The Colour I Have in Mind - July 28 2026

 

The Colour I Have in Mind

July 28 2026

The colour I have in mind

is hard to describe

without seeing it.

But if it does exist,

and can be perceived

by a human eye

born under blue skies

in the light of a yellow sun,

it has yet to materialize

as far as I know.

If you do the math

it would seem colours are endless

  — blue, green, and red

in all their subtle shades and combinations

until you’d run out of names;

infinity,

an idea that hurts my head

to contemplate. 

So the one I have in mind

is mine alone,

beyond language

in any vernacular.

Perhaps a mantis shrimp has seen it

with the 12 colour receptors

in its buggy eyes,

or a butterfly

whose tiny insect brain

can see in ultraviolet

and discern polarity.

So when I remembered that every colour

is contained in white

I was even more bewildered,

because infinity contained

contradicts itself.

And when I was told

that while our sun appears yellow

it’s really white

I was bewildered some more:

that what we see

can’t really be real,

especially when what we perceive

is even less so.

Not when a butterfly’s wings

have no colour themselves,

but simply play

with wavelengths of light.

Not when a mantis shrimp reacts

but feels nothing.

 And not when what we see

is not to be believed.

The colour I have in mind

along with everything else.

I chose a shade from the internet for a paint job I’m having done. But what my painter had the store make was wrong. Apparently, they need a chip: they can’t reproduce a digital colour. So it was thinking about colour — and this elusive shade — that got me started here.

Every kid crayons a yellow sun with its smiling face and welcoming rays. But that’s just how it appears when viewed through the atmosphere. And if it really was yellow, then how could snow be white? From where else would the snow get the white light it’s reflecting? So as you’d expect, in space — that is, outside the atmosphere-  the sun is indeed white. 

Vision and perception are two different things. Vision is what our retina receives:  colour, movement, shape, and shadow. But it’s the brain that interprets this signal. Not just synthesizing the input from both eyes to give dimensionality, but paying attention, making inferences, filling in the missing parts, and ultimately giving meaning.

There is no pigment in a butterfly’s wings, no intrinsic colour. Rather, precise arrays of microscopic structures have evolved to reflect light so that some wavelengths interfere with themselves and cancel out, while others reflect cleanly. It’s the latter that form the colour we see. But the wings — in and of themselves — are colourless.

I suppose you could distil this poem to a single clichéd line: that seeing isn’t believing. And perhaps, that we see what we expect to see (the brain likes to get ahead of things by jumping to conclusions and invoking past experience, especially when information isn’t complete). So it’s all in one’s mind:  all we know of as reality is what our brains are able to synthesize from the bits that make their way into the closed dark vault of the skull.