Multiple times this week I had to explain what I mean by "true indigo." I found an interview with
Dr. Oliver Sacks with
Wired Magazine. His story, first heard by me heard elsewhere on a 1998 episode of
The Mind Traveler , was my inspiration and definition:
Wired: You write that there was a time in med school when you took a lot of amphetamines. What's the most vivid experience of music you ever had on drugs?
Sacks: Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, "I want to see indigo, now!" As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall — the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.
Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi's mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, "Good, the color exists in the external world." But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo — they were blue, mauve, pink. I've never seen that color since.
It took a mountain of amphetamine, mescaline, and cannabis to launch me into that space. But Monteverdi did it too.
Multiple times this week I had to explain what I mean by "true indigo." I found an interview with Dr. Oliver Sacks with Wired Magazine. His story, first heard by me heard elsewhere on a 1998 episode of The Mind Traveler , was my inspiration and definition: