Whatever You Do, Don't Cut the Magenta Wire
The color-blind man is often pitied, with well-meaning onlookers offering condolences on his inability to see differences between shades.
They suppose that to him the world looks black and white, like photos from the 1950s, or at best a uniform shade of brown, perhaps of the khaki or beige variety.
In truth it is not as though for him color has been entirely drained from the world but that certain colors lose their distinction as they edge closer to one another on the spectrum, and that certain others never become known to him at all.
He is on friendly terms with this condition and has long been accustomed to not seeing, not seeing at all, the tiger or the dog or the Empire State Building that is supposed to emerge from a circular arrangement of colored dots on the page illustrating a magazine story covering the condition.
To him, they remain dots on a page, perfectly fine specimens of page dots if that is your passion, but nothing more than that.
He embraces approximation more than precision in these matters and adopts a live-and-let-live approach to colors and by association to many another thing in the world, for such a happy lack of distinction between categories is not limited to the color spectrum.
There are fine people in the world, and he may be one of them, who search for the perfect word among many choices and, finding the effort too time-consuming for the sake of the conversation at hand, will settle on one scarcely in the same orbit as the correct one at all.
Save for a surface similarity of syllables or number of vowels, or really, being somewhere in the same one-third of the unabridged dictionary, these words are not otherwise within plus or minus 35% of the word they are really looking for.
When they mean to say adolescence they say effervescence and when they mean to say primarily they say summarily and when they mean to say accordingly they say accordianally and when they mean to say pleasant they instead say peasant, present, or pheasant or a word entirely new to the language, measant.
It's all good! All good.
Approximations will get you there sooner than precision, which otherwise may leave you standing in deep thought until midnight, savoring on your tongue each syllable of the possible 33 words you might choose to exactly get your point across.
At the least these quarter-, half-, or full-misses keep the conversation flowing.
The other approach may find you, once you have selected the very word, resuming conversation with a person who had entered into decrepit old age simply in the course of this exchange of pleasantries between the two of you.
Or, again, he is like the mother of a large brood who stands at the back screen door shouting, "you get back in here and clean up your mess, George, Mike, Bill, Tony, Suzie, Janie, Matt, Ben, Allie, Rover, Mr. Crawly, or Disdain, the Evil Feline," throwing in the name of the dog, turtle, and cat for good measure, since you never know, you just never know, confident that the kid associated with the mess will know that he is the one being addressed and is correspondingly now on notice.
The others may have done something bad that the mother doesn't yet know anything about, in fact it is near certain, so it is good to connect with them in this generalized way.
Why be specific when an umbrella approach is so much more efficient? It is after all only one shout out the back door, not a dozen separate communications.
When presented with a choice of beverages which range from Belgian Witbeir to Berliner Weissbier to American Amber to India Pale Ale to Imperial Porter to Belgian Style Fruit Lambic to Hefeweisen Paulaner, he has been known to relax the categories entirely and merely specify "something cold,” and sometimes, going even further in this mode of relaxation, may content himself with "something wet."
He is like the workman who goes so far as to carry the instrument known as the level on his person but doesn't go so far as to be ruled by it.
He may apply it to a newly erected beam or railing to gauge its absolute even-stevenness, but if the tell-tale bubble is just a smidge shy of the center line left to right or top to bottom he is apt to say, “well, good enough.”
Much of life, by this approach, is good enough.
You may lay awake at night and consider the very finely shaved distinction between Cobalt Blue and Cobalt Blue (Caran d’Ache) or the even more finely shaved distinction between Cinnebar and Cinnamon, or, alternately, you may grab some much-needed shuteye.
The colorblind fellow is in any event relieved of any such ponderings since entire swaths of shades to the left of Cobalt Blue and great open prairies of shades to the right of Cinnamon look more or less the same to him.
When asked his opinion on some particular combinations of colors in the matter of whether this color slack goes with this color top and how does it look to him, he is happy to answer “fine.”
On rare occasions of eloquence, he may reply "just fine."
Either of these is a superior answer on every occasion of this question arising, every single occasion, my friend, be it from a stranger on the street or from people living at the same address as you, remember that, but he has the additional benefit of speaking entirely truthfully on the matter.
You could hook this guy up to a lie detector machine and the colors in question might be Electric Lime and Post-Apocalyptic Pink, and that needle wouldn’t budge.
“Fine,” he answers honestly, or alternatively, "just fine," and just as honestly.
He is, to take another instance, like the fellow who, when asked by someone for reasons of their own what the value of Pi is, dredges up from the basement of his high school knowledge a mote or an iota of knowledge and says, “umm, maybe 3.14 something something?” and considers himself lucky to have hit the side of the barn, much less the target, much less the bullseye.
This is a healthy-minded approach and can be compared to this other fellow who, when asked the same question, replies “3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286” and seems prepared to move through quite a few more digits than that if you don’t scurry to bring the conversation to a quick close.
It is not hard to conclude from this conversation that here is an individual that is thinking altogether too much about the value of Pi.
We all have only so much disk space on our interior hard drives and the space taken up by this string of integers might be displacing something else.
The colorblind individual takes a broad view of humanity as well, and thinks more of large groupings than in distinctions between them.
It cannot be said that he doesn’t notice the difference between tall and short, male and female, old and young; it is more like his travels in the land of colorblindness have taught him that there is a commonality to all things once you get under the surface (if you have an interest, this under-the-surface commonality business is a kind of green or gray or muddy blue mixed what I believe is called ochre, combining in a swirl just about to lose any distinction between the individual contributors whatsoever, like chocolate syrup going into white milk in the moment it is stirred) and we do well to honor it.
It must be admitted that for sufferers of this condition there are some situations that just aren’t going to end in success, say when you are advised to catch the chartreuse bus and meet someone under the big magenta logo, and some careers that are best avoided – the paint departments at Sears or Montgomery Ward come to mind – and any line of work that has you crouched over a ticking time bomb examining wires with a wire cutter in your hand.
To take this last instance, it is an interesting situation for the colorblind man to look at the digital clock on the bomb running in reverse down to zero and examine the tangle of brightly colored wires leading to the dynamite and listen politely to the fellow at the other end of his walkie-talkie who is offering advice along the lines of “now, first you need to cut the French Plum wire, while making sure that it never touches – never ever touches! – the Harlequin Green diode. Once you have completed that you are ready to splice the Kenyon Copper colored wire with the Lapis Lasuli one. This will place you perfectly to run the current over to that red fire hydrant over there.”
Well, you get the red fire hydrant bit, that much is clear to you, but as for the rest you don’t have the heart to tell this fine walkie-talkie guy that to you all these wires more or less look like a plate of spaghetti that a child, as a jest, has dripped a full range of fingerpaint colors upon, going over some of them twice, then tie-dying the rest. There is simply no distinction between one wire and another; indeed it could all be one continuous tangled length for all you know.
In such cases it is probably best to simply yank the wires from the dynamite entirely, which usually works in the movies.
