Relativity is both literal and metaphorical. "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful," says Emerson, "we must carry it with us or we find it not." There is the whole question of the eye of the beholder: - who is doing the seeing, with an individual and particular way of looking? From what angle, and through what filters or fogs? Subjectivity is partly a function of predisposition: in general, we see what we expect to see. One person sees a weed, while another sees a plant whose uses haven't been discovered yet. Some people see ghosts or demons. Most people see stuff when looking at a clear sky - cells and strings of cells. Wilhelm Reich thought of them as orgone energy. Yoga students see them a lot when they do breathing exercises, and consider them benign. Yet cocaine addicts see them as aggressive insects.
Late at night, I have wondered aloud, to one person or another, what it really means to say that we see a color. We may both look at something and both identify it as being red, but how do we know that we're actually seeing the same color? Maybe what you habitually identify as "red" is actually what I habitually identify as "blue". There is no way we can ever know. This line of speculation sometimes elicits blank incomprehension, and never meets with agreement. Usually the other person brings up color-blindness tests. That's totally irrelevant to what I mean, but I never can seem to frame the objection correctly.
Joel Achenbach (again!) in his syndicated column Why Things Are puts it this way: "Is redness an artifact of the brain, varying from person to person, or does everyone see the very same red?......There's no guarantee that people are 'seeing' in their minds the same color when they talk about, say, 'red' or 'green'."
It cheers me to know that I'm not the only one who considers this a valid question, and that a professional science writer has traveled some way on this particular train of thought. He points out that any definition of color is necessarily tautologous. And science is on our side. "After all, red is nothing more than light (photons) moving at a specific wavelength," says Achenbach. "Photons aren't red! Nor is a wavelength red."
People are attuned to different things. I like to think I have a pretty good eye for detail, texture, color, and so forth. When out in nature I drink in the sights. Every vein on a leaf becomes precious. But have a friend who always picks out animals from the landscape. Any kind of little creature, no matter how protectively colored or how still it's sitting, he spots it. I don't really think that on an ophthalmologist's chart I would necessarily test any worse for eyesight than my friend - we just see differently.
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