Color Me Musical

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     Color is one of our most pleasing sensory attributes, and yet it is the most difficult to explain.

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     A blind man asks, “What is the color blue?” I think about this. Finally, I say, “Blue is like listening to light jazz.” “Oh,” he says, and thanks me. Later, after a surgeon has restored his sight, I find him in a garden filled with colorful spring flowers. I say to him, “Well, my friend, now you know what the color blue is.” He smiles. “Yes, indeed,” he tells me. “I heard a bit of it just this morning.”

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     What our senses furnish us is always filtered through a mind that reaches into memory to understand it. “When the eye is unobstructed,” Anthony de Mello tells us in Awareness, “the result is sight.” But if we are blind, our brain compensates as well as it can using the other senses. “When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing,” he says. But if we are deaf, the mind finds an alternative in touch or sight.

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     Then, de Mellow asks, “What if the mind is unobstructed?” He tells us the result is wisdom. “Wisdom,” he states, “occurs when you drop barriers.” He may be right, but it is the obstructed mind that describes aroma and sound and texture in other terms to begin with. Left unobstructed, the mind has little to feed on. It needs connections.

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     An intelligent chimpanzee sees an apple as something to eat, nothing more. With our minds obstructed with imagery, it becomes a laptop or a symbol of original sin, things the brightest ape could never see. Our memories interfere with pure thought. Wisdom occurs in selecting the appropriate memories. (Ironically, it requires some wisdom to identify which ones!)

Describing our sensory world invokes many adjectives, rich in sound, hearty in flavor, full of nourishment. Colors can be listened to, caressed, and tasted. Many are fragrant. A few are pleasant companions.

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