by David Kastan
Gladstone, then, might well have been on to something, but not exactly what he thought he was on to. It wasn’t the Greeks’ physiologically undeveloped color vision that explained what Gladstone found in his reading of Homer but a culture that had little use for abstract color words—and particularly for “blue,” which existed in ancient Greece mainly in the great expanses of sea and sky, both of which can dramatically change colors. Neither is chromatically unified nor stable. Who needs “blue”? Clearly not Homer or the Greeks, who, in any case, always responded to color more in terms of luminosity (with words like “radiant” and “shining”) than in terms of hue (for example, “blue” or “yellow”).
But Gladstone’s error points us to something true about words used to describe color in particular—and about language in general. Although what we are able to see is a function of a common human physiology, what we call it is a function of culture. If we don’t have a word “blue,” obviously we don’t use it to name the color sensation English speakers normally identify as that color. Maybe “wine-dark” will have to do.
Color words, then, aren’t exactly the names attached to properties we know without them but are part of how we come to know those properties. The eye sees what it is disposed to see, and language does a lot of the disposing. Language, as the anthropologist Edward Sapir famously said, may not be as much “a garment as a prepared road or groove.”4 That is, it focuses our vision, providing the lenses through which we look, defining, we might say, the visual field.
It is easy to think that language is mere labeling. That seems to be what Genesis tells us. The animals parade before Adam, and Adam then gives them names: “And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Gen. 2:20, KJV). Something is, and then it gets a name. And it might easily seem as if our names for color work more or less this way. A parent plays Adam, pointing at a colored object, saying, “This is blue.” A child hears the reiterated word “blue” in relation to various objects with similar color characteristics and over time comes to generalize these to form a coherent category of blueness that eventually allows the child accurately to apply the word “blue” to previously unseen examples. God says let there be blue, but we give it its name.
Yet that won’t quite do. It obviously didn’t work for Homer. He called it “wine-dark.” In English, however, there is a word “blue,” but it refers to a wide range of colors we are willing to call blue, from powder blue to navy blue—that is, from a blue that is almost white to one that is nearly black. And then there is teal. Or is that green? And yet English speakers confidently assemble and distinguish a whole variety of shades as types of blue. Is it our eyes or our language that enables this?
“Both” is of course the answer. Color vision must be universal. The human eye and brain work the same way for nearly all people as a property of their being human—determining that we all see blue. But the color lexicon, meaning not merely the particular words but also the specific chromatic space they are said to mark, clearly has been shaped by the particularities of culture. Since the spectrum of visible colors is a seamless continuum, where one color is thought to stop and another begin is arbitrary. The lexical discrimination of particular segments is conventional rather than natural. Physiology determines what we see; culture determines how we name, describe, and understand it. The sensation of color is physical; the perception of color is cultural.
UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW
This is true even for the colors of the rainbow. In the smooth gradation of the visible spectrum from red to violet arching across the sky, colors are spectacularly revealed to us in their perfection. William Wordsworth’s iambic-marked joy at its appearance is hardly unique: “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.”5
For John Keats, the accompanying emotion was even stronger. “There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,” he wrote in his poem “Lamia”—“awful,” not in the pejorative sense in which we use the word today, but in its original meaning: awe-inspiring.6 Keats feared that the efforts of natural science to “unweave the rainbow” would reduce it to just another item in “the dull catalogue of common things.” Understanding would abolish awe. At an infamous dinner organized by the English painter Benjamin Haydon at his London studio late in 1817, Keats rushed to agree with his friend Charles Lamb that Isaac Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors” (a comment provoked by Haydon’s inclusion of Newton’s face in the crowd scene of his new painting Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem).7
For many writers of his day, Newton’s optical discoveries were thought presumptuously to pull back “Enchantment’s veil,” as the poet Thomas Campbell complained.8 But the wonder of the rainbow’s radiant colors survives its scientific explanation, and another poet, James Thompson, was so taken with Newton’s account of “the grand ethereal bow” that for him it was Newton who was “awful” (in the sense that Keats had intended the word) rather than the rainbow whose appearance Newton had explained.9
Although scholars gradually came to understand the phenomenon in scientific terms—as an optical illusion produced by sunlight reflected and refracted through a water droplet and viewed from a particular angle—the rainbow never loses its ability to astonish and delight (Figure 3). And even the science that explains it creates its own surprises: no two people, even if they are standing next to each other, ever see exactly the same rainbow, and each eye of each observer actually sees a different one. And, in fact, the rainbow is constantly being re-formed as the light strikes different water droplets. The rainbow is not an object; it is a vision—a vision dependent upon sunlight, water, geometry, and a sophisticated visual system. Like color itself, even explained, it remains a wonder.
The truly “awful” rainbow “once in heaven” was the one that served as the symbol of God’s covenant with the creatures of the earth after the flood. “I do set my bow in the cloud,” God tells Noah, as the sign of the guarantee never again “to destroy all flesh” (Gen. 9:13). The rainbow’s perfectly organized spectral arc of luminous color was the visible promise of the reconciliation of heaven and earth. Now, the sight of a rainbow most likely produces pleasure rather than awe. (Vladimir Nabokov comments on “the quick smile with which we greet a rainbow.”)10 For Keats, however, it still inspired something of the wonder of that awful rainbow of peace with its reiterated gift of color.
Although it may seem ungrateful to ask, how large was that gift? How many colors are there? Seven is, of course, the obvious answer. Newton, we all know, saw seven colors in the rainbow’s seamless continuum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. ROY G. BIV in the familiar mnemonic—or, as is sometimes said in the United Kingdom, “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain,” though in our historically unmindful, consumerist age, this in Britain for a time became “Rowntree Of York [a British candy maker now owned by Nestlé] Gives Best In Value.” But, however the colors are remembered, almost no one else (though Dante, in the Purgatorio, is a prominent exception) seems to have seen seven. Not even Newton at first.
FIGURE 3: Rainbow on a Long Island beach, 2016
In a letter written in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, Newton confessed that his eyes were “not very critical in distinguishing colors.”11 Once he saw eleven in the rainbow. Usually he saw only five—red, yellow, green, blue, and violet—until he looked again or, rather, until he stopped looking. There were seven musical notes in the diatonic scale. The world was created in seven days. And the rainbow was a sign of cosmic harmony, so it had to have seven colors—and Newton therefore added (saw?) orange between red and yellow, and indigo between blue and violet. Although Shakespeare in King John had said it was a “wasteful and ridiculous excess” to “add another hue / Unto the rainbow” (4.2.13–16), for Newton it was necessary to add two to those he had seen. Our seven-colored rainbow was born, though more as a child of faith than as one of science.
Aristotle, and most of the ancient
s, saw only three colors in the rainbow. About two thousand years later, perhaps John Milton did, too. In Paradise Lost, he writes of the “triple-colored bow,” though it must be admitted that he was blind at the time. Isidore of Seville saw four. Titian saw six (see his painting Juno and Argus), and so apparently did Steve Jobs (look at the Apple apple). Virgil, more discriminatingly, recognized “a thousand colors,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley saw a “million-colored bow,” but he, of course, was prone to romantic exuberance. Newton’s faith-based seven, however, has carried the day. We now are convinced that the rainbow consists of “seven proper colors chorded,” as the poet Robert Browning wrote, his participle picking up Newton’s musical analogy. We see seven whether or not there are in fact seven to see. Always with color, what we see is what we think is there.
FIGURE 4: Color illusion
PIGMENTS OF THE IMAGINATION
Look at Figure 4.
The two seemingly tilted square tiles are obviously different colors. The lower one is white; the top one is a darkish gray, what the paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams calls “Serious” gray. But place your index finger over the line that separates them, covering the adjoining edges. The two squares in fact are the same gray color, but it is impossible to see them that way. This is often known as a “Cornsweet illusion,” named after the psychologist who first described it in the 1960s. Our eyes trick us. Or, rather, our brains do. Our brains introduce all sorts of information that our eyes have not transmitted to them. The differing backgrounds somewhat affect how we see the tiles, but primarily we extrapolate from the adjoining edges of the squares (the darker edge seemingly in shade, the lighter one apparently illuminated), and our brains create the sharply contrasting colors we think we see.
But all color is always something created rather than merely detected, not just in these cleverly created optical illusions. The electromagnetic waves our eyes detect are not colored, yet our brains allow us to see them as colors, and even to see them as colors different from those we presumably are seeing. We know, for example, that colors look different in different light. “Colors seen by candle-light / Will not look the same by day,” as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote.12 But still it is the daylight color that we take to be real, though even in daylight shadows will make different parts of the same object appear to be different colors. If we look at a white bowl, it does not appear all white since some of it is in shadow. We are, however, certain that it is a white bowl, though an artist could not use only white paint to depict what we are seeing. Our brains not only create the color but also correct for the lighting conditions, normalizing what we see.
And colors are perceived differently as they appear in relation to other colors. A student of Leonardo reported that the great painter would teach his students that “colors appear what they are not, according to the ground which surrounds them.”13 This, of course, was also the essence of the teaching of the legendary twentieth-century painter and teacher Josef Albers, whose brilliant Interaction of Color explores the inevitable discrepancies between color as it is physically presented and color as it is perceived.14 It is the almost daily intuition we have as we choose our clothing and wonder if this “goes with” that. It is also the logic of the old joke of Rodney Dangerfield: “I told my dentist my teeth were turning yellow; he told me to wear a brown tie.”
In addition, there are colors we see with our eyes open but that aren’t in any sense present in the object we are looking at. Stare at an illustration of an American flag for about thirty seconds and then look at a blank piece of paper. You will see an image of the flag, but one in which the red stripes appear to be blue-green. This is called an after-image. The color distortion is produced by the fatigue of the retina’s red color receptors as a result of staring at the flag, allowing the more active green and blue receptors to be excited by the white light reflected off the blank paper, and this colors the image. We see a flag with blue-green stripes, but no such flag is there.
We even can see colors with our eyes closed. We rub our eyes and blobs of color often appear floating behind our eyelids. These are called phosphenes. Scientists explain that these are the result of biophotons produced by atoms in the retina. This is a kind of light but more like that produced by some deep-sea creatures than by the electromagnetic energy of the sun.
Isaac Newton’s physics couldn’t account for these color illusions, but he knew that they existed. In a manuscript begun about 1665, Newton records various of his experiments with color, including one in which he took a sharp knife and placed it “betwixt my eye & the bone as neare to the backside of my eye as I could,” and saw “severall white, darke, & coloured circles” as he stimulated his eye “with the point of the bodkin” (Figure 5).15 This, it should go without saying, is not an experiment you should try at home.
But all colors seem in some fundamental sense to be illusions, not just the illusory ones. As objective, physical facts, colors are not colored. Always with color there is something more than meets the eye.
FIGURE 5: Isaac Newton, “Of Colours,” experiment 58, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 3995
LIVING COLOR
This is really what the book is about—about both what meets the eye and the so much more that doesn’t. It is about how we see colors, about what we see or think we see, and about what we do with the colors that we recognize or imagine. It is about how we make color and how color in turn makes us.
The book’s structure is neither thematic nor chronological. It is topical (in several senses of the word) and opportunistic. Color provides the book’s principle of organization, which, among other things, means that you can read the book straight through or start with your favorite color. There are ten chapters. We begin by unashamedly unweaving the rainbow and following the order of its seven constituent colors. And the book ends with three more—on black, white, and gray. These are achromatic colors, which don’t appear in the spectrum of visible light and define their own independent color scale, though they appear in the spectrum of our concerns.
Each chapter uses its nominal focus on a single color to explore some discrete aspect of what makes the subject of color as compelling as color is itself. Each individual color becomes—as is the way with colors generally—emblematic. In each chapter the color functions as the focal point of a consideration of one of the various ways in which color appears and matters in our lives.
A friend (clearly an academic), reading an early draft of the book, recognized that its central argument was twofold: that colors are ontologically impure, toggling between the self and the world, and that they are figuratively promiscuous, available for almost any kind of metaphoric appropriation. That seems more or less right, though the adjectives “impure” and “promiscuous” seem unconsciously to import an all-too familiar anticolor bias, which suspiciously views color as mere seduction.16 Color is indeed seductive, but it isn’t mere seduction, or mere anything else. It is essential to what it means for us to be human. It doesn’t get much more essential than that.
The book begins with a chapter called “Roses Are Red,” which asks if even the red ones really are. It is about how we perceive color, but it is also about the nature of color itself: what is the property that we see—or more accurately make, for we make color color. An eye for color turns out not to be just a term of praise but a literal fact of its composition. And the book ends with a chapter on “Gray Areas,” on that dull color, indeed the very color of dullness, but that is also the color of what once in photography, television, and film successfully stood in for all the vibrant colors of the world. We call that effect “black and white,” but it is almost always gray (although if the images are pornographic they become still differently colored: “blue” movies, we say in English, but they are “green” in Spanish and “pink” in Japanese).
In between there is a chapter that thinks about how color serves as a remarkably inexact metaphor for racial difference, beginning with an account of when Asians first “became” y
ellow; and another about how very material color can be, focusing on the dyes and pigments that allow us to reproduce the colors that we (think) we see. There is an exploration of color names, although as Fairfield Porter said, colors don’t always correspond to words we know but “are themselves a language that is not spoken”—and of the related issue of color spaces, wondering why it is, as Herman Melville asks in Billy Budd, that “distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but [wonder] where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other?”17 There are discussions of an Iranian election and a Ukrainian revolution, of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and The Wizard of Oz, of pigeons and zebras and whales (oh my!), and of little black dresses, little white lies, and the Little Red Book.
On Color may seem too minimalist a title for the book or just too vague. It is, however, accurate. It is a book about color seen from ten angles created by ten colors as each intersects with the world. Each chapter explores a distinct way in which we understand color as we use it to construct the world we live in.