Where is the red of a rose?

Where is the red of a rose?

Is it in its petals?

No, that is merely organic cells absorbing and reflecting light

Where is the red of a rose?

Is it in the light?

No, that is merely a wave and a quantum energy travelling to your eye

Where is the red of a rose?

Is it in your eye?

No, that  is merely photo-chemical reaction sending signals to your brain

Where is the red of a rose?

Is it in your brain?

No, that is merely electrical impulses from neuron to neuron

Where is the red of a rose?

Find it, and that is where you will find yourself

Reviews

[Einstein Noodle]

a rose is a rose is a rose ... so the saying
goes :)
a great question ... love the connection implied on a cellular level ... makes me think right away of differentiation ... all these incredible miracles occurring all around us at all times ... perhaps in the finding ...we have to loose ourselves ??? :)
E.

[Brittany Zedalis]

Mixing science and poetry. Nice! :D

[Sami Khalil]

Where is the red of a rose?
Is it in your eye?

[Vidya Bacchus]

Makes a girl wonder deeply about something I always took at face value. Cool poetry RD :)

[Aethereal]

Color vision is a species survival trait, a psychological response to a wave length entering the cones within our eyes that enables us to adapt to our environment in a more successful way. Red is within the catalogue book of Evolution as a survival trait. Personification is another survival trait, but it has been abused over the centuries. We have red because it has helped us to survive as a species.

[Rogie-Dodge]

All true, but none of that is where the red is. That's just the stuff I wa saying isn't red. Light is just EMR, like any other, it doesn't have colour. Its just photons with energy levels and a frequency of vibrartion in immaterial eletrical and magnetic fields at a certain rate. Its not red.
Our eye respond chemically and electrically to certain frequencies of vibration and energy levels and trigger emission of elecricity, but that isn't red. Red is not even in our brains. Its in our minds, in the mental model for the world we construct. There is a 'real' one out there, but it has no colour, not texture, no sweetness, no music. no things. Its clinical and objective. But the 'real' world is hardly like the world as we know it in our minds. Red roses are only red roses in our minds.

[Aethereal]

"Red" is our emotional response to certain electromagnetic wave lengths in our environment. A snake has even more of an emotional response to red than we do. We evolved from the lizards in prehistoric times and thus retained their survival trait of responding to the red and infra-red in the way that they do. Red means wind in for an attack to get either food or sex. sssssssssstesst.... bite , inject venom. Beware the snake within our limbic system! Every Zombie or Vampire movie made counts on this response from our limbic system.

[Rogie-Dodge]

We do have emotional responses to it .. but that's a different issue all together. That is not what we see when we see a red rose. That's not where the red is. It is not in our emotion (whereever they may be).

[Aethereal]

It's just an evolved biological engram within the limbic system of our brain that's triggered automatically when we encounter this electromagnetic wave length nothing more, nothing less. We then carry out the program of this biological engram. It's an automatic behavioristic response. There are some human beings with brain damage who have no idea what this response is, for they lack this engram.

[Rogie-Dodge]

But that isn't what we see when we see a red rose. There's a respons to the redness we see, but it isn't the redness. Nor the colour of grass or the shirt I have on or anything else. You're missing the point.

[Aethereal]

It's a complex subconscious response that's its own referent. You are your subconscious mind, and that being said, then you may never be fully aware of why you react the way you do to certain sensory inputs. If we had to think through every automatic reaction that we have before we had it we would not have survived very long as a species. Do you see the one milion line program in your computer that starts it up every time that you turn it on? No, this "Turn On" just happens automatically in some magic way as far as most people know.

[Rogie-Dodge]

I know that there is a lot of processing going on within the brain and other system, and we also have behavioural reactions to certain colours. But none of that is what we *see*, the myriad of colours, the shapes, etc etc. that I see my fingers and the black and white keys on my keyboard, my yellow shirt and the blue bag in the corner .. that whole 'picture in our mind' of the world isn't neurons firing, neurons firing is just neurons firing .. it isn't a picture in out minds. And that is the point .. all the we see and hear, all the beauty and ugliness, the music, the rainbows, the flowers, the food .. it is ALL in our minds. There are things out there that aren't music or colours etc that end up stimulating our brains .. but what we are experiencing as music and colours etc is mind.

[Aethereal]

Mind, energy, space, time, and matter are one and the same thing according to Science. Our minds form synergistic structures that defy analysis under the constraints of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Many things defy analysis within Mathematics and Logic as well as Empirical Science. We have our limitations.

[melissa]

This is a really great poem i can't wait to read more keep up the great work and keep sending me more to read

[Sami Khalil]

A nice poem using biology and nature. Bravo..........