Colorblind

I’m not sure when they first figured out I was colorblind, the doctors, my mom. It is possible that my mother knew, or at least suspected, from the moment I was identified as possessing a Y chromosome. Her father was colorblind, grandpa used to joke that he had to have my grandmother check his socks, pants and tie, every day before he headed to the office to make sure he wasn’t mis-matched in some way that would embarrass him and perplex everyone else, to whom the difference between the one navy blue sock and its mismatched black opposite was painfully obvious.

To those of us with red-green color deficiency, or whatever the correct term for it is (true color blindness means seeing things in greyscale) dark navy blue might as well be black, there is no discernible difference between the two unless we can examine them side by side under very bright white light. The gene that causes color blindness is passed down from the maternal grandfather, but only to male grandchildren. So if my daughter has boys they will likely be colorblind, just like pops.

For a while there, when I was younger, my mother would mention my color blindness and the doctors would gleefully pull out the book. In every doctors office there dwells, in a drawer, a stack of thick cardboard pages with a corkscrew binding, like a baby’s board book bred with a sketchbook, except instead of chunky letters and simple bright drawings the doctor’s book contained page after page of circles made of circles. Like someone took a bunch of circular stamps of various colors and just kept hammering away until all the little circles overlapping and connecting made one larger, patchwork circle. If you have seen a colorblind test you know what I mean. If you have seen one and you are not colorblind you have seen something else as well: those books are full of numbers, or so it has been reported to me. Each of those cardboard pages with its patchwork circle displays a number, from 1 to 10, which I am told is very obvious to those with normal sight.

It is as if I am looking at an entirely different book.

It grew so I got tired of doctors showing me their book, it is not as if it can be cured. There is no chance I will grow out of my color blindness. Also it has very little functional impact on my life, “green” lights will always the one at the bottom of the stack of three. The middle one is yellow. Whether I can differentiate between the two or not has no bearing on how I react when I see a traffic light. I have solved the clothing matching issue by keeping things simple: I only own black socks, I rarely wear bright colors or patterns and I check with my wife if I am not sure about color coordination.

I realized after a while that the doctors were only showing me their book because it entertained them to see me get it wrong. No matter how hard I tried I was never going to see the figure eight among those similarly colored dots. When I did see a number and announce proudly that I had spotted the 7, or whatever, it was always made painfully obvious by the physicians avuncular amusement that I had gotten it wrong again, the 7 was actually a 9 and I had fallen into the clever trap set by the test designers: only color blind people see the 7, see?

Sigh.

Actually, just recently, at my last visit to the optometrist, I mentioned my color blindness because I was curious about what kind of color blind I am. Apparently there are three varieties of color deficiency, protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia, a fact I only discovered by digging deep in my iPhone’s accessibility menus, a labyrinthian maze where, after some persistent searching, one can apply color filters to the display which are meant to help color blind folks navigate in a world of color cues designed by, and for, people who have no trouble telling pink from red, or yellow from green. The filters don’t fix my color blindness, by the way, though I suppose they help me navigate apps and see text highlights, links and stuff like that. Apple very helpfully includes a colored pencil graphic to help me decide which filter works best and I will tell you that none of them make the yellow pencil look yellow, all of them make orange look like varying, and awful, shades of brown.

My iPhone will not show me the full beauty of the fall foliage that everyone else enjoys, no matter how I mess with the display. It is not something that can be fixed with a color filter, for the same reason that no one has invented a pair of glasses that fix color blindness.

The issue is that I have insufficient numbers of certain types of sensors in my retina. Remember “rods and cones” from high-school bio? The cones are color sensors and work under bright lights, simply put: colorblind people don’t have enough cones.

There are different kinds of cones and different levels of insufficiencies and this yields the three (ultimately unhelpful) labels in the accessibility menu.

Unhelpful because the optometrist enthusiastically pulled out the same cardboard book, looking rather antique at this point, and after smirkingly confirming that I couldn’t see the 8 and that I got tricked by the damned 7 again, told me which one of the three I was, a piece of data which I promptly forgot because my memory is a broken thing.

Actually I’m pretty sure I remember which one she said, doesn’t matter, no matter how much I fiddle with settings and sliders the orange still looks like shit, literally.

Or maybe shit is really orange and I’m the one who has been getting this wrong all along?

It becomes a philosophical question, really, a matter of perception. Of sensorium, the only place each of us will ever live - we cannot escape the fact that all we are, all we experience, everything we do, is just our brain interpreting the signals, conveyed by the “wiring” of our nervous system, picked up by organs that are wholly remarkable in design, some would even argue divine, but entirely human in their fallibility.

So in a sense my color blindness is just me seeing the world differently… I can see beautiful colors in the leaves as they wear their autumnal finery. I just can’t see all the colors everyone else does. Or so I am told. Since I have no idea what I am missing it is hard to feel too sad about. I can see rainbows, I’ll be ok.

But it is a genuine issue when it comes to one thing in my life.

My art.

Or, I guess, my attempts at art.

It is hard to argue that color isn’t necessary to art. Being a colorblind artist is a little bit like being a Sommelier with a dull palate.

Ironically I have an incredibly sensitive palate, a very discerning nose, years in professional kitchens have confirmed to me that I am more sensitive to smells and the subtleties of flavor than most people, even highly trained chefs. I probably could have been a Sommelier if I had any sort of passion for wine. Wine has never been more than a means to an end for me and since we only drink about twice a year these days wine isn’t even that anymore, wine is just a headache.

Art, on the other hand, or at least the failings I make in art’s direction, is something I have done for my entire life. I have no intention of stopping. I will make artwork and I will attempt to make art work, even though I don’t see colors correctly.

Which might explain why my art is such a headache.