Black and White Color

" BUT - I AM SO ABSOLUTELY COLOR BLIND ... I have been involved in all kinds of tests. You name it. My brown dog is dark grey. Tomato juice is black."

Jonathan's letter to Oliver Sacks baffled him. This was a man who had lived his whole life seeing normally but after a car crash was now viewing a black and white movie of his life and seeing through a built in zoom. Color is an everyday thing that is taken for granted except when its family movie night and you beg your mom not to rent Casablanca and instead rent the recently released movie Coraline.

It must be unbearably scary to wake up one morning after an accident, not even remembering the event and then have your world turn into a gray blur. For an artist to loose their sense of colors and for their paintings to become "unfamiliar and meaningless" must be debilitating. Not only did his own paintings change but he would not be able to dissect as Arnheim does, Matisse's painting Luxury, where he describes the spatial relationships due to color or the bright yellowness of the nude bodies in the image. He also would have no recognition of the yellow haired angel children in The Virgin with Santa Ines and Santa Tecla by El Greco. This very drastic and rapid change made Jonathan extremely depressed. He felt the world looked "dirty" and didn't even want to look at his own reflection in the mirror. His lost his desire to have sex because his wife was now "gray". He dreams turned gray and his memories had been drained of color. How would you feel if your whole world and life's work was now altered and possibly lost? When Arnheim quotes Poussin " The colors in painting are, as it were, blandishments to lure the eyes, as the beauty of the verses in poetry is a lure for the ears." it accentuates how Jonathan must have felt. He felt that nothing would ever be the same, and it wouldn't.

I found the scientific parts of these stories interesting but I was more drawn in by how people like Jonathan and Virgil dealt with their new way of life. A great deal of learning and readjustment was necessary. Just like in the other Sacks piece Virgil has to teach himself to see and understand what he had previously only felt. When he encounters the lathe and touches it he exclaims "Now that I've felt it I can see." Jonathan like Virgil takes baby steps. Virgil teaches himself how to see and what he is seeing in relation to what he has been blind to in his earlier life. Jonathan teaches himself how to continue living with a whole new vision. The different ideas that Jonathan creates to make himself more comfortable are fascinating. He starts eating black and white foods to avoid the foods that had once been red or green. He labels all his clothes and their colors just to make getting dressed in the morning easier. These everyday normal activities become a process for him. Activities and necessary tasks that were once done with ease were now a challenge. It made me think of the thousands of tasks we do everyday without reflection. Most significant to me was that his memories of color had vanished and consequently his history had changed.

Jonathan's desire to get back to painting was a huge part of his story. As an artist he lost "A sense that interweaves itself in all our visual experiences and is so central in our imagination and memory, our knowledge of the world, our culture and art." He wanted to pick up his brushes and pretend that nothing had happened. It was not that easy. His artist friends were telling him not to paint in color and that if he did no one would understand his paintings. Similar to Livingston's descriptions of when a color painting is photographed in black and white, Jonathan's paintings would also lack depth. Even his colleagues had given up hope on his ability to function as an artist. This didn't stop him. I admired his stubbornness. He started by creating a comfortable environment for himself. His made his studio into a palate of grays which he felt would communicate his experience to others. I thought this was a really good way to force people to see the way he did. After seeing a sunset one day it inspired him to teach himself to paint again but this time in black and white. He had wondered if anyone had ever seen the sunset the way he did. So he painted it. Painting became his therapy. It was his way of coping with the constant feeling of being alone. It also gave him the chance to show the world the exclusive image he saw.

For a while the processes of trying to get his eyes fixed was another thing that kept him sane. It must have been extremely hard to hope and get let down and know that his eyesight would never be perfectly restored. He might get one step closer but never fully "the same". Jonathan was living in fear. Many people encounter the fear that their life will never be the same again. Jonathan's fear however was starting to become reality. He was beginning to come to terms with the fact that he was colorblind and would most likely never be able to see color again. This pointed out to me ways that the body and the brain adapt while compensating for the great physical and mental losses we suffer as human beings.

The end of the story has a twist that I found unexpected. Jonathan was approached with a procedure that would possibly cure him and give him back his sense of color. He turned the idea down. His previously colorful world had transformed into a disgusting dirty gray world which had then turned into his final "uncluttered by color" world. He was finally embracing his black and white vision and saw it as unique. He had a whole new understanding of his situation. He finally had gotten himself to a place where he was settled and didn't want any more disruptions. While reading I anticipated a fairy tale ending where his vision would be restored but instead understood and appreciated his decision to remain untrammeled by any further changes.

I found the story sensational and mystifying. A man living his life is in a sudden car crash destroying one of his most precious senses as an artist, color. The ways in which Jonathan learns to cope with his situation and the little life tactics he invents were intriguing. His healing process was long and hard but resulted in a acceptance of his newfound self. He felt that his art keep him alive and gave him a new challenge everyday. He created paintings that people could relate to and opened their eyes to his world. He reconstructed his life and continued living it. When asked to if he wanted to see color again and possibly get his old life back he realized that black and white was his life. I am amazed at the mechanisms he created to change his perception of his self. One day picking out a shirt was easy and the next day impossible. How do you accept that ? He final realization was that he was getting a chance that no one else would.

The story reminded me of questions I would think about when I was younger. What does the person next to me see ? What does a dog see ? Is my blue her red ? Does he see my blue or does he have his own blue ?