The Color Blue

Kindergarten teachers or parents teach us our colors with pigment on paper and the written representation followed by the verbal confirmation. When, or if, we remember learning our colors, that’s how we remember learning them. Like many other things that we learn, the real lesson is in the environment. When I was a young man I’d think about the concepts of color and language mingling. When someone is color blind there are definite tests and some dangers (Red and Green are common color blindness, kind of make stoplights useless yes? Sort of, except that in most countries the colors are always in the same place, so; top means go, middle means yield, bottom means stop, and always check the intersection anyhow.).

But, nodding to my younger self, what if you see the color you’ve learned to call red and the one you learned to call green just fine, is it the same color I call red or green? I never did quite answer that, or want to bad enough to, say, go into neuro – anything. Another thought has occurred to me here in my dotage; the flavor, tone, depth of color. I grew up here, but, still, as of this date, spent most of my life in Oregon, mostly in the Portland Metro region. I also spent three years hitch-hiking the states, and a year or so in Europe. I’ve seen different skies, different grass, different birds and ground critters.

For absolute certain I can tell you a blue sky in Michigan in the summer is a fuller, chewier, deeper shade of blue than any day in Oregon, at least in Portland metro. To the East of Portland, you get a desert/high sierra sky. Clearer, but not as blue as mid-Michigan and shallow in comparison. Montana skies can get their own shade of blue, Alaskan skies too. Kansas and Nebraska will make a Michigan sky, almost, less water to reflect off of. The flora and fauna in Oregon, in the rain forest and valley at least, aren’t quite as brilliant either. They radiate a a feeling of age and serenity, and the color seems augmented by the surroundings, But, for instance, an Oregon blue Jay and a Michigan Blue jay have wildly different plumage; color-wise that is.

Oregon Blue jays are pale, closer to gray, like the most frequent color of the sky, even before we started burning fossil fuels for — anything. A Michigan blue jay looks like a party hat, dark blue but radiating, like a neon dark blue. I never saw a cardinal in Oregon. In Michigan they are red as a teacher’s pencil. Red as the books of a tech company that falls six months behind. The foliage is farmland and old forest stuff, not varied or interesting, but the green is intensely green.

Even if the way we process the event of blue (as opposed to its name) me growing up here, and, my son, for instance, growing up in Oregon, PDX metro, the meaning of blue is different, our expectations of blue are different. Hold on a sec, I’m not suggesting the sky is never clear in Portland, just that when it is, the color is paler. The slight nod to evolution with the Jays was, perhaps unfair (though, Portland has, I believe, always had low cloud cover, if you need to blend into the sky, paler is better). The theory, however, I think is sound.

I don’t have a scientific mind, but sometimes the process is the best way to organize thoughts. Maybe not the best way, but when I can’t find a creative, the methodical way is next best or giving up. I am interested in language and perception though. By the time a kid enters school he or she (I’m going to pick one or the other soon, I mean if I need a personal pronoun) has a working verbal command of the English language, even the decidedly subpar thinkers. Yet you can get a PhD in English, or, I assume, the language of the country the university is in. From day one English is usually translating the spoken word into the written word. Heh, a brief pause — language is a bit different in Portland too; Couch St, for instance, is pronounced cooch, Glisan is not gliss-an it’s gleason, those are just a few examples. Language is the basic building block of everything we conceive or perceive. When asked to describe an event, we chose words we understand and that make sense, the degree to which we try to be precise is secondary to the degree with which we try to be coherent. I don’t think it’s even a conscious thing; ask a cop trying to get details from witnesses. It’s unlikely they all perceived something different, and yet many details are wildly different from witness to witness. They’re usually good about who shot who, but not so good on what they look like.

Michigan spends a fair part of the year gray too (I’m talking south central, but under the right circumstances everywhere here gets that blue and that blue jay). It’s a duller, harder gray. The PDX gray is soft and enveloping, the gray in South Central Michigan is like concrete, hard and distant, apart. With the world wide web opening the entire world, I can communicate with people in lands I’ve never seen. I don’t know how to ask what blue means to them or how vibrant the foliage. I remember London being a lot like Portland, often gray and wet. The birds were a bit more vibrant, but, say, a French bird has a much shorter trip to London than a midwestern bird does to the west coast. Another brief tangent, I was watching some show and the character says “the Dunbar hotel, meet there. It’s abandoned, from a time when LA still had some dignity.” I thought to myself “the thirteenth century”? That tangent reminds me not to lump in the west coast as small and singular thing. Spokane, Portland, Corvallis, Shasta and San Francisco are all within sixteen hours of one another (that’s Spokane to San Francisco, and, around the speed limit. It’s probably closer to twelve. I’ve made Portland to Las Vegas once in fifteen hours, unlike certain astronauts, that’s with out diapers or gas station food.). Portland and SF are close in sky color, so are Corvallis and Shasta, Spokane is like a mix of Shasta and Portland. If you spread out those sixteen hours East, things change a lot.

Huh, I didn’t want to devolve into a travel blog, so I tried not to and didn’t fail too miserably. I’m just saying even if what you and I both call blue is the same color, are associations with it are different. The fashion industry depends on colors being empirical, then again, sometimes they come up with hideous shit and people wear it. Sometimes what makes it hideous is the color scheme, not the cut or material or symmetry. Fuck, I’m going to pretend I just lost a salient point that was going to tie this all together and make you Wow Out Loud (WOOL, oh, Wow Overtly Out Loud). Truth is I don’t think I had one, or, if I had something close to one I blew my wad in the first paragraph. Um, baby this never happens to me? I must have had too much to Drink?