Ishihara’s Colorblind Plates
note, 11 march 2023: For a few months now, I’ve been working on a series of poems about how I see (and don’t see) color. I want to use the form of a colorblind plate to offer some stories/images/ideas about color. A main goal is to give the reader some insight into how color works for me right now. Eventually I will create a separate space for these poems and all the materials I’ve gathered in connection with them. For now, I’m putting it here.
An inspiration: OR/ Chihyang Hsu
See actual poem here.
OR, 2019
In this piece I quote Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, pulling his language to describe the sea. Instead of blue, the poet called the sea “wine-dark”. Conspiracy has it Homer was coler blind and some others say the concept of color blue did not exist in ancient Greek. Using an open-source algorithm to generate the Ishihara plates, a pattern used for a color-blind test, I print the words in dots of color but twist its medical use. BLUE and WINE DARK can be seen by the colorblind while OR can be seen by everyone.OR/ Chihyang Hsu
A cool idea, and helpful to know that you can get 2 rows of 4 letter words in the plate. At least, that’s what Scott tells me. I can’t see these letters, even when I invert the colors. I am more than colorblind.
A source on Homer and wine-dark
The ancient Greeks and color
Today, no one thinks that there has been a stage in the history of humanity when some colours were ‘not yet’ being perceived. [As they used to think about the ancient Greeks.] But thanks to our modern ‘anthropological gaze’ it is accepted that every culture has its own way of naming and categorising colours. This is not due to varying anatomical structures of the human eye, but to the fact that different ocular areas are stimulated, which triggers different emotional responses, all according to different cultural contexts.Can we hope to understand how the Greeks saw their world?
Different ocular areas are stimulated, which triggers different emotional responses, all according to different cultural contexts.
There is a specific Greek chromatic culture, just as there is an Egyptian one, an Indian one, a European one, and the like, each of them being reflected in a vocabulary that has its own peculiarity, and not to be measured only by the scientific meter of the Newtonian paradigm. Can we hope to understand how the Greeks saw their world?
The Greeks were perfectly able to perceive the blue tint, but were not particularly interested in describing the blue tone of sky or sea – at least not in the same way as we are, with our modern sensibility.
More to study: How to make sense of ancient Greek colours
Gray in James Schuyler’s Hymn to Life
The rain stops. April shines,
A Little
Gray descends.
An illuminous penetration of unbright light that seeps and coats
The ragged lawn and spells out bare spots and winter fallen branches.
Yardwork.
What a wonderful description of gray light! It shines a little, an unbright light that seeps and coats and exposes (spells out) the worn spots and the ordinary work needed to be done every spring. Lately, when I think of gray, I think of the opposite — not how it makes everything look shabby, worn, tired, but that it softens everything, making it mysterious and more gentle, relaxed.
It seems like Schuyler could be writing against one classic image of luminous gray light or, it made me think of this at least: the silver lining. Wondering about the origins of the phrase, I looked it up. John Milton’s poem, Comus:
That he, the Supreme good t’ whom all all things ill
are but as slavish officers of vengeance,
Would send a glistring Guardian if need were
To keep my life and homour unassail’d.
Was I deceiv’d, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
I did not err, there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted Grove.
Thinking about my color poems, and my interest in gray, I wonder how I could write about silver? For me, silver is the color that burns and shines when concentrated on the iced-over river, too bright for my eyes. Silver is also the color of the path when ice is present — it’s a warning sign, a whisper, Watch Out! Slippery.