Mauve Unnatural desires Halloween deceptions Commentary

William Henry Perkin chemistry

Mauve

• Experimenting with coal-tar distillates
• (benzene, toluene, naphthalene, anthracene)
• while trying to synthesize quinine,
• William Henry Perkin discovered a
• reddish brown powder
• that would dye silk purple,
• the royal color.
• Perkin convinced Scottish dyers to test it,
• and founded a company to manufacture it
• thus starting a major chemical industry
• made successful after Empress Eugénie
• decided that mauve matched
• the color of her eyes.

Unnatural desires

• In our alchemist crucible
• we crudely imitate nature
• using intense heat
• and vicious catalysts
• to produce plastics, poisons, fertilizers,
• paints, dyes, and medicines
• more expensive than gold.
• Gradually the accumulation
• of unnatural residues
• thwarts the natural processes we rely on
• and our dreams become nightmares
• in which everything we touch,
• like the Midas curse, becomes toxic.

Halloween deceptions

• Because it’s Halloween
• you enter the party blindfolded.
• At the door
• polyester fibers pull across your face.
• Someone takes your hand
• and pushes it into a bowl of grapes.
• If these are not spider webs
• if these are not human eyeballs
• if the mournful music you hear
• doesn’t make you apprehensive
• then playacting is
• indistinguishable from real life.
• but in real life when we remove a blindfold
• we find another blindfold under it.
• We poke at things in the dark
• to give unshapen forms angle and texture
• and it’s impossible not to imagine
• that things conform to our analogies.
• When the genuine is indistinguishable
• from a good fake, we are equally innocent.