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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
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I'm not overly familiar with the source of the article I'm featuring today. It's from Open Culture, which bills itself as having "the best free cultural & educational media," and already I distrust it because if you're really the best, you don't need to self-promote as such.
But we're going to look at this article anyway.
I'd heard this assertion before, but I don't think I've ever blogged about it.
The article, incidentally, contains a video with a similar title. I didn't watch it. I don't know if it covers the same material as the writing. I prefer writing over videos.
In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, saying, “It is your mind that moves.”
That reminds me of how an optimist and a pessimist argue over whether a glass is half-full or half-empty, when, clearly, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
Such observations bring us to another koan-like question: if a language lacks a word for something like the color blue, can the thing be said to exist in the speaker’s mind?
It's a fair question, I'll admit, but it seems to me that lots of things exist that we don't have words for.
We can dispense with the idea that there’s a color blue “out there” in the world. Color is a collaboration between light, the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex. And yet, claims Maria Michela Sassi, professor of ancient philosophy at Pisa University, “every culture has its own way of naming and categorizing colours.”
Can we really dispense with that idea, though? Just as sound is a pressure wave in a medium such as air, water, or something solid, regardless of whether there is an ear around to hear it (so much for the "tree falls in the forest" Zen koan), color is a particular wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. I'd argue that insofar as color exists at all, being not a "thing" but a property of a thing, that wavelength that we agree on as "blue" exists, too. How we perceive that color is, to me, a separate issue.
The most famous example comes from the ancient Greeks. Since the 18th century, scholars have pointed out that in the thousands of words in the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer never once describes anything — sea, sky, you name it — as blue.
I'd heard that, of course, but I still have questions, like: How do we know they didn't use the word for blue if they didn't have a word for blue? And, more importantly: Why are we trusting the color descriptions of a blind poet?
It was once thought cultural color differences had to do with stages of evolutionary development — that more “primitive” peoples had a less developed biological visual sense.
Yeah, evolution doesn't really work like that. No matter how primitive the culture seems to our technological senses, people are generally the same, genetically speaking, all over.
“If you think about it,” writes Business Insider’s Kevin Loria, “blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t blue animals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flowers are mostly human creations.”
Well, yeah, but unless you live in London or Seattle, there's this big thing-that-isn't-a-thing called the daytime sky, which we describe as blue. It's pretty hard to miss unless you live in a cave, which even cavepeople didn't do all the time.
The color blue took hold in modern times with the development of substances that could act as blue pigment, like Prussian Blue, invented in Berlin, manufactured in China and exported to Japan in the 19th century.
I did a blog entry a while back on that particular pigment; as I recall, it featured in Japanese ("The Wave") and European ("Starry Night") art. But I have my doubts about that being the origin of our shared perception of the color blue. Newton did a lot of study of the color spectrum, breaking up sunlight using a prism like the proto-Dark Side of the Moon cover art, and he included "blue" as a color. I should note, however, that Newton seems to have chosen a seven-color scheme (the actual spectrum covers a lot more than seven shades) because of the mystical association with the number seven: days of the week, visible heavenly bodies that move (sun, moon, and five planets).
One modern researcher, Jules Davidoff, found this to be true in experiments with a Namibian people whose language makes no distinction between blue and green (but names many finer shades of green than English does). “Davidoff says that without a word for a colour,” Loria writes, “without a way of identifying it as different, it’s much harder for us to notice what’s unique about it.”
I kind of agree with that, though. There's the old story about how the Inuit have many different words for snow; it's probably false (not least because there are several languages and dialects involved), but it does speak to the larger truth that we name the things we find to be important in our lives.
It's an interesting line of inquiry, though. When I was a kid, I remember making an offhand comment to a friend like, "How do I know that the colors I see are the same as the colors you see? Like, we can both agree that this grass is green, but if I could see through your eyes, would I see the same color as I do now?" Those weren't my exact words, which I don't remember, but whatever I said, he understood what I was getting at. Much later, after the internet became a thing, someone echoed my childhood Zen koan and got a bunch of mind-blown reactions.
As far as I know, we can't know the answer to that, not yet. Perhaps someday. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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