Chemicals and wavelengths got me to thinking about how colors can’t be described in words, and therefore it is *impossible(?) to know if my ‘green’ is the same as someone else’s. The wavelength is the same, and conditioning has brought us to a point where we’ll all call objects of the same wavelength, ‘green’ or ‘blue’, but what if the interpretation leads us to see completely different things. Knowledge / experience is also intangible in this way. Meaning, it’s impossible to see what someone else sees, or feel what they feel.

Take for instance a camera, or a car I sometimes walk around with my Epson, hoping to spark a conversation with another photographer, who I’d imagine would be thinking to themselves, “Oh! Is that an RD1? Damn, look at that sexy CCD, manual shutter lever-equipped, Seiko-designed dial gauge-having, Bessa-styled body!” But most people instead just think, “camera,” lacking the knowledge to fully appreciate it. The same goes for me. Where someone might see a V12-toting, aerodynamic supercar, my mind simply registers it as, “car”. Also with wine, someone might see a bottle that has been buried in a ship wreck in the ocean for over a hundred years as a “treasure”, I simply see the liquid as ‘wine’. These words are more than just a long explanation of the hackneyed “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure” expression. I really do find it fascinating how knowledge and experience can ‘color’ a person’s world (haha, see what I did there?).

Perhaps there is also a calibration issue. For instance, you know how the Leica M8 had a purple tinge to its images (prior to the M8.2) due to it picking up on IR rays? Well what if there is also a universal truth that requires calibration? For instance, what my brain registers as ‘plant’, someone else’s registers as “medicine”. This is the closest thing to magic that I’m aware of. It’s almost as if that person see the ‘plant’ for what it really is, with no filter between themselves and the plant. Maybe that is one of the aspects of true love too. No filter, unadulterated pure, ‘me’, and someone who both see that, and appreciates it.

Being on an isolated wavelength can be both a gift and a curse.