Colors And My Pensive Thoughts.

Can a blind person visualize color? I wonder. What does he feel when he reads or listens to the description of a scene replete with color? How does he fill up this void?

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

How does one explain colors to a blind man? Or music to a deaf man?

This question has been bugging me for the last few days.

We understand and recognize color intuitively when we see it. Many of us may not know the name of the color we see. But we intuitively can distinguish a color from other colors. It is said that women may be more aware of different hues of color than men. But that is another story.

In the same way, we can appreciate the sound of music when we listen to it. We can distinguish music from noise, between musical harmony and cacophony.

But what is natural to us might not be natural to a blind who cannot see and a deaf who cannot hear.

When the first consciousness dawned in humans, and the man looked up at the sky, how did he know he was looking at a blue sky? And when he peeked at the bright mid-day Sun, how did he know he was seeing red?

We understand color by comparing one with the other. He might not have known the names of the colors. That came much later, but he could recognize that he was looking at two different colors, one distinct from the other.

Ved Mehta, an Indian-born American writer who was blind, used to describe colors in his writings in his unique ways. He did it with such elan that many people thought he was faking his blindness. Norman Mailer even challenged him to a boxing match to call his bluff.

Ved lost his gift of sight when he was just three years old. So, one might infer he might have had some remembrance of color from his childhood. Maybe somewhere deep in his consciousness, he retained some images of color from his childhood that helped him experience color later in life. When asked about his understanding of colors, he mischievously replied, "Of course, my yellow may not be the same as your yellow."

But how can a person blind from birth, who never experienced the joy of sight, perceive color? Or does he live perpetually in a world devoid of color? A person who is deaf from birth can yet perceive sound. It is the nature of sound to vibrate. By learning to distinguish different types of vibration, a deaf person can recognize distinct categories of sound. Beethoven, by the age of forty-four, became deaf, and yet he continued composing music, his masterpieces. Some of his masterpieces, Moonlight Sonata, opera Fidelio, and a few more, were written during this later period when he slowly and gradually went deaf.

But what about color? Does color have a vibration or something similar to a vibration that the blind man can perceive?

And then some people are color-blind. The herpetologist Romulus Whitaker, the snake man of India who started the Madras Crocodile Park, is color blind and claims that he can discern shapes even in uniformly grey backgrounds, which ordinary people who are not color blind fail to recognize.

Those who are fond of literature know how color is meaningful and makes life richer. And one can read about the azure sky of summer, the bleeding red sky of the setting sun, and the turquoise green of the sea in the Bahamas. The colors of rose, lilac, lavender, daffodil, or any other flowers can only be enjoyed by those who have seen them in their natural surroundings. And when we read about them, we know what the writer meant.

But to a blind person who is reading these expressions, how would he decipher the colors? How would he know that the sky reflects different colors at different times of the day? Or the sea behaves like a color-changing chameleon depending on the shore, the current, and the season. There are so many different colors of flowers in abundance in nature. Reading the description of a scene and understanding it intellectually is far more different than actually visualizing the scene vividly in mind with all its hues of color. Do the human emotions that are linked with various colors are missed by the blind person? Can a blind person visualize color? I wonder. What does he feel when he reads or listens to the description of a scene replete with color? How does he fill up this void?

Jacob Bronowski, in his book Ascent of Man, which was also a very successful British television series, commented that after Issac Newton broke down a beam of white light passing it through a prism forming a hue of colors, a VIBGYOR, there came a sudden profusion of colors in the average English vocabulary. It became evident when one compares the literature of the period before and after the famous discovery of Newton that a broad spectrum of colors comes together to create white light.

Once, I remember, I was asked to write about my favorite color as a school assignment. Culturally, different colors mean different things to diverse observers. As per popular culture, blue has a calming effect on the mind, while yellow breeds happiness. Red is implied to be a regal color and may also be the color of danger. Black, in most cultures, is an inauspicious color. Besides, most colors have their uniqueness in popular culture. And how we relate to color depends on the culture we hail from.

Though cynics may call color merely a visual effect created by the reflection of light, philosophers, artists, romantics, and lovers will differ vehemently. Life would be so drab without color and our consciousness of them.

So what about those blind men and women who have never experienced the enjoyment of gazing toward a green undulating meadow covered with beautiful, colorful flowers kissing the blue sky at the horizon with the warm afternoon Sun setting with all the psychedelic hues of color? Or do they know something that we, the ordinary people, do not comprehend?

People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and its ends, but to me, it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. ”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

---