In Sanskrit I know two words, kaala and krishna, that can both mean black, dark, or dark blue (there is no distinction). Krishna (the god/avatar) is usually depicted as having blue skin, though it is obviously more likely that he was simply dark-skinned, like a Dravidian, and it is probably the lack of differentiation in the words used for these colours that gives him the blue skin.

When I had to learn Hebrew, I was surprised that there are separate words for blue and light-blue. An Israeli will never call a “light blue” a “light blue” – it is always tchelet. And I have read that this is similar for Russians, Japanese and Greeks.

Why There was No Word for Blue in Ancient Greece and How Homer and Aristotle Perceived Colors

There was no word for “blue” in classical Greece. The closest descriptions of blue are glaucous and cyan, which express the contrast between light and dark. They do not, however, define the color itself.

I thought about this today when arguing with my wife about whether an object was blue or green. (It was actually a turquoise colour that she saw more as a shade of blue and I saw more as a shade of green).

A small percentage of women are thought to be tetrochromatic. They possess four types of colour cone cells rather than our usual three. Theoretically, a person or creature with true tetrochromatic vision is able to have much greater sensitivity to colours, though this depends on the range of colours perceived by the individual cones and the possession of four, rather than three, colour channels to process the information received.

It is much more likely that our ability to differentiate between colours depends upon language and culture.

Researchers have been fascinated by the Himba people in Africa and their unusual perception of colours.

The Himba and the hidden colors of the world/

The Himba have no word at all for the colour blue, but a whole range of words available to describe shades of green, and it seems that the result of not having a word for blue means that they find it difficult to differentiate it.

Experimental psychology research has demonstrated that this linguistic classification directly influences their visual perception. When asked to identify a slightly different shade within a series of green hues, they succeed more quickly than individuals from other cultures. Conversely, when faced with a single blue shade among greens, they struggle to distinguish it, whereas an outsider would immediately see an obvious difference.

Now I’m remembering how in Orwell’s 1984 the control of language was used to constrain the ability to think, or even the ability to experience the world.

Julia: ‘I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.’

The study of the Himba suggests the same, and the article above quotes Witgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

And, says the article:

However, this linguistic influence on perception is not unique to the Himba. Studies show that in some Asian languages, which do not distinguish blue from green, speakers perceive these colors as a single entity. On the other hand, Russian speakers, who have separate words for light blue and dark blue, differentiate these shades more rapidly.

Thus, language is more than just a communication tool, it shapes how we see the world.

For the Himba, colours have a much greater significance to their lives than use as a practical means to describe their environment. And it is worthwhile too to remember that colours hold different significance in different cultures. The articles I found mentioning this are those intended for practical issues like marketing, advertising and decorating. An obvious example given is that whereas white usually is associated with weddings in the west, it is associated with death and mourning in the east. In India, it’s the colour worn by widows.

Color Psychology Across Different Cultures: Unveiling Global Perceptions and Meanings

Color psychology rests on several core ideas:

Colors evoke emotional and physiological responses
Cultural context influences color associations
Personal experiences shape individual color preferences
Color combinations can amplify or alter effects

Finally, it seems that even the same person may experience colours and light differently according to the state of their mind. This was once demonstrated to me in a music concert by the musician Steven Halpern.
He showed a series of colour slides prior to his playing a piece of music he had composed called the Spectrum Suite. After the performance, he showed the same slides. Now the colours appeared richer and warmer. I particularly remember that what had looked like a lemon-yellow beforehand, now appeared to be a rich, warm and deep yellow.

This connection between hearing and seeing may imply that our perception cannot be neatly separated between the senses and that our perception of the world is affected by other factors. A “spiritual” or “mystical” experience is sometimes described in a way that transcends the narrow limits of one or another senses, as when in Exodus 20:15 it is stated that “All the people saw the voices” ( וכל העם ראים את הקולות)

In the sense that no visual perception is objective, but is influenced by linguistic, cultural or emotional factors, every experience is “spiritual” and perception is never an unalloyed experience of reality. It depends upon what we bring to it.

Watched the film “A Call to Spy”, about a British wireless operator in Paris, 1942. It is based on the true story of Noor Inayat Khan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan). Noor was the daughter of the Indian Sufi master and musician Hazrat Inayat Khan and Nora Baker (a US acolyte). She was born in Russia and educated in France, where she learned music and child psychology at the Sorbonne. Her fluent French and musical ability made her a good candidate for tapping out Morse, and her outrage at the capture of Paris by the Nazis made her volunteer for the dangerous mission (she was sent as the first female British wireless operator in France). This role was essential for communications at a time when the British were attempting to set up a covert spy network throughout France.

She was an unlikely candidate for her position: dreamy, a pacifist, naive and vulnerable – her London handlers had serious doubts about at all sending her and gave her the option to opt out multiple times. But she insisted on going anyway, and seems to have understood that she may well be caught.

As it happened, she and her entire network were quickly taken down by the Nazis. She was tortured, like every other operative, but, according to the officer who was responsible, never broke. She was eventuially moved to Dachau camp and executed. Before being shot, she reportedly called out “Liberté!”.

At the Sufi centre in Suresnes (just outside Paris), which had been her home as a child, there is a small memorial to her.

Lately I have felt haunted by the horrors that grew to be so prevalent during the mid 20th century. A series on the history of modern Algeria in the Empire podcasts, speaks about the brutality of the French during their attempts to suppress the popular resistance. Hundreds of thousands were killed, and the torture methods used by the Nazis were turned on the Algerians. “The Battle of Algiers” {from the 1960s) is still the movie to watch, regarding all that.

I was interested to learn about the million settlers that France eventually repatriated and the lingering political consequences of their repatriation, when thinking of Israel’s settlement of the West Bank (and maybe re-settlement of Gaza). Of course, to many in the Arab world, the settlement of Israel itself by Europeans reminds them of Algeria, when they are not looking still further back to the Crusaders and what became of them.

Did the 20th century, with its wars and genocides ever really end? Did the colonial era with its dehumanization and slavery ever find closure? Certainly the roots of so much of what is happening today can be found in what came before. But if we want the future to be superior to the past, we had better not remain stuck in the same modes of behaviour, or constrained within the same patterns, that we can identify there.

My neighbour Gideon, who is attempting to create an archive for the village, invited me for a meeting in a nearby kibbutz, to speak with Gila and Motke, the archivists who lovingly maintain the archive there.

Kibbutz Nachshon, population around 600 has its archive at the community’s modest library building.  On its porch, as we entered the building was a dead rat.  Gila said that she had heard that in southern Israel, close to Gaza, there is currently a plague of rats and mice, all of which have fled the devastation in Gaza.  The expression “like rats fleeing a sinking ship” was never more timely.

With regard to archives, the kibbutziks are way ahead of us, having kept every sheet of paper, every photo, every item of their history from the very beginning (1950); and nowadays these are all well-boxed as a backup to their digitized equivalents.  Looking after this is usually the job of retirees.  They do it proudly and patriotically, believing that, in safeguarding their own history, they are, in a small way, playing a part in preserving the macro-history of the state.

Owing partly to the wilfull destruction of evidence, the story of what came beforehand is murkier.  In the case of Nachshon, the kibbutz was built on agricultural land; owned or farmed by whom, even Palestineremembered.com does not say.  The nearest Palestinian village was Dayr Muhaysin, upon whose lands the neighbouring moshav Bekoa now stands, though I once heard that the valley’s lands may have been farmed by owners further afield, in Abu Ghosh, which is on the way up to Jerusalem.

Palestine Remembered says that the land upon which our own village sits was stolen from the small village of Latrun.  This is not factually correct, as the land was previously owned by the Trappist monastery nearby, and we have land registry papers in the fine handwriting of British Mandate officers to prove it.

But, what the hell: for all I know, the land which the monastery itself occupies may have been sold to the Vatican by absentee-landlords under the Ottomans.

For its wretched inhabitants, the pain of this region’s history goes back a very long time.

On the web you can find blogs with old photos of cities, and sometimes, in the case of well=known places like Paris or London, the photographer has mentioned the names of the streets.  Google Maps street view has photos of the same places today, so you can compare how a place looked in the 19th century or half a century ago and today.  Sometimes, a city has been changed and rebuilt.  Cheapside in London looks almost unrecognizable today when compared to a photo from the early 20th century.  The majority of the old buildings are gone, perhaps bombed during the Blitz.  Paris seems to have survived better.  You can find the same streets, the same buildings, not fundamentally changed from in the past.  Usually today, they look to be in a better state of repair than in the old photos: the cobbled streets have been re-surfaced, the buildings have been re-plastered and repainted, their broken shutters or rotting woodwork replaced.  There is obviously much greater prosperity today than in the past; more public works.  It’s just that the shoddy quaintness has been exchanged for ugly modernity.  Many of the features that make those old photos remarkable are long gone.  In the past, there was greater attention to architectural detail, whereas now plain lines and clean facades are in mode. Areas of touristic value like Montmartre look like they are faking a picture-postcard quaintness; at best their streets look like a movie set.  And the people, their professions and modes of transportation, have become more vulgar.  It would be impossible to re-create the beauty of those old photos today.  Their modern equivalents, snapped from the smartphones in everyone’s hands, are for the most part uninteresting.

 

 

Since the time of the cave paintings, we seem to have been a species that lives more in its head than on the ground, more in our imagination than in the real world.  We spend the majority of the night dreaming, and when we wake we are entertained by memories of the past or plans for the future.  We imagine scenarios that will never be, or lust after things that are beyond our reach.  We embellish reality with impossible versions of it.  We lie and believe our own fabrications. We build idols out of clay and create symbolic currency out of paper.  We will die for a flag or for a crazy belief.  We gang together and follow the visions of others. The stuff of our imagination is more real to us than what we see before our eyes. And when our own imagination fails us, we spend our time reading stories, watching films, listening to music, or taking drugs.  We will go to incredible lengths to avoid dealing with the ordinary substance of our lives. We find life unbearable if we have nothing to live for other than what is actually there.  We search for meaning anywhere but the place that it can be found. What is so horrible about life in this world that nobody wants to live there?