The Color Blue

THE COLOR BLUE

JUST BECAUSE The Man Who Loves Provo was color blind did not mean that he did not have a favorite color. He just had a different criteria than did those who saw--or thought they saw--and knew--color better than he. For The Man Who Loves Provo preferred the sounds of color to their actual visual quality.
His favorite was blue. He loved the texture of the voiced bilabial stop running into the voiced alveolar lateral and then ending in that rounded, back upper vowel. He especially liked colors that ended with a vowel, those voiced options that had length--indeed, that can go on forever and ever and ever: bluuuuuuu.
Orange, for example, was not nearly as beautiful as yellow. Red, phonetically, paled beside grey. And who could argue the fact that black and white were an aesthetic disgrace when compared to the sublimity of magenta? Or even lavender. But blue: ah, blue! That it was a so-called primary color meant nothing to The Man Who Loves Provo. It was the sound that mattered: Bluuuuuuu.
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The Man Who Loves Provo found that as he aged, he was also losing the accuracy of his hearing. But that, too, he realized, was no handicap. For even though his ears were losing some of their function, he still liked listening to sound, though not necessarily for the sound itself; rather, for what the sound made him want to touch. For example, the sound of the bird’s wing made him want to touch sand; the sound of an ocean wave made him wish to feel the page of a book. When he listened to the oboe, he felt the desire to touch a woman’s hair. And when he heard human speech, he longed to be immersed in water. The sound of the color blue helped him to realize the importance of corn.