A poem for Mary

Sean Patrick

When you ask,

What is it like?

though I tell you:

it is like the sun rising over a forest fire
it is like the sight of your future ex-lover dancing
it is like an apple dangling in Eden from a serpent’s bough

I cannot tell you what it is like.

There is no comparison
to the feeling of ripeness
of readiness to be taken
but also to the promise 
of poisonous agony.

If you wish to know what it is like
go out of your black and white life
and look for yourself.

You will understand when your heart aches
when you wish to relive the pieces of your past
that are colored red.

The Science

‘A poem for Mary’ is written for Mary the scientist, a thought experiment from Frank Jackson’s 1982 article ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’. The experiment is thus: Mary is a brilliant scientist who has researched everything there is to know about the colour red: its wavelength, all its physical properties, and so on. Yet Mary has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room, with no personal experience of colour. Suppose that Mary left that room and saw red for the first time: would she learn something new? Jackson’s so-called ‘knowledge argument’ is that, if this first-hand experience (the ‘what it is like’ of red, its ‘quale’) has some new information, then physicalism – the idea that everything can be reduced to physical phenomena – must be false. Qualia, those features of a phenomenon that can only be experienced firsthand, continue to vex philosophers and poets alike to this day.

The Poet

Sean Patrick (they/them) is a scientist and sonnet aficionado residing in Massachusetts. Their poetry has appeared in Grand Little Things, Blue Unicorn, Lavender Lime Literary, Corporeal, Verum Literary, the Blydyn Square Review, and Empyrean Literary.

Next poem: arancione by Stefania Zampiga