Free On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass

takes to make them. Here, however, immediacy is essential. In short,
    'seeing' the blue of the gentian, the storm in the clouds, or deer in their tracks, involved the same principles and was basically the same process. Genius, then, was the ability to 'see' a long way—
    swiftly. Unfortunately, the implication is that if I were stupid enough—retarded might be the right word—I would see no farther than the inside of my eye. This seems unlikely, and, although the dunce sits in the corner he's been sent to, the corner does not close that narrowly upon him, or his conical paper crown slide that darkly to his nose.

    Aristotle had no more doubt than Plato did that things were loud, sour, blue, or rough, but he had difficulty in understanding how we saw and felt and heard these qualities. Moreover, he wished to avoid Plato's dismissal of the sensible world as a ground for knowledge. Consequently, he was driven to make a number of extraordinary suggestions. Perception, he said, is the power of receiving 'the sensible forms of things without their matter.' Here we tremble on the brink of something without actually toppling in, because Aristotle's sensible forms, transmit-ted to us through an intervening medium called 'the transparent,' are tinted images, visible species, the verdigris of bronze without the bronze, the shape of the spear, first in the trembling air and then in the eye, given to us as the sharp flowing edge of a set of colors; but like a camera which peels off and spools the visible film of things, what these colors color must be supplied by the sensitive soul itself.
    We reach that brink in the moment when Aristotle says:
    . . . the sense is affected by what is coloured or flavored or sounding, but it is indifferent what in each case the substance is; what alone matters is what quality it has, i.e., in what ratio its constituents are combined....
    When a colored surface sets the transparent in motion, it relays to the eye a record of the relation between light and dark which constitutes its hue, and the organ responds by establishing this relationship inside itself. Thus
    .. . the actualities of the sensible object and of the sensitive faculty are one actuality in spite of the differences between their modes of being . . .
    and the mind flies to another essay, this time a contemporary one by Edwin H. Land, in which the results of his experiments on color vision are summarized. It is not the eye's response to a single wavelength, as the spectrum displays them, which causes us to perceive a color, rather
    . . . the colors in a natural image are determined by the relative balance of long and short wavelengths over the entire scene .. . ('Experiments in Color Vision')
    so that within the frequencies which make up spectral yellow, for instance, the whole range of colors can be experienced. Within spectral blue, already short or cool, the cool side will be seen as blue, the long or warm side as red. Clearly, color is the experience of a ratio.
    As I should like to spell the theory now, the musician, for example, counting on the auditory laws, creates a structure he knows the mind will materialize in sounds of a certain kind. The musical score represents the music's form in ink and paper. The disc represents it in wiggles and rounds. The performance troubles the air with the same structures. And our mind hears.
    But the qualities we taste in wine, touch and feel along the thigh while loving, hear as singing, sniff from the steaming pot, or observe articulate the surface of a painting, are, in fact, relations.
    Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vib-rancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as