artistic styles bring deviations from the real thing. Flower fragrances commencing at the onset of evening are not captured in the photo or the painting. The creepy crawly, evening active insect or whatever running thingy (Does it bite?) getting into clothes or hair, ruins the focus on the sunset.

Confident people might trust their ability to memorise a sunset, believing they are up to retaining the essence of the chosen moment. But all attempts at drawing it afterwards introduce artist’s warp, skill limitations and selective recall. Let alone attempting to describe the memory of the image in words to a partner that did not witness the moment.

Turning words into a painting is a challenge matching transforming music into a sculpture. The better attempts simply create more art, twice removed from the sunset starting point. Accomplished prose or poetry may do justice to an evening sky in general, without reaching a precise rendition.

“Capturing the essence”, relates to a partial solution, maybe only the quiet or serenity brought on by the sunset in word or image; but that’s inside the mind, not up there!

The human sensations brought on by colours and vaporous shapes of dainty or dominant clouds of the evening sky are recognised and shared in communication. This built the culture of agreeing ascribed meanings to the sensations associates with the sunset stimuli. People teach people to interpret little pink and orange clouds as being beautiful and calming, relating us to each other, making us human. More about us, our real focus; less about the sky, the disappearing sun or the wary animals in the bush.

Good word pictures conjure mind pictures in readers or listeners never to be matched when their drawings are compared to each other. When looking again, the ephemeral cloud shape has changed, transforming continuously in the fading light. The cloud configuration in the light of the single moment in the precise location seen from the specific eyes is an irrevocably lost part of the world’s history.

The same holds for the rosy fingers of dawn that stirred Homer nearly three millennia ago. Ethereal, cloudy fingerprints cause the slightest of stirrings in consciousness, assuring us that we see what we saw last time, although we never do. The unique cloudy dawns and dusks are so vast in number that the mind settles the matter by ascribing a sameness to it all. Not sameness as in cloud congruence, but the same and common human sensations repeating in response to the cloud stimuli.

So, nothing new inside the head can be expected from the next sunset. Discovering this, some will never look at the evening or morning sky with an appreciative mindset again, no matter how long they live.

Culture transforms nature in the word, the painting, the photo. When the art work has merit, listener or viewer minds conjure a myriad of unique sunsets of their own, some that never happened but nothing can be proved. Each fits the furnishings and functioning of a particular mind, not what is present in the sky, eliciting thought and emotion fitting the personality.

In words, the same thing: Stories and descriptions kindle unique embellishments in listeners. The listener’s spontaneous mental illustrations and meanderings while following the story in vicarious experience delude into beliefs of equivalence to happenings in the next mind.

The repetitive nature of socialisation induces increases in commonality, reducing uniqueness of individual freedom to the comfort zone of similarity. The opposing forces of individuation and standardisation compete continually, posing questioning search and conforming platitudes against each other in our communication.

Closeness between people is the happy outcome of confirmatory stories and chatting about what a sunset was really like. Meantime the minds remain as far apart as before sunset, functioning independently, but hooked on having “truly” met and shared, really understanding each other. The opposites are not only between people but inside every individual. Sometimes one needs own space and sometimes the sensation of solidarity is welcome in the dark, overcoming distance.