{"id":81457,"date":"2016-10-17T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=81457"},"modified":"2016-10-16T15:02:48","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T14:02:48","slug":"what-color-is-the-wind-a-most-unusual-serenade-to-the-senses-inspired-by-a-blind-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/10\/what-color-is-the-wind-a-most-unusual-serenade-to-the-senses-inspired-by-a-blind-child\/","title":{"rendered":"What Color Is The Wind? A Most Unusual Serenade to the Senses, Inspired by a Blind Child"},"content":{"rendered":"

An imaginative invitation to empathy and self-expansion.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind\"<\/a>\u201cWhat is essential is invisible to the eye,\u201d<\/em> Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry wrote in The Little Prince<\/em><\/a>. Those bereft of vision, therefore, need not be bereft of the essential \u2014 they discern it by means other than sight.<\/p>\n

The richness of that otherness is what Belgian artist and author Anne Herbauts<\/strong> came to see in a surprising and profound question from a blind child. During a bookmaking workshop she was leading, a little boy asked her whether she, as an artist, could tell him what color the wind was \u2014 a notion of the same trans-sensory, synesthetic quality as Helen Keller\u2019s electrifying account of \u201chearing\u201d Beethoven<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Touched by the sincerity of the boy\u2019s curiosity, Herbauts set out to offer her answer in What Color Is the Wind?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), translated by Claudia Zoe Bedrick \u2014 a largehearted, unusual book that takes the reader on a sensorial adventure, with the tactile magic of The Black Book of Colors<\/em><\/a> and the die-cut delight of Bruno Munari\u2019s visionary vintage gems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind21\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The story\u2019s protagonist, whom Herbauts affectionately calls \u201cthe little giant,\u201d goes in search of an answer to his synesthetic question. Every piece of nature he encounters gives him a different answer \u2014 to the bee, the wind is the warm color of the sun; the old dog, who perceives the world through smell<\/a>, experiences it as \u201cpink, flowery, pale white\u201d; to the wolf, it smells of the forest; for the mountain, the wind is a bird; for the window, it is the color of time.<\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind23\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind26\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind24\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Herbauts paints the sensory landscape with extraordinarily inventive bookmaking techniques to which this screen can do no justice \u2014 appleseeds peek through a die-cut hole, raindrops gleam embossed on a laminated page, debossed grooves invite the touch of tree bark. What emerges is a parallel invitation to empathy and self-expansion in imagining the world as the unsighted experience it and exploring a different sensorial space than the one we sighted humans ordinarily inhabit. Just as the universe of smell unlocks hidden layers of reality<\/a>, so does the universe of touch.<\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind22\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind25\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind6\"<\/a>The little giant asks the bird,
\nWhat color\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

But the bird has flown away.<\/p>\n

And the enormous giant,
\nwith a slow gesture says:
\nThe color of the wind?<\/em><\/p>\n

It is everything at once.
\nThis whole book.<\/p>\n

Then he takes the book and,
\nthumb against its edge,
\nhe lets the pages fly.<\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind7\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind8\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"whatcoloristhewind20\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The immeasurably wonderful What Color Is the Wind?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> comes from Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse Enchanted Lion<\/a>, publisher of such imaginative treasures as The Lion and the Bird<\/em><\/a>, Cry, Heart, But Never Break<\/em><\/a>, Pinocchio: The Origin Story<\/em><\/a>, and Louis I, King of the Sheep<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat is essential is invisible to the eye,\u201d Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry wrote in The Little Prince. Those bereft of vision, therefore, need not be bereft of the essential \u2014 they discern it by means other than sight. An imaginative invitation to empathy and self-expansion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}