Colour Blind

My promiscuous eyes

Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash

In elementary school, my teacher discovered I was colour-blind. In an attempt to cure me, she called me up every day in front of the class and held up coloured pencils. “What colour is this?” she asked, holding up a red pencil. “Green!” I shouted with great conviction, eliciting explosive laughter from my classmates. She held up a pink one, to which I responded, “Blue!” More explosive laughter.

Fun and games, for sure. This went on for two weeks until she finally realized I was incorrigible.

Some jokers had fun with my colour blindness. Jimmy Sutton, a wild boy with fierce eyes and a conspiratorial smirk, would point out an object and ask me to name the colour. He’d tell me what I was looking at was blue, not orange — with a wink to his friends — when I knew damn well it wasn’t blue. Perhaps it wasn’t orange, but it certainly wasn’t blue. He couldn’t fool me — I’m colour-blind, not stupid.

I guess he assumed I saw the world in black and white, as though life rolls out in front of me like a movie from the 1930s. (Not a bad idea, actually; I do enjoy those flicks.) To be fair, some people do see in shades of gray if they have monochromacy, but I’ve never met such a person, so they must be as rare as Vantablack.

That I wasn’t stupid, however, was hard to prove, if my math marks were anything to go by. For the colour-blind, arithmetic in elementary school is an absolute nightmare. One day, we were asked to count the black dots in the red border — a simple enough task if you can count to ten — but the problem was I couldn’t SEE the red border. As my eyes scampered across the page looking for the red border, the worst possible occurrence transpired: the teacher called out my name. I blurted out the first number that came to mind: “Seven!” More explosive laughter. My classmates must have thought they had before them a complete ignoramus — a boy who couldn’t see colours and couldn’t count, no less.

Geography brought a similar experience. When it came to colouring maps, I unwittingly strayed from convention. Instead of blue waters, mine were brown. Instead of a yellow cornfield, mine was blue. My trees were white. My teacher would often show my maps to the class, which was good for a laugh. They were as colourful as a Van Gogh. In private, she informed me my maps were “wrong.” I got the last laugh on that, though, for in my travels around the world, I have indeed seen brown muddy waters, blue corn, and white birch trees. Miss Fussbudget obviously lacked imagination.

The ironic upside of all this laughter at my expense was that I made many friends. All my classmates wanted to hang around me at recess. I’ve thought a lot about this over the years (I mean, why would they want to hang out with an idiot?) and have come to the following conclusion: their young minds, unschooled in the many defects of the human body, couldn’t possibly conceive of a person who couldn’t see colours, or count, so there was only one explanation for my behaviour: I was putting the teacher on, pulling her leg, duping her in front of the whole class! They saw me as a rebel, a contrarian raising my middle finger to the whole educational establishment, a choirboy in Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall:

“We don’t need no edge-u-kay-sion.”

Or at least I like to see it that way.

At one point in my youth, I thought I had colours all figured out. I was on a roll, identifying blues, reds, and yellows like someone who knew what they were talking about. But just when you think everything’s going smoothly in life, someone has to throw up a speed bump: my buddy Jamie told me that the sky wasn’t blue, but azure, and sometimes robin’s egg blue. What!? What!!?? Great. More colours to contend with! As if the world isn’t confusing enough as it is. I was still trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop staring at a girl named Virginia who sat opposite me in class.

To this day, I blame Jamie as the evil herald who opened the gate to a whole new world of chromatic hell and unleashed demons with names like Cyan, Taupe, and Verdigris. This subdivision of colours was too much for my small brain, and I submitted to the irreconcilable fact that I would never master them.

That was the day I gave up trying.

Source

So, how exactly does my colour blindness work? Well, first of all, the defect comes from my mother. The gene responsible for colour vision deficiency is located on the X chromosome. This explains why there are very few females with colour vision deficiency, as they have two X chromosomes, so what they lack in one is usually made up for in the other. Second, I do see colours, but not as many as your average trichromat (a person with full-colour vision). I’m what they call a strong protan, which means I have problems distinguishing between red, green, brown, and orange hues. For instance, while most people see seven colours in the rainbow, I see only four.

Third, sometimes I see a colour, but can’t name it. If you show me beige, I will stare and stare, drawing a blank every time, regardless of how many times I’ve seen it. I have no clue what beige is — it’s like a foreign word that has no English equivalent, like the German word Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaft, which is 39 letters long and whose meaning is not as interesting as the word looks (an insurance company that provides legal protection). Other colours that are like foreign words to me? Magenta. Vermilion. Hooker Teal — I’m not even going to ask about that last one.

Fourth, sometimes I think I know a colour, but misidentify it, as in the case with my elementary school teacher when she held up a red pencil that I said was green. But green can also be brown in my eyes. My dad had a green station wagon for ten years, yet it was brown in my mind and is still unshakably brown in my memory. That I muddled colours up like this was a great mystery to me for many decades. How was I able to see the colours, but confuse them, mistaking green for brown or pink for blue? Was it merely a semantic problem? After all, colours are socially determined chromatic categories, quite random to tell you the truth. For example, the colour Australien, which describes the pigment of the red-brown soil in the Australian outback, could just as well be called Cambodien, as both terrains share the same hues. So if I decide to call the soil Cambodien instead of Australien, it’s not a perception problem. It might just reveal the rebel in me more than an innate defect.

I recently learned, though, that this goes beyond semantics and into biology. I have promiscuous eyes — my colour-detecting cones like to lie on top of one another, whereas in most people the cones have their own beds. When a colour is presented to me, the cone on top shouts, “Green,” the one underneath shouts, “Brown,” and the one below shouts, “Red.” It’s an orgy of colour!

But here’s what’s interesting: when a trichromat tells me that what I am looking at is red, not brown or green, then I shut the brown and green cones up (“Silence!”) and I see only red. The red-detecting cone becomes the master, and I bend to its bidding. It’s a remarkable transformation, actually. It’s like a camera that, without the proper ambient lighting, doesn’t know what to focus on, so it tries to grab three things at once and makes a mess of it. Then, add light and suddenly, SNAP— one clear object appears. Being colour blind certainly isn’t boring.

By high school, I thought I had skirted all the pitfalls of my colour deficiency, but some were still lying in wait. I almost didn’t get my driver’s license because when it came time to take the eye test, I couldn’t see the green dot in the machine. The examiner had to come around my table and look into the machine because I told her the green dot wasn’t there. When she told me it was in the upper right corner, I saw it — the colour blind are extremely prone to the power of suggestion— and was okay with tracking it for the rest of the test. She told me that I passed by a narrow margin. Whew! That was a close one.

Besides being mocked for my sartorial colour coordination (“Kevin’s mother forgot to dress him this morning”), I once had a date in high school who refused to get in my car with me. She was absolutely terrified I’d crash into another vehicle. “How do you tell the colours of the traffic lights?” she asked. A fair enough concern, I must say, considering she’d be in the passenger seat.

Here’s the thing: since relying on a faulty colour-recognition system to navigate the world is extremely risky, I’ve had to hone another ability. I accentuate position. It doesn’t matter to me if the top light in a traffic signal is turquoise, zaffre, or gamboge; I just know that whatever is on top means stop. (Unless I’m driving in Europe, where the traffic signals are horizontal, not vertical, which puts me in a minor panic). Also, the bottom light is not green to me, but white, which helps a lot when driving down a highway at night — when determining position from a distance is impossible — because in my eyes there is no difference between the colour of the “go” traffic light and the white streetlights. Approaching an intersection at night, if all I see is white, I just keep on going. However, if another colour is mixed in among all those whites, such as your red or amber, then that informs me to apply the brakes. Hearing about this system might strike fear in the driver in you, and raise hopes that you never meet me on the highway, but I can assure you: so far, so good.

All things considered, my colour blindness hasn’t caused me any serious problems in life. I never wanted to be a pilot, so there was no issue there. Even in school, when I couldn’t count because everything was in colour, I never felt humiliated. To the contrary, I kind of liked that I was a bit different. I wore my colour blindness like a badge of honour, a war wound.

True, there are minor inconveniences. I’ve met the odd character who couldn’t stop pointing and asking, “What colour is this? What colour is this? What colour is this?” Then there was the time Spielberg’s Schindler’s List came out. Everyone was talking about the girl in the red dress, and everyone had an opinion about it. Some thought it was corny, some brilliant — I was unaware that there was a girl in a red dress because the movie was in black and white, so, once again, I was out of the loop. When I rewatched the movie, I made sure to look for the red dress and was quite surprised to see it. That just goes to show that colour is not what my mind looks at when viewing the world.

Then came the day I learned that many colours are a matter of opinion, not hard facts at all! I was at an open house with my mother and aunt. I asked what colour the basement carpet was and my aunt replied, “Lavender.” My mother disagreed. “Periwinkle,” she opined. Not only a matter of opinion but a bone of contention: on the way home, alone with my mother in the car, she stated as a matter of fact, “That carpet was periwinkle, not lavender.”

I reasoned that if colours can be a source of argument, then aren’t we all colour blind to some degree? I’ve read that there are people whose vision is so acute that they can see stars in the daytime. Are the rest of us labelled star-blind? No, we are not. There are even people who have four cones in their eyes instead of the usual three. They are tetrachromats and women, as you need two X chromosomes to be one. They have the potential to see hundreds more colours than the rest of us, but rarely do, unless their job demands it of them; otherwise, the fourth cone remains dormant. I know because I dated one. She was a graphic designer and dealt with thousands of colours every week. When she named colours to me in her layouts, I was spellbound: Sang-de-boeuf; Aureolin; Perylene Maroon…I guess opposites attract.

I was glad I met her because she rendered all trichromats colour blind, like me.

Oh, and if you want to know, I dream in black and white, just like a movie from the 1930s. And it’s quite wonderful.

> Discover more of my scribblings:

https://medium.com/fascinate-me-fiction/teeth-6829ceb04928

https://medium.com/the-lark/no-way-home-a7ca53f8406a