Sleepless in Navy

A very minor and broad history of ultra-black

I haven’t been sleeping. Not well at least and never before two. Every night I lie down at ten and pretend that tonight will be different. That I will suddenly become a Girl Who Wakes Up at Six and Goes Running. The dreams (see last post) haven’t been helping, and neither has the rain. Rain smudges resting and waking hours like soft graphite.

Google tells me “insomniatic” is not a word, but the title of seminal 2000s pop-rock album by Aly & AJ, though it should be. Insomniatic—God, the sound of it—really should be a word. I used to love sleep, used to do it all the time. Once I slept through a fire alarm at sleep away camp which concerned my mother. I would sleep into the day. Sleep on the floor, on couches, in the car, swaddled in temporary blankness. But when the dreams started they didn’t stop. It happens to everyone.

These days, my sleep is navy like skin bruise and maybe that’s the problem. Terrors materialize in my doorframe or the mirror. They become real and reaching and I’m shaking all over, totally immobile. Demon-ish and unnatural, those fuckers love the navy, but I remember when midnight looked black.

It was the end of 2010 at a ranch in Texas. An old colonial home and not a building besides in sight, just a thicket of trees beyond the grass. We kids ran down to the stream with a yellow lab and soaked our shoes in the water, angling for an adventure. But somebody got spooked and we were scared of killers back then so we raced back at sundown, the ground hard with limestone and packed dirt.

Before long we collapsed on a blanket and somebody’s Dad handed us an iPad with an app that named the constellations. I pointed at dots and pretended to see shapes, but I was too busy with the opaque parts. Such enormous black. I remember the days before Californians took over when you could be at a gas station in Austin and find a charcoal sky and plenty of stars, back when everything felt cloudless.

But that was paper-black, sometimes shoe-leather black if you were lucky. I realized I’d never seen the real deal until then. Truest black swathe free of shimmer or iridescence. Black without blue or white, still pierced by the littlest holes; a trillion camera obscuras in deep space’s throat. Secrets were hiding in that ultrablack. I wanted to suck it down and keep it with me forever, this deep and mysterious color.

I looked for it everywhere. In 2020, there was a group of fish found off the coast of Mexico with ultra-black pigment in their scales as camouflage in deep ocean, often in juncture with bioluminescent lures like that one creepy fish in Finding Nemo. The pigment has also been found on certain birds of paradise and spiders as a way to brighten surrounding colors and attract mates.

The truest black not found in nature comes in a spray. They call it Vantablack, created by scientists in a lab originally for aerospace use. The paint, crafted from carbon pylons, absorbs light as photons before dispersing throughout the substance as heat. Before long, it was redeveloped for spray-on application and licensed exclusively to artist Anish Kapoor (of Chicago “Bean” fame). There had not been such color-motivated uproar since the Baker-Miller pink fiasco. Commercial dupes came along to fill the market gap. It would have been sick, as Wired pointed out, if Goya was alive today. Satan Devouring His Son with a background made of Vantablack? Chills.

BMW painted their X6 in Vantablack as a stunt for the 2019 auto show in Frankfurt (yet to be available for public purchase). Drew Dorian of Car and Driver called it a “sea of black so dark it's like staring into a black hole.” Sometimes described as an “absence,” Vantablack absorbs virtually every particle of light visible to the human eye, leaving behind no trace of the world.

Vantablack upsets the mind by erasing spots in our perception. If the Vantablack BMW were not on a white backdrop, if it were not cut into the shape of a car, we would not see it at all, almost disappeared from reality. Vantablack objects carve a hole in the universe; only by touching it could we “see” its matter. Reach out your hand and find if it disappears into that crack.

When you paint an apple, it might generally be “red,” but it is also purple, green, white, blue—an object informed by the summation of its surroundings. Black, by contrast, is so much of every color, that it becomes no color, a non-thing. Color, whether or not we’re aware of it, has always been an abstract concept. All languages have names for both black and white. It is the first order of things—dark, light. We have always needed a name for the material of Night.

The second time I saw ultrablack wasn’t in an art gallery or on a car or in a rainforest, but as God intended (drunk in the desert). I was staying in an Airstream in Terlingua, the final destination of a West Texas road trip. It was a ghost town turned tourist trap for twenty-somethings traveling along the border. I recall a guy with a guitar and some little girl hola-hooping, a speckled dog kicking up dust, the one restaurant in town’s sign glowing in the dark, the parking lot swaddled in soft red. It was eleven or so when I stumbled down the hill, using an iPhone as a flashlight. Down the crest sounds disappeared and without warning all red was gone, every ATV headlight cut out. It’s here, I thought.

I looked up, my eyes adjusting, and saw it. Dark and fathomless, every photon eternally abandoned. Now that I’d seen the color again, I wasn’t about to let it go so easily. I was determined to take it back. I had a feeling I might never see it again and I haven’t. It doesn’t appear even when sleep finally surfaces and I hold myself under like a 3 am tide, sloshing over my head.

Maybe sleep doesn’t like you anymore. Maybe you take a Xanax or melatonin. Maybe you drink or cough up bong water to chase the navy away. Maybe you work the night shift and sleep in gold. Maybe you never have bad dreams.

But maybe like me you’ve also seen the ultrablack and it haunts you. Maybe you’re Anish Kapoor and bought the bottled version. Maybe you figured out how to swallow sky and from it, you know what it tastes of. Maybe it tasted like every piece of shit we hoard but can’t take into the next place like come and sweat and perfume and salt and plaque and grease and blood and coffee and ink and smoke and skin and rotting fridge food and paper and metal and makeup. Maybe you got the gist. Maybe you took the whole fucking thing down. Maybe you named it. Called it a summation. Maybe you looked up and said never mind.