Read Online Peripheral Visions by Mary C. Bateson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mary C. Bateson
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person in the whole kingdom with color vision.
At first she felt that she must be in the wrong and all the others right. She was a good child and had grasped early on the responsibility her parents and teachers felt to explain the world and bring her up to be a queen, so she tried to behave herself more sedately, but still she sometimes couldn’t resist crying out with delight. She dressed with a shudder in the clothes laid out for her by her nurse, and tried to be polite about it. It took many years before it occurred to her that she might know more than others, and then that she might be able to make her vision of the world available to them. What would it be like if all these dour people also saw the world as brilliant and sparkling? The grown-ups, busy about her education, never even thought of learning from her, although of course the servants had to listen politely since she was a princess. Even younger children shook their heads in bewilderment when she talked about what she saw, and often she floundered for lack of words.
One day she stopped asking who might be able to imagine that she knew better and simply asked herself who loved her best. She went and sat in the queen’s lap and said, “Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.” “Why, you have beautiful gray eyes,” said the queen, “as pale gray as egg yolks or lettuce leaves.” “No,” she said, “look more deeply.” They sat for long minutes, and finally the queen said, “I see something I have never seen before. And what I see is different from egg yolks or lettuce leaves.” So the princess said, “What you see is called blue. If you look now at an egg yolk, you will see that it is yellow, and the lettuce leaves are green.” (The six-year-old making up this story is female, blue-eyed, and striding back and forth dictating authoritatively to her mother at the typewriter, but the words of this version are those of an adult who remembers only the plot, not the language.)
The princess took her mother by the hand and, leading her around the palace and the palace gardens, taught her to see color. Then they went to the king and taught him to see color, and bit by bit everyone in that kingdom learned to see color. Indoors and out, they all started laughing aloud at how much more variety they could see in the world than they had ever imagined.
The premise of the story breaks down at the end, for as a child I never quite penetrated the princess’s dilemma. Somehow the word blue and the concept of color are ready to hand as soon as the loving magic transforms the mother’s vision, but children have no words for their private knowledge. Perhaps I should have imagined the process of inventing names for the new experience, words for colors that were really names of objects, like orange , or a scholarly debate about the nature of the new experience, something like the transition that took place, within a few years of the vivid experience of Jesus’ friends, to the invention of trinitarian theology. I seem to have understood that for the individual color is an artifact of perception, but it didn’t occur to me as a child that color is encountered through the understandings of a community. Whatever the physics of wavelengths of light and the biochemistry and neurology of color vision as determined for most of us by genetics, the experience of blue remains totally private, and the shared meaning of blue has to be socially constructed—not, of course, from nothing but as a building is constructed from the facts of gravity and balance, the characteristics of materials, the purposes and meanings of human beings.
The fable expresses a reversal of the most visible patterns of education. Here, a child teaches adults. That reversal occurs more often than we realize, for much of what adults learn is learned from children. Newborns come equipped to turn their elders into parents, and on-the-job training continues from then on. After immigration or when the
At first she felt that she must be in the wrong and all the others right. She was a good child and had grasped early on the responsibility her parents and teachers felt to explain the world and bring her up to be a queen, so she tried to behave herself more sedately, but still she sometimes couldn’t resist crying out with delight. She dressed with a shudder in the clothes laid out for her by her nurse, and tried to be polite about it. It took many years before it occurred to her that she might know more than others, and then that she might be able to make her vision of the world available to them. What would it be like if all these dour people also saw the world as brilliant and sparkling? The grown-ups, busy about her education, never even thought of learning from her, although of course the servants had to listen politely since she was a princess. Even younger children shook their heads in bewilderment when she talked about what she saw, and often she floundered for lack of words.
One day she stopped asking who might be able to imagine that she knew better and simply asked herself who loved her best. She went and sat in the queen’s lap and said, “Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.” “Why, you have beautiful gray eyes,” said the queen, “as pale gray as egg yolks or lettuce leaves.” “No,” she said, “look more deeply.” They sat for long minutes, and finally the queen said, “I see something I have never seen before. And what I see is different from egg yolks or lettuce leaves.” So the princess said, “What you see is called blue. If you look now at an egg yolk, you will see that it is yellow, and the lettuce leaves are green.” (The six-year-old making up this story is female, blue-eyed, and striding back and forth dictating authoritatively to her mother at the typewriter, but the words of this version are those of an adult who remembers only the plot, not the language.)
The princess took her mother by the hand and, leading her around the palace and the palace gardens, taught her to see color. Then they went to the king and taught him to see color, and bit by bit everyone in that kingdom learned to see color. Indoors and out, they all started laughing aloud at how much more variety they could see in the world than they had ever imagined.
The premise of the story breaks down at the end, for as a child I never quite penetrated the princess’s dilemma. Somehow the word blue and the concept of color are ready to hand as soon as the loving magic transforms the mother’s vision, but children have no words for their private knowledge. Perhaps I should have imagined the process of inventing names for the new experience, words for colors that were really names of objects, like orange , or a scholarly debate about the nature of the new experience, something like the transition that took place, within a few years of the vivid experience of Jesus’ friends, to the invention of trinitarian theology. I seem to have understood that for the individual color is an artifact of perception, but it didn’t occur to me as a child that color is encountered through the understandings of a community. Whatever the physics of wavelengths of light and the biochemistry and neurology of color vision as determined for most of us by genetics, the experience of blue remains totally private, and the shared meaning of blue has to be socially constructed—not, of course, from nothing but as a building is constructed from the facts of gravity and balance, the characteristics of materials, the purposes and meanings of human beings.
The fable expresses a reversal of the most visible patterns of education. Here, a child teaches adults. That reversal occurs more often than we realize, for much of what adults learn is learned from children. Newborns come equipped to turn their elders into parents, and on-the-job training continues from then on. After immigration or when the
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