August 25, 2012

he world presents itself to us scant-haired apes through our senses. Our attention alights on the warm, flaking brown tactility of a sunlit bench or the gut-tugging stench of rainwet, festered trash, and these details stand out from the remaining mess of things unattended to. Later, a string of sensations can be woven together to give memory the sensible fabric of an afternoon, a first meeting, a childhood. For most people, these sensations are of a distinct qualitative sort: touch, smell, taste, etc. But a very few, synesthetes, perceive one channel of sense as entangled with another. And, if The Atlantic is to be believed, everyone may be able to develop some form of this doubled sense perception.

I am color deficient: red, green, brown and sometimes gray blur into a muddle in my sight.1 Probably because of my troubles with color, I've been fascinated by culture's approach to divvying up the visual spectrum. Which is what makes "The Crayola-fication of the World" so interesting to me. In this super-viral two-part article, Aatish Bhatia describes how Japanese people call green traffic lights blue, even though they have the physical capacity to distinguish the two shades. Still, because of the history of the cultural practice of naming colors in Japan, the green "go" light is labeled blue. Awesome, and strange, eh? It gets better.

It seems that the development of color words follows a predictable path: you start with two, which in English we might feel as analogous to white and black, and from there you progress to three, which would be analogous to our red (well, yours anyway), and which further progresses until you get to the infinitesimal division of the rainbow.

Looking at the history of colors entering languages, you might feel like it's only a matter of time before English speakers employ a color vocab that makes the big box of Crayolas look puny. Well, rein in that pride: there are limits to your eyeballs, and human perception of color, even that of the freak ladies2 with four color receptors on its outlying limits, is drab compared to that of other creatures. Like the mantis shrimp. Of course, crustaceans don't speak, which means all that vibrant visual acuity is mute.

But I wonder about the forms of metaphor in languages that lack the barrier between colors we know. Would a phrase like this one I dreamt up, the sky, lime-like in midday under a yolky sun, be sensible to a culture that didn't distinguish between blue and green? I'm inclined to think not, because even if we used the same word to describe the color of blue and green things, the sky certainly isn't similarly hued to a lime—it's not like we're calling it plum-like. Which would make it a bad, bad metaphor.

Then again, no one knows what to make of Homer's epically confusing "wine-dark sea."

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1. It might interest you full-spectrum types to learn that total color blindness, the inability to distinguish any color from another, is exceptionally rare; and that we who have trouble with specific color pairs or ranges are overwhelmingly male. Blame it, as I do, on the Y-chromosome.

2. There are a select few women who have an extra color receptor, or cone, in their eyes, which allows them to see further into the ultraviolet spectrum than most of us. Lucky them. Maybe they should paint.

Image: flickr user bortwein75

I find The Paris Review's literary paint chips feature—“paint samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature”—totally sublime. Their 28 choices, including the requisite Fitzgerald (“Dock Green") and Hemingway (“Elephant Hills”), suggest Gerhard Richter's color-chart paintings: systematic permutations of chromatic variety, as mundane as industrial paint samples yet as thrilling as exploring every possibility of hue and tone.

Okay fine, I'm also an art nerd. So the literary paint chips got me thinking: what happens when you locate these colors in real abstract art?

Try Brice Marden, whose earthy palette in For Pearl (above) becomes surprisingly kinky when its shades are renamed “Mediterranean Cock” (John Updike, Rabbit is Rich), “Lipstick Smack” (Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes), and “Mapp's Silence” (E.F. Benson, Miss Mapp). Didn't expect that from the New York Minimalist's matte monochromes, right?

Most of the lighter shades incorporate well into Agnes Martin's powdery grids, like the sombre stripes of “Rebecca's Smalls” (Daphne du Maurier,Rebecca) and “Rothko's Forearm” (Joy Williams, Breaking and Entering).

Byron Kim's distillation of landscapes into planes of nearly unidentifiable color plays well with this chart. U.N. Building (Looking Downtown) explores the grayish palette of “Elephant Hills”, “Lydia” (Margaret Drabble, The Millstone), “Montdore Mink” (Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate), and the apropos “City Fingers” (Martin Amis, London Fields).

Think of the possibilities not covered here! Those high-altitude sunsets in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, or Füsun's tear-reddened eyes in Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. The “dead channel” sky of William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer could be a flickery gray-green...if, thanks to Gibson's now-retro vocabulary, we can remember what “screen snow” even looks like.

Images: Gerhard Richter courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art; Brice Marden courtesy Wikipedia; Agnes Martin courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mark Rothko courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Byron Kim courtesy James Cohan Gallery