Color Blind July 1, 2008
Posted by Christina in Musings.Tags: color blind, existential, green, red, yellow
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I’m color blind! Blind blind blind!!!
My world was unhappily rocked a few days ago at the doctor’s office. It was during the easiest and least embarrassing part for me- the color vision test. I’m plenty embarrassed by my inability to see much besides the giant E at the tiptop of the eye exam chart sans contacts or classes. Usually I just grunt sounds at the doctor hoping they’ll interrupt the noise as the correct letter. So, color. Easy peasy. I love colorful things and was 100% confident in my ability to distinguish red from green from yellow from blue. Ho ho!
As my chest swelled with pride as the doctor flipped the pages of the color test booklet, “89!” “66!”, she turned the page to a swirl of brown and green dots. I could see brown dots of all sizes. I could see green dots sizes of all sizes. Some looked more maroon, others more sage. But I paused. Hmph. “Well, this is tricky,” I said aloud. No help from the doctor so I blurted “55!” She turned the page. Uh. Another page with green and brown dots. And another! Four total. That was my first experiences with brown and green in the color test. These weren’t brilliant colors. To my eyes, they were very muted, gray in tone. Like the vibrant red and green had been exposed to the sun for too long. Still, at the end of the exam, I felt confident I nailed it as usual. “You missed two,” she said. “What?!? Which two?” I exclaimed before I could stop the words. She showed me two of the four green and brown pages. “This one is…” she began. I finished for her, “55.” “No, it’s 27.” WHAT?!?? Same with the other one. She held the page out for me and I COULD NOT SEE THE NUMBER 27!
I passed the test, as you’re allowed to miss four. But this had never happened to me! Clearly, my perception of the world is completely wrong. My colorblind boyfriend missed the maximum- four- no surprise since a startling revelation in a biology class several years ago. We sometimes play the “Is this orange or red or pink” game. Of course, I always win because I have fantastic color vision whereas he lacks certain color receptors. But. I lack, too. When I told him of my startling revelation, he asked if I was having an angsty existential crisis.
Of course. A foundation for my perception of the world is blown up before my very malfunctioning eyes. There are certain things I can not see! And I don’t even understand what. Certain shades of green and brown. Or is it my favorite color red that’s betraying me? I know not. Only… everything is not as it seems. I am isolated, alone in my perceptions of this cruel, cruel, colorful world. And I can’t even enjoy them all.
Minimalist Poetry ? May 1, 2008
Posted by Christina in Musings, Reads.Tags: lighght, minimalist poetry, red
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I was reading the latest issue of the New York Times Book Review when I came across this review of Aram Saroyan’s collection of minimalist poetry. Minimalist poetry? Hmph. Intrigued, though skeptical, because I know how I feel about minimalist writing (ick) but I think poetry is sometimes pretty. So I read on.
lighght
A one-word poem! What? My brain instantly wanted to reject this. You can’t even say this word. And it won Aram Saroyan $$$ from the National Endowment for the Arts. WTF? There are brilliant, real writers, who create beautiful prose while juggling plot, characters, setting, theme! This dude just inserted two extra letters into a word! You can only look at it on the page! I like to hear the beauty of the words, the rhythm as it rolls of the tongue, thank you very much!
My indignation egged me on and I learned that he didn’t write all one-word poems. Some were three or five or seven words long, some the same word or two repeating themselves 1, 568 times. There’s one that’s an equation with words.
Then I read this one:
whistling in the street a car turning in the room ticking
For reasons I certainly don’t understand, I kept repeating whistling turning ticking. Whistling turning ticking. My ears, I guess, liked the sound of those words and how, in that one loopy sentence a story starts to emerge.
And:
This red hood holds the mood, keeps my eye happy.
Oh…happy. I think I’m getting it. Especially when I read that Aram Saroyan was probably smoking pot when he wrote these poems. He’s sitting in this dumpy, rusty red Volvo, staring out the windshield and listening to the birds tweet tweet and suddenly! in his smoke-addled brain he sees this rusty red as the brightest and most red red in the world! And he is happy.
In conclusion, I have no idea how I feel about these crazy word/poem/sentence things. Curious, that’s for sure, wannabe wordsmith that I am. I’ll have to buy the book and then decide.
