Blue is not real….
Anyone who knows more than 2% about me knows that blue is my favourite colour. Actually, my favourite colours are grey and blue and in fact, I am wearing a grey tee right now. But some would argue that grey is not exactly a colour as it falls under the black and white category. Well, technically just like any other colour, grey is grey because it absorbs some frequency of light rays while reflecting some others. Grey rather does so more evenly than most other colours making it more of a colour. But let’s not argue over grey, especially since blue is dear to me as well.
But what is this blue? I mean it’s a clour but then again what is a colour? The dictionary defines colour as the property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light. And what is this light? Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation within the spectrum that can be perceived by the human eye. This usually falls between 400–700 nanometres which is a tiny portion of a seemingly infinite range, most of which is infrared or ultraviolet. Even amongst that tiny visible spectrum, we have colour blindness affecting more than 5% of the human population.
This also means that non-human living beings see the world differently than us. Our best friends doggos for example can’t see colour at all, let alone blue. Evolution traded it off for better detection of motion and superior sense of smell. But being the selfish creature we humans are, let’s ignore them and focus on what we see and enjoy as blue. We associate blue with tranquillity. We love the blue oceans, at least I do. But the oceans are not really blue. Water is colourless and transparent simple reflecting the blue skies. So the sky is blue? Well, not always. It often gets covered by clouds. It often gets covered by mist. Even when it’s not getting covered, it turns red and yellow during the sunrises and sunsets. So we cannot trust the chameleon sky.
Let’s look for something that’s more consistently blue. 8–10% of the human population has blue eyes and this frame would work better if I had them too. But then again, people with blue eyes don’t really have any blue pigmentation in neither the iris nor the ocular fluid. It’s a result of the same Rayleigh scattering that makes the sky look blue. It seems we got cheated again. It seems blue doesn’t really exist. Studies show that the first mention of blue is in Ancient Egyptian civilisation although the ability to see colours have evolved into existence some 30 million years ago. Most of the other civilisations including Greeks didn’t even bother distinguishing the colour from green or purple.
Well, why would they? Blue is really rare in nature and even when it does exist it’s usually an optical illusion. No wonder blue is always the last colour to enter in a language. Why would there be any fuss about rare illusions, right? Just because I love the colour doesn’t mean it has to be important or even exist. I love Kirishima Touka but she is just fictional, why would this be any different. For all we know we could be living in a simulator at worst or getting tricked by nature every single second at best. What better can we expect from a body existing solely to sustain a nervous system showing us dreams of whatever it can make of the continuous bombardment of information it’s going through every second. A nervous system that’s not even capable of understanding what really blue is, what whether the tee I am wearing is really grey or some form of blue it can’t compute. Maybe we’ll need few more million years of evolution to figure this out. Till then, I guess we’ll remain in the blues.
Watch the cinematic video essay here: https://youtu.be/RhHECNUL7RI