Ultraviolet (Light My Way.)
Our brains, our words, our beliefs are all hard-wired to the idea that what we see... is what is real. If we can't see it, it doesn't exist.
Week of February 8, 2009 - February 14, 2009
Tetrachromatic Vision.
Birds can see in the ultraviolet.
Red, green, blue... and ultraviolet. "Tetrachromatic" vision.
Whereas we can only see three.
I can see what you're saying.
The problem is that what we see - and thus, what we think is real - is limited. Only part of the picture. There are all sorts of wavelengths out there - radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays. But not only don't we see them, we don't even recognize our close cousin - ultraviolet.
Light... that we can't see.
But it's out there. Bouncing off things, headed straight back at our eyes. We might like to blink it away, refuse to take it in. But in it comes. And still, our heads, our brains, can't make sense of it.
It's happening to you right now.
We filter, distort, what everything "looks like." What is.
Birds can do better. They can see large stretches of ultraviolet light. Which means every bird we see, the colors we know so well - we're seeing differently than the birds see themselves.
Crows, are not pure Black... to other birds. They have great splashes of color. Robins with their Red breasts, Blue Jays, Snowy Owls - we've got them all wrong.
We failed in one of the first tasks we were given. We've misnamed them. Mistaken them for what they are not.
Birds see everything differently - plants, animals, sunshine, the sky. They're all colored differently, once you can see into the ultraviolet.
Even the expressions on our faces look different, if you could see as birds do.
Our minds can't grasp what it's like to see in the ultraviolet, because we're locked into seeing the limited color range we're used to. It's not like you can just add another color to the mix. Nope. All the relationships between the colors, all the shadings and patterns, all the brain cells we use for vision - they all would need to change. Each of us color blind, blind, to what is right there before us.
Oh yeah. And all those skin colors we think we are? Black and white and red and yellow and all that?
Wrong. We aren't any of those colors. Not really.
None of us know what color we really are. At least, not in the eyes of God. Nor in the eyes of Science.
Fade to black?
