For me, neither color nor the absence of color exists; for me, nothing but color and its absence exists.
I discovered that I was "afflicted" with this "condition" (which I inherited from my grandfather by way of my mother) rather late, at 16 to be precise, on a dead day in biology class. Our instructor, having exhausted his lesson plans for the semester, displayed the first of a number of tests used to befuddle those of us who were born with the incorrect allotment of retinal cones. There were those who saw a certain number, say 13, and there was me—I who saw a random cluster of dots in a circle with no discernible pattern.
"You are colorblind," the teacher said, pleased with himself and his little experiment, grinning the ridiculous, slightly sadistic grin of a vindicated high school instructor. This was, I suppose, the extent of his authority and power over me: to tell me that my experience of color has been, up to this point, almost completely false. So he had every right to feel vindicated, I suppose. But partial colorblindness is not uncommon, in fact. Roughly 10% of males are at least partially colorblind, so of course it stands to reason that at least one student in an introductory biology class in high school would fail at least one or two of the color wheel tests; most of us never learn that we a colorblind, however.
How absurd! Most people who are colorblind don’t even know it! I sometimes wonder if this fact comes as a disappointment to color-seeing people—people who have every reason to believe that they can see every color. After all, it takes the concentrated intervention of a "normal" person who can devise a way to test for lack to tell us that we cannot experience the beauty of the spectrum, or at least not in the "correct and true" way of the majority of humans. If it weren’t for such efforts on my behalf, I wouldn’t even know what I was missing when I look at a rainbow, or the laughable version of a rainbow that I see. (Of course, even though I know that I’m missing something, I still don’t know what it is I’m missing, and I can’t know. So actually, I’m no better off. Sorry!)
The inability to see color, even in the perfect light of day, is not experienced as deprivation to me (despite the occasional difficulty with reading a color-coded roadmap or something like that). This is because color and its absence exist for me, as with other colorblind people, purely as a function of language; even though I have never seen the color green, for instance, I still have a linguistic concept of the word "green." That is to say, I still experience the color discursively, which is also the only way I can experience the absence of this color.
With everyone, it’s the same. Words entrench the color into us, we entrench the colors into words. When I was young, therefore, before I knew that I could not see color, I was taught how to describe things by their color: The sky is blue; it is sky-blue. Water, at a distance, is blue, too, but up close, water is clear. These flowers are red. This shirt is yellow. Those shoes are brown. And so on until every object and phenomenon was classified according to the possible spectrum.
And after I learned that I cannot see color, I had to learn that the blue I have seen is not blue, that likewise yellow is not yellow, that I have mixed this blue that is not blue with this yellow that is not yellow to produce a green that is not green. And so on until every object and phenomenon was declassified according to an impossible spectrum.
So I’m actually quite thankful I found out I am colorblind, that there are (according to several reliable sources) several colors I can’t see and never will. This "condition" or "affliction" has given me the gift of rethinking the world we are made to experience through words—the world of the words and the words of the world, the innerworld the words create and the outerworld the words signify and the implacable threads of conditioning that run through them. Colorblindness has created in me the possibility of interiority that is both the irrevocable product of language and a place utterly protected from our words, concepts, and distinctions—a place where language turns in on itself and experience dissolves into the words that constitute it.
I’m also left handed, but that’s another story altogether.
August 26, 2012
