The Island of the Colorblind

A man must have experienced all the illnesses he hopes to cure and all the accidents and circumstances he is to diagnose… Such a man I would trust. For the rest guide us like the person who paints seas, rocks and harbours while sitting at his table and sails his model of a ship in perfect safety. Throw him into the real thing, and he does not know where to begin.

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Like Knut, Frances Futterman has acquired an enormous catalog of information about color, its physical and neurological basis, its meaning and value for other people. She is curious about (and finds that other achromatopes are intrigued by) its meaning and value, and I was especially struck by this when I visited her office in Berkeley, which was filled with bookshelves containing the hundreds of volumes she has collected. Many of these she acquired during her years of special education and rehabilitation teaching with the blind and partially sighted – others deal with scotopic or night vision. Thus on one wall, I saw titles like The World of Night: The Fascinating Drama of Nature as Enacted between Dusk and Dawn; Nature by Night; The Coral Reef by Night; After the Sun Goes Down: The Story of Animals at Night; The Shadow Book (a photographic-esthetic study); Images from the Dark; Night Eyes; Black Is Beautiful (black-and-white landscape photos) – books about the world she loves and knows.

On the other wall there were several shelves of books about color, that strange phenomenon which she can never perceive and never really know, but about which she is endlessly curious. Some of these were scientific studies on the physics of color or the physiology of vision; others dealt with linguistic aspects of color – The 750 Commonest Color Metaphors in Daily Life; Seeing Red and Tickled Pink: Color Terms in Everyday Language. There were books on the esthetics and philosophy of color, ranging from anthropological treatises to Wittgenstein on color. Others, she told me, had been collected simply for their colorful titles [Color Me Beautiful: Discover Your Natural Beauty through the Colors That Make You Look Great and Feel Fabulous ). There was a variety of books for younger ages, with titles like Hello Yellow, Ant and Bee and Rainbow: A Story about Colors, and her favorite, Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Color. She often recommends these for achroma-topic children, so that they can ‘learn’ the colors of common objects, and the emotional ‘valence’ of different colors – necessary knowledge in a chromatopic world.

Frances is also hugely knowledgeable about specialized sunglasses for visually impaired people, and had advised us on which type to bring to Pingelap. ‘She has collated a huge amount of practical information on all kinds of aids for achromatopic people,’ Knut remarked, ‘and although she repeatedly refers to herself as a nonscientific person, I regard her as a genuine investigator in the real meaning of the term.’

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This is very much what happened with Virgil, a man virtually blind from birth whom Bob and I had worked with (his case history, ‘To See and Not See,’ is given in An Anthropologist on Mars ). When it was suggested that Virgil’s sight might be restored by surgery, he could not help being intrigued and excited by the prospect of seeing. But after the operation, which was seen, medically, as ‘successful,’ the reality, for Virgil, was bewildering. He had built up his world entirely from nonvisual information, and the sudden introduction of visual stimuli threw him into a state of shock and confusion. He was overwhelmed by new sensations, visual sensations, but he could make no sense of them, he could not give them any order or meaning. The ‘gift’ of sight disturbed him profoundly, disturbed a mode of being, habits and strategies he had had for fifty years; and, increasingly, he would shut his eyes, or sit in the darkness, to shut out this frightening perceptual assault, and regain the equilibrium which had been taken from him with the surgery.