Jerome Blue Skies and Grey Boxes Basically there are two kinds of designer: Helicopters and vending machines. This is not a woman, this is a picture.” “I like work - it fascinates me - I can sit and look at it for hours.” -Jerome K. Inspecting one of his latest works, she unwisely said: “But, surely the arm of this woman is much too long.” “Madame,” the artist politely replied, “you are mistaken. Julio Cortazar A lady visited Matisse in his studio. There was a man who became so intrigued with watching salamanders, that he ended up as a salamander watching the man he was. And a primitive tribe in the New Guinea Highlands still speak a black and white language and distinguish colors in terms of brightness. These, despite the hoax, do have at least seven words for white. French has two words for brown: brun and marron, but there isn’t one in Chinese, Japanese, Welsh, or (less surprisingly) Inuit. Creek and Natchez Indians use the same name for yellow and green, as do the Highland Scots for blue and green. Swahili doesn’t have any, so coined bulu from English. Italian has three words for blue: celeste, azzurro and blu. An African desert tribe has no word for green, but six for red. If eight or more, then purple, pink, orange, and grey are added in any order. If five then whichever didn’t make four, yellow or green. If there are four, then it is green or yellow. If there are three words, the third is red. Today, although we can differentiate millions of shades, our vocabulary still only has about thirty color words. Orange has always suffered an identity crisis. Chaucer referred to it as “bitwixe yelow and reed”. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue and even in the Middle Ages there was still no English word for orange. Some ethnologists extended his conclusion to the entire Greek population of that time. A similar misconception was propagated by William Gladstone, who thought Homer was color blind because of his meagre use of color words. This was a scientific paper which debunked the myth that the Inuit (Eskimo) have a hundred or more words for snow - actually they have no more than the English do for rain. The fence was utterly dumbfounded, each post stood there with nothing round it. Took out the spaces with great care and built a castle in the air. An architect who saw this thing stood there one summer evening. I’m reminded of the Lennon-McCartney lyric which asks: “What do you see when you turn out the light? - I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.” “Every object has two aspects, the common aspect, which is the one we generally see and the one which is seen by everyone, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals see at moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation.” -de Chirico There was a fence with spaces you could look through if you wanted to. But what I kick might be something else, so all I know is that when I open my eyes- it’s come back again. I could give it a kick to reassure myself like Samuel Johnson who, on hearing Bishop Berkeley declare that reality was only a state of mind, kicked a rock to disprove him. Certainly when I look at something, then shut my eyes, I can’t see whatever it is- so can’t be sure that it’s still there. A situation obliquely analogous to a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there. There is a theory that when you aren’t looking at something it doesn’t exist.
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