PLANET BLISS
Not so long ago, rungs of the social ladder led to a volleyball beach. Trading dope and blissful thinking, the children of whale oil axle grease kings chased mandalas and sea gulls, shouting at clouds.
There had been orchids at Orchard Supply Hardware, before Santa Clara got branded, forgetting how our municipal charter said the City's purpose was to serve the community. At OSH there was an endless supply of tools and parts for fixing a leaky faucet, building a fence, overhauling a Briggs and Stratton mower engine. The rusted dinosaur at El Real Nursery was a roadside attraction. There were hedges to trim, weeds to pull, sprinklers to repair. Having outlived Blossom Hill orchards, OSH was our celebration of work, a hardy survivor.
Ordinary yard work. My neighbor's ongoing philosophy, “It never ends, Dave.” And I said, “It kept me in business for over thirty five years.”
When Orchard opened its doors, glazed tiles decorated the entryway to Bank of America. If you were waiting at the corner for the light to change, the blue tiles pleasantly reflected light. You could watch them and see the red stop light change. In a different context however, say in a physics classroom, red and blue combine to produce magenta.
Physics was a high school subject I ignored. I had my own business then as a commercial photographer, and preferred working in the darkroom, especially in 35mm color, which needed a six step process to develop red, blue and green dye layers. This process replaced an even more cumbersome one in which three black and white transparencies, mounted in projectors with red, blue and green lights, when all projected together in exact superimposition, produced full color on a projector screen.
The red stop light anomaly might have gone unnoticed indefinitely. Until 1959, when I came across an article in Scientific American, “Experiments in Color Vision,” by Edwin H. Land. He had discovered that only two colors are needed, and that they can be any two, so long as they differ by a minimal wavelength. Another requirement he learned, completely different from the rules of classical physics, is that the two related images of a scene that are superimposed must not be uniformly organized, but rather distributed in the manner of scenes found in everyday life.
He described an “eye-brain computer,” which recognizes patterns of intensities that have been previously experienced in ordinary situations, using the rods and cones of the eye. These patterns are not necessarily tied to any particular situation but are the basis for assigning colors in a wide range of situations. In his words, it “...can build colored worlds of its own out of informative materials that have always been supposed to be inherently drab and colorless.” The eye-brain computer normalizes experience so that a red stop light can stay red in more than one context.
We also have an ear-brain. A nose-brain. A heart-brain and so on. These comprise one mind that is accumulating experience, that recognizes patterns, including changes to Blossom Hill and OSH, and much more. The mind summarizes its results and finds trends. Blossom Hill and OSH went through social and economic changes. They were also affected by specific changes in the weather that participate in a trend we call climate change. There is a tendency, as seen in the function of the eye-brain computer, to normalize in accordance with previous experience: Oh, it's just the weather doing its thing.
What if the trend turns out to be more than just a little disturbing? How quickly the bojangle beach changes, past the wind swept cypress on its granite rock by the sea. Now it's raining dogs and fire hydrants.
With something so manifest, so disastrous, how is it that climate change does not have everyone's attention?
This morning my April issue of Discover magazine arrived. There is an article by Sofia Deleniv:“When Ignorance Is Bliss, why we sometimes choose not to know.” She speaks of a study published in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which the lead author, Caroline Charpentier, says --
'Our brains treat positive information as a reward to be approached, but negative information . . . more as a punishment to be avoided'
