–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Five months into life, babies start to recognize color starting with red. But the colors we see, do not exist in the physical world ! They are mere post-processed results of the brain’s model of the world. Every time we see a color, we are only seeing your brain’s capability for modeling the physical world. We are seeing a totally made up fiction that our brain constructs for us to marvel at and enjoy. Realizing this makes even the garish colors I wish didn’t exist in my line of sight, a miracle of sort. Objects are a certain color because they absorb some wavelengths while others bounce off. In some sense, the color we perceive is the color it isn’t. It’s the segment of the spectrum that is reflected away. The visible spectrum is a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. A flower maybe more colorful to a bird than to my (mere) human eye. The ultraviolet ‘colors’ on a flower serve the purpose of attracting bees and birds that aide in pollination. The photographs of the universe we see in images from radio astronomy are renditions made from detected wave forms for us to better understand the information. It is not necessarily what it looks like. It’s all a man-made rendition. Talking about color can slip into a metaphysical debate … but that nothing new. It’s been going on for centuries.
Aristotle put forth the first color theory : it’s sent by God from heaven through celestial rays of light. Oh well ! 2000 years later, Sir Isaac Newton looked through a prism and identified the colors RYGBIV as the visible spectrum, the colors that the cones in our eye are sensitive to. This was done before. Until then, it was assumed that the rainbow colors were created by impurities in the glass. But Newton went a step further : he used another prism to put the wavelengths back together again. Pure white sunlight was considered a gift from God. During the middle ages, it was unthinkable that it could be created by mixing colored light. Newton went on to wrote Opticks, the first scientific treatise on light.
Goethe challenged Newton’s views on color. He hypothesized that color was not simply a scientific measurement, but a subjective experience perceived differently by each viewer. It lead to the first experiment on the physiological effects of color. I have a hypothesis of my own. My brain obeys the biological impulse to color. But between impulse and response, there is a lifetime of stubborn choice and aesthetic preference. My response looks like this :
How do I explain what blue feels like ? Or how indigo looks ? Can I reduce it to a psychological reaction to a certain wavelength of visible light ? How do I explain my looking at all the clothes in the world but only seeing the ones that are blue ? …. It is said that when you are madly in love, the poet awakens. There is no poet in me. Some borrowed words :
“We love to see any part of the earth tinged with blue, cerulean, the color of the sky, the celestial color,” Thoreau wrote in another spring entry. “The blue of my eye sympathizes with this blue in the snow,” he recorded in a winter one. “Blue is light seen through a veil,”
– Henry David Thoreau
The power of profound meaning is found in blue, and first in its physical movements (1) of retreat from the spectator, (2) of turning in upon its own centre. The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper. Blue is the typical heavenly colour… The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest… [Footnote:] Supernatural rest, not the earthly contentment of green. The way to the supernatural lies through the natural.
When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human… When it rises towards white, a movement little suited to it, its appeal to men grows weaker and more distant. In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all — an organ.
– Wassily Kandinsky
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
– Rebecca Solnit
Blue is bunting, indigo and quick. Blue is jay, its chatter like jazz. Blue is grosbeak is bluebird is blackbird turned sky. The Chisos mountains at dusk are blue. Blue is ghost-like. Twilight. Deep border blue. Once is the blue moon where panthers dance. Twice is the blue belly of lizards flashing. Blue waves are heat waves, dervishes in sand. Blue is the long song of storm clouds gathering with rain.
– Terry Tempest Williams
“electricity and purity love”
– Freda Kahlo
“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.”
– Rebecca Solnit
“To make one appear more distant than another, you should represent the air as rather dense. Therefore make the first building . . . of its own color; the next most distant make less outlined and more blue; that which you wish to show at yet another distance, make bluer yet again; and that which is five times more distant make five times more blue.”
– Da Vinci
This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful — but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
– Goethe
A different kind of poetry :
( my notes from the Color of Life exhibit at California Academy of Sciences )
Blue is rarely present in nature as pigment. Blue animals, blue eyes, blue flowers, blue rock, … are very uncommon. Often, what we think is blue upon close inspection, is not blue pigment at all but tricks played on us by fractured light on nano crystals that exist on the surface. Change the ambient light conditions, and it all changes. Remember how the blue or white dress picture went viral on social media ? Polar bears may look white in color but they have transparent fur. Salmon is pink because of its protein rich diet. Color is in the eye of the beholder. A species appearance maybe shaped – over long periods of time – by how its predators, prey or mates see it. Animals with vivid colors and bright ornaments win mates and get to leave maximum number of off-spring. ( à la Alessandro Michele’s Gucci. They catch attention. ) Some species use color to ward off predators ( à la Yohji’s black garments. He claims to make clothes to protect women from unwanted eyes ). Pitohui bird of New Guinea’s blue feathers that produce a neuro-toxin that is fatal. Scorpions evolved to have an UV-reflecting armor as a kind of sunblock that made them more day active. The marble berry is not blue at all, but have outer layers of cells arranged in such a way that berries reflect more light than any other living thing on earth, perhaps to catch a bird’s eye. Colorful tricks of light are all around us. My favorite is the answer to : Why is earth blue ?
I used to wonder why the sea was blue at a distance and green close up and colorless for that matter in your hands. A lot of life is like that. A lot of life is just a matter of learning to like blue.
– Miriam Pollard, The Listening God.
Image credit : NASA
The clouds and the ice looks white – because it reflects back sunlight. The continents are green or brown – depending on how greedy / advanced the society got. But the rest of it is blue – depending on the depth of oceans. Our oceans are blue, not because the sky is blue and the water reflects it. Water molecules prefer to absorb certain wavelengths and reflect some. The easiest for it to absorb – infrared, ultraviolet and red light. In moderate depths, we would be protected from the UV rays and the red lights get absorbed. Go a little deeper, the oranges go away. Next go the yellows. Greens and violets go next. Go a little deeper, the blues disappear too. Since most of our planet is covered in oceans, it looks blue from afar. It’s customary to pay homage to Carl Sagan’ pale blue dot at the end of this discussion :
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
– Carl Sagan
Why is all this trivia relevant on a style blog ? Coz not all love stories are the same. Sartorial love stories should not start in a store and end in a landfill.
Next : My shades of blue