“There is a reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by a moth which eats that paper, literature is absolutely nonexistent, yet for Man’s mind, literature has greater value than paper.” –Rabindranath Tagore
My science teacher was describing visual impairments when a friend in the seat behind me poked me in the back and whispered, “I’m color blind.”
“Wait, you’ve never seen green grass before?” I asked him. “That must suck man.”
“But why?” he asked. “Why does it matter if I have never seen green before? I see a color, why do I have to see green?”
At this point, I hadn’t a clue of what to say to him. Because, really, I asked myself, what was so important in green? Wait, what is green, anyway?
“It is a tragedy because you can never experience reality. Green is the real color of grass and for you it’s this dirty shade of brown.” I told him.
Smirking, he asked, “How do you even know what’s real and what’s not?”
We may be missing everything or we may be missing nothing. The mantis shrimp, with its sixteen color receptors, challenges the second assumption. When humans run around frantically trying to discover all there is to be discovered, the mantis shrimp snaps its claws, creates light from sound, a phenomena we aren’t even close to understanding, and says, “Ha, good luck with that.”
Questioning what we are missing is questioning our understanding of reality. Perhaps, to the mantis shrimp, blue is an incandescent hue, fading and reappearing, shimmering in the sunlight. The color explosion that would dull our perception of the world is the mantis shrimp’s reality.
This is a slap in the face to anyone (me) who’s ever dreamed of learning about everything. The sadistic mantis shrimp and its magical color vision crush my dreams, making me seem like a disillusioned teenager girl with impossible expectations.
“Ha, good luck with that” echoes in my nightmare, the taunting rainbow face of the mantis shrimp circles through my mind.
Here’s a scary thought: what if there is no reality? What if everything is just a figment of my imagination? Here’s an even scarier fact: for a solipsist, this thought is their reality. Solipsists actually believe that the world is a figment of their imaginations. “We’re not ‘missing’ anything,” they’ll say. “Our minds made the mantis shrimp up.” My colorblind friend won’t label a solipsist “crazy.” He’ll stand up for them saying, “How do you know what is real and what is not?”
Human minds may be flawed and incomplete, but they are all we have. I couldn’t be typing this if I didn’t have my mind. We wouldn’t know what a mantis shrimp even was if we didn’t have our minds. My three color receptors allow me to frolic in a meadow of flowers, write about it and share my vision.
Now if I could talk to a mantis shrimp, and said mantis shrimp could then boast about how spectacular the world was with 16 color receptors, we’d have a problem.
Otherwise, the bargain of never knowing what we’re missing is not entirely a bad one.
wind chimes + books 