inaction
I rode the subway from Williamsburg in Brooklyn back to the Upper West Side where I currently live.
While in Williamsburg I attended Conflux, a festival for psychogeography. At the festival I took a smelling tour of the neighborhood with The Smelling Committee. The Smelling Committee was an interactive group project. The group leaders gave each participant a “smell enhancer” (a blindfold to cover the eyes) and a map of the neighborhood. The leaders then asked us to mark the locations of potent smells at the appropriate locations on our maps. The strongest smell that I smelled was cabage at a cabage processing plant. The smell was so strong that when I stuck my nose in the door I got a headache instantly. Smelling the cabage was a sensual (almost sexual) experience for me, not because I am sexually attracted to cabage but because I am sexually attracted to the idea of becoming overwhelmed with sensation.
A sense-related tangent: I have thought a lot about the relationship between my senses and knowledge. If I had no senses and thus received no data from the external world, what would I know? Would I have any knowledge at all? Could I communicate with others without sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound?
Another sense-related tangent: I remember the day when I realized that each individual might see colors differently. My blue could be your orange. Your black could be my white. I got all excited and explained this to my teacher in school. I told him that the color I call blue is actually the color he calls orange. If I look at an object, the object is blue. But if I could see that same object as he sees it, the object would be orange.
Back to my story. After Conflux, I got on the subway back to Manhattan. While I was waiting for the train, a man sat down on the edge of the tracks with his legs dangling over the edge. I just watched him. Two young woman immediately went over to him and told him that he shouldn’t sit there. The man immediatley stood up and wandered away. I just stood there. That was my inaction. My inaction could have killed that man. Would his death have been my fault?
September 29th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
i’ve often thought about how you would explain the color green to a blind person. what is green? it’s envy, it’s nausea, it’s springtime. but if you’ve never seen green, then you don’t associate it with those emotions. right? green is a mixture of blue and yellow…again, won’t help if you’ve never seen blue or yellow either. green is an emotion, a feeling, a time.
i think color is a very personal thing. i had the same revelation as you, alissa. my green is another person’s red.
October 26th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Thus the colors we “see” are composed of two parts. 1) The actual science with which the eye and the mind perceive the color. 2) Our feelings, emotions, and memories we associate with the color.
We cannot separate the science from the emotion.