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

and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception.
    When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strength-en this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they show how it is produced.
    It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise. ( Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man)
    Still, every one of these diligent gentlemen may be r i g h t . . . and why should we mind if every one of them is right simultaneously? Let all notes sound together and cacophony be king.
    There are particular pieces of the world which essentially serve the abstract (dominos, for instance, standing armies, monetary prose), and there are fragments of the mind which nevertheless pretend to be (like men of good will and the data of sense) resi-dents in the realm of things. It is around these coins, twin-headed and treacherous, that the quarrel which concerns us has centered, for there is clearly a similar conflict between the way we customarily experience color and the way we have historically tended to think about it. This unnecessary antagonism is traditional: shall we believe our senses or our reason? And reason is so swift to slander the senses that even Hume did not escape, replacing shadow, mood and music, iris and jay, with a scatter of sense impressions artificial as buttons: each distinct, inert, each intense, each in self-absorbed sufficiency and narrowly circum-scribed disorder like a fistful of jelly beans tossed among orphans or an army of ants in frightened retreat.
    The blunt truth is that if the sky's not blue, the sea, the serge suit, the chicory, the blue goose; if they're not blue, then, like our ears and nose and tongue and fingers, our eyes have lied, and although on occasion the truth may be beaten from them, they cannot be a standard; they have soiled consciousness too continuously; they cannot be trusted. If, on the other hand, we begin with what we're given, then what about all those advisers who have whispered persuasive nonsense in our ears from the beginning? don't believe what you hear—the violin, the wind—
    believe me; others feel differently, in other ages, different climes; even yourself—on grayer days, at greater distances, in sickness, out of madness, during dream—distort—from pique, from spite, f r o m wine; remember the shadows which threatened you like a thief? the friend you greeted like a stranger? the lap dog's bite? the lips which claimed to be so sweet? so don't believe the rainbow or the oil, but believe the lines the mind conceives connect the spill and bow to you; believe in the weights of spaces and the rush of quantity through the void. Well? what to do?
    For their treachery, for the buttered sound of their sophistries, shall we confine them to the tower?
    Choose.

    * * *
We might suppose that connoisseurs and critics of painting, certainly the painters themselves, would be. better disposed to blue than the physicists and philosophers—that's a natural thought—and we might expect many of them to think of shape as a qualification of color, or colors as contents whose limits were created simply to contain them, like thick cream curdling in a bowl (because who looks at the basket when it's heaped with berries?)—yes, that's a thought natural enough—but you also might expect writers to love their words (does not Krapp cry out
    'spooooooF to the unrecorded walls of his room?), although the truth is that what they usually want is whatever their words represent (the things, not the thoughts, the things, not the sounds, the things, not the snicker and giggle of ink or the rumple of sentences like slept-in pajamas—no, only things, dear things, sweet things . . . and then only those things things designate, the way work means money and money downpays the car