Thoughtful Colours
Are dreams in colour? How about early morning thoughts?
Today started with colourful thoughts!
My midnight blue computer opened in dark mode and switched shortly to bright mode, this way presenting me for a broad palette of greys in the various parts of the user interface.
A cup of black espresso lungo with its brownish foam in a green cup was a perfect complement to the emerging celeste day sky behind the shady clouds of orange-white with every tone of bluish grey spread and spangled over the top of the world.
The yellow light of an LED lamp guided my fingers across the keyboard, while the rainbow of soft electronic tones from Kitaro’s Silk Road soundtrack guided my mind across the spontaneous questions:
What’s the colour of silk? I know that: I saw it being unwound from the cocoons long ago, but no matter its own colour, it was soon dyed into just about any nuance and tone of the colour palette.
And the road? Curling its way through the Himalayas, through many countries and landscapes, many ages, with many creatures of every thinkable colour watching the caravans from above and below.
Didn’t get much sleep, so my red eyeballs were helplessly surrounding each steel blue iris and its pupil in the attempt to maintain a solid visual grip of the light grey electronic paper, but somehow tending to get too attracted by the coloured noise on the screen — the traffic light buttons in one corner, the peach-coloured and magenta icons of the toolbar in another, and that inciting little green plus sign for adding more pages, more meaning, to the writing.
Now finally here, ready to write. The purpose being to end up with something that isn’t just black and white, not just the same greyish mix of pencilled dust over the paper — symbolically, as the computer doesn’t even leave a trace of dust on the writing, letting it be all transparent in a sense, by showing only a white frame around the cut-out letter-shaped holes through which the screen’s colorless background let itself show.
This way, even the most colourful descriptions are written by the colour of colorless. Between the lines, however, the full universe of all what the screen is capable of is mixed into a bright white. Between the lines, and even between the letters and between the lines of the letters.
Now I just wonder
What is the colour of the writing while still not on the screen?
While still in the mind, on its way through my nervous system into the fingertips and then the keys and further through the inner wirings and logic of the computer, the Wi-Fi, the router, the hundreds of internet devices used to make the writing finally enter the screen as colorless emptiness — and controlling the muscles of my arms, hands, fingers, eyes, — and lips, as I cannot help reading aloud while shaping the beat, the rhythm, the voice of the text.
And IÂ wonder
What colour has the writing from the moment where I put it there, on potential display on the Internet, but before anyone opens it for reading?
And when entering the reader’s screen, the air between the reader’s computer and their eyes, and through the eyes, the nerves behind them, through the brain in a distributed pattern of electrical-chemical impulses and traces, some lasting, others not?
And when being part of a moment of consciousness, perhaps for a fraction of a second, perhaps longer, but still to be potentially recalled and remembered?
What is the colour of a thought? An understanding? An emotion? A memory?
Are thoughts genuinely colourful? Are colours?
Not entirely related, but I've always wondered if what I see as, for example, blue is the same you see as blue. Then there are people with tetrachromacy who just see way more colors than you or me. By the way, magenta surprised me! When I studied linguistics, we learned about a study that proved that men know way fewer names for colors than women.