You should’ve seen it in color

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m into woodturning now as I go ever deeper down the rabbit hole of woodwork.  I’ve learned it from YouTube and the world of hard knocks.  This is not necessarily something I would recommend to everyone. You need to be a responsible adult; have some disposable income; be far enough into your life that if you are severely crippled by an injury your family can go on.

But it is an interesting experience.  

For example, the folks who teach woodturning on YouTube aren’t there because they are articulate.  Some of them are, don’t get me wrong.  My point is that they were woodturners first. Their focus is toward the wood.  They know how to do things with it. They understand what is happening with the wood. Having the language to communicate that to someone else is a different matter entirely.

Some of them are very loquacious. Very.  You’d hate to be caught with them between you and a bathroom. But there is a continuum of folks who talk less and less all the way down to some you just show their hands, their lathes, and the wood turning, either in silence or music in the background.

Sometimes those silent ones work, but having a word now and then would be helpful.

Having the words to communicate is a key thing. Getting meaning into those words is another.  This is hard to do, so let me come into it sideways.

One of the songs that the Algorithm brings me is “In Color”, written by James Otto, Jamey Johnson, and Lee Thomas Miller, and sung by Jamey Johnson.  For those of you who haven’t heard it, I do suggest that you get out on the old Internet and find it, but a bit of it goes like this:

If it looks like we were scared to death//

Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other//

You should've seen it in color//

A picture's worth a thousand words//

But you can't see what those shades of gray keep covered//

You should've seen it in color

This is only the chorus, but if you have the right experience base, it will tell you more than 1000 philosophers typing on 1000 typewriters for 1000 years.  No offense to philosophers here; they would be the first to say so.

For those of us of a certain age who’ve sat by our elders looking at old black and white photos this takes us back in time. The symbols conveyed in the photograph can connect with the base of common shared experience and help us to remember them with such force as to evoke emotion.

I’ve not made it through the song with dry eyes yet.

The songwriters do some amazing things here.  They convey that these black and white photographs do carry a message.  But, while pointing out that the deficiency of the media, i.e. it’s only black and white, they use this as a metaphor to illustrate that any form of communication will fall short of actual experience. “You should’ve seen it in color,” does not mean that a colored photograph would be better.  It means you need to live through it.

Saint Paul said that “we see through a glass, darkly.”  Some scientists say we don’t see at all, but they are writing philosophical checks they can’t cash.  What they mean is seeing is different than we thought it was.  

Light comes into our eyes and activates receptors.  Some of these are rods: They manifest as seeing black and white. Others are cones: They manifest as seeing in color.  There are three different types of cones, so every color we see is a combination of three basic colors.  What our brain interprets as color is just a combination of the electrochemical signals that the eye sends through the optic nerve.  There would be those who say because of this that there is really no such thing as color.

You can see why not many scientists could make a living writing country songs, but why Saint Paul probably could.

I know a bit of what Saint Paul meant when he wrote that.  Every day that I live and experience the world, I know a little more.  This is not to belittle, not to poo-poo the work of scientists. Far from it.  Nor do I mean to deprecate the value of words.

But we absolutely cannot overvalue experience nor shared experience.

That's the story of my life // Right there in black and white.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.