Page 56 - Vol. VI #3

My wife’s summer garden is to the eye as music to the ear. Ear registers different wavelengths of sound, the eye of light. The plea- sures are in the blendings, contrasts, symme- tries; and, curiously in our perception’s motion. Painters know this. We read paintings as they invite the eye, as shape and color combine, left to right, up, down. The motion is ours, our eyeballs turn and irises adjust, sweeping, rolling, search- ing for rhythms.
Monochrome, we say. One color. Black on white. Grayscale. Brown on white. Sepia. And then Technicolor. The sepia door opens onto Munch- kinland. The startle, deliberately garish, of sudden primary colors in a land of dream and wonder: vivid reds, greens, yellows, blues. Ruby slippers! Yellow brick road! Horse of a different color! On my first flight from wintry Boston to Cartagena, Columbia, I felt that way. Vivid, blaz- ing colors everywhere, not only in the tropical flora/fauna (exotic birds!), but in the painted buildings, in the clothes and cars.
Blind Milton (formerly sighted), describes Satan’s hell at first sight as “waste and wild...yet from those flames / No light; but rather darkness vis- ible” (Paradise Lost, I, 62-64), and later as Poet laments that “Not with me / Returns the day, or sweet approach of even or morn,/ Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose...or human face divine. / But cloud instead and ever-during dark,” and prays for Celestial Light to “Shine inward... that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (PL, II, 21-27).
Of course in my dreams, or even when I shut my eyes, I can recall no colors, despite researchers reporting that most people do dream in color, or think they do.
as dogs’ ears pick up high-pitched sounds. On the other hand, cats and owls have night vi- sion because they have more rod receptors than we do, rather than cones. We, of course, have developed night vision goggles that either enhance dim light, send out infrared beams and read their reflections, or read the heat energy that objects themselves emit. Heat imaging instruments aboard a helicopter detect a fugi- tive bomber hiding in a backyard boat. The images are tinted green (howstuffworks.com). Elsewhere, researchers hope that the blind can learn to detect infrared wavelengths with their tongues, and thereby see the world in terms of heat variations (tcnl.bme.wisc.edu).
Different substances reflect light in different wavelengths, the wavelengths stimulate cells in the human retina—some 120 million rods and six or seven million cones. Hence with fall foli- age in New England; as the leaf turns molecularly from alive to dead, it turns from reflecting light in the green range of 450–560 nanometers to that in the yellow, orange, and red range of 560–700 nanometers (usda.gov). At twilight or eclipse: “brightness falls from the air.” There are no col- ors at night, except in artificial light (see Edward Hopper’s paintings). A grey day. All colors tinted, muted, bland. But at night, in street or headlight or flashlight’s shine, they seem surprised and not themselves. A peony in moonlight.
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In 1667, one year after Paradise Lost was pub- lished, Sir Issac Newton discovered the visible color spectrum. Shining sunlight through a prism, he projected seven different colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. He also found that when the bands of color were passed through another, inverted prism they emerged as white light; also that when only
On Color
Where humans have three kinds of cone cells, responding to three bands of light (red, green, blue), other species have more kinds and can see ultraviolet wavelengths we cannot, just
one ray passed though a prism it retained its color. He diagramed the basic colors in a circle or wheel, relating their compliments, contrasts, and gradations. But where Newton considered colors a property of light, Goethe in 1810 con-
DeWitt henry