In Sophie's World, Sophie is given two bottles in a scene reminiscent of Alice in the Wonderland. One bottle contains blue liquid, the other red liquid. Sophie takes a sip of the blue liquid, and suddenly she begins to see everything in sharp detail. She sees every tree distinctly in the forest, and every leaf and twig distinctly on a tree. The red liquid merges all perception together in one whole. The microcosms merge to make a macrocosm - and Sophie no longer sees trees, but the forest.
I sometimes feel I am on a permanent high of the blue liquid. I see many things, all apart from each other. Which is a remarkable shift from my life long habit of perceiving things in general, bunched together. Anyhow. Thanks to my new perceptual outlook, I have a faculty quite opposite to color blindness. What can one call it?
Color splashiness?
Ah, that's not bad at all. Meanwhile, the reader of Quest & Lust will have to tolerate the deranged palette. : )
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
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Dear color-cuckoo, have you ever studied the psychological effects of colors? Do you know that each color has a different psychological effect? For example, yellow is supposed to induce people into buying something and also expresses happiness? Study up on this. I think it is up your alley. Also when you talk about color-blindness, what are the main colors that are misinterpreted by the brain? What's the phenomenon behind color blindness?
ReplyDeleteCheers.
Yes; I have had the chance to undertake a rather advanced study of color and color theory. That is perhaps why black is no longer my favorite 'color' and that I appreciate the individuality of each color. While I am preoccupied with this observation, however, I will best be like a frenzied palette in use by a madman painter. Which reminds me, I have to blog about Van Gogh!
ReplyDeleteThe physics-concept of color is an interesting notion. Color is merely the part of the energy spectrum that the organs we call our eyes can percieve. Scientifically, ultra-violet and infra-red are also "colors" but we don't have the ability to percieve them. If you go off a whole lot further to the "left and right" of the energy spectrum, you'll find energy waves at every kind of frequency e.g. 2 KHz to 22 KHz, what you refer to as the audio band or going to the other extreme you have bands in the GHz range which are used for communications e.g. 900 MHz for mobile telephony. I just like to think of "color" as being the chunk of this energy spectrum that my eyes can sense or "sound" as the part that my ears can. There are creatures in nature that "see" things in the other energy bands. E.g. bats actually see in the audio band or eels can see electrical dispersions and variations. Their sensations of the world are as much true vision as your experience of Mr. Van Gogh's work.
ReplyDeleteX-rays or gamma rays are also a form of "light" but they are in another energy spectrum. Also the higher the frequency of an energy band, the more harmful it is to human exposure. A laser is light too and has color...it is a concentrated beam of light with a coherent phase, powerful enough to cut through normal matter but harmless to a mirror because it is light! :-)
And you're quite right, black is not a color at all...it is nothing more than what we "see" when there are no colors or there are colors but no luminosity to reflect them back.