Kodalith is photographic film (obsolete) once used by printing companies and commercial photographers. Kodalith film reduced 10,000 gradations of tone, perceivable in nature by the human eye, to black or white only, all gray is washed out to either end of the scale. If a surface reflected less than 50% gray this film recorded it as pure white. If the surface reflected more than 50% gray, it became black. When developed, the photos taken by this film had no gray whatsoever, just bold black and white. Something is kodalithic if its complexities have been reduced to black and white.
Black and white are qualities of the visual world but all sensory, intellectual-philosophical phenomena can be reduced to polar terms. The matter at hand is either black or white, conservative or liberal, hawk or dove, scientist or artist. Music is either tonal or atonal, food tastes good or bad, the skin feels good or bad.
The human brain turns as much as possible into black or white; sometimes in an instant, sometimes over years. Shades of gray or gradations of hue will be added upon recall as time allows. First impressions and gut reactions tend to be kodalithic.
Kodalogic: An heuristic turning all audio, visual, olfactory, tactile, vomeronasal, intellectual, political, philosophical subtlety to black or white. It is instinctive in humans to do this - probably a characteristic of all vertebrates. We all do it, we’ve all done it. It saves time and perhaps your life. The dog is not well - it is not dead - it’s not going to get well without a $500 trip to the vet - shoot it, thus making it one or the other - alive or dead - in between is expensive. The three young men walking toward me on the sidewalk at night may be angels or devils - probably something in between, shades of gray. I must make a decision to cross the street to avoid them ( they’re devils) or walk forward through them ( they’re angels). Walking in the middle of the street, having split the difference, would look stupid.
Kodalogic can save your life and it can make your life black and white boring with no subtlety. Kodalogic ought to be used sparingly but it isn’t. Kodalogic gets waay over-used in contemporary America. Overuse of kodalogic is a characteristic of Americans. Kodalogic is so comfortable, like the latest Lee Child-Jack Reacher novel in which there are good guys and bad guys and the principal good guy drinks a lot of coffee.
When we are young we see every shade of every sense. As we get older brains turn millions of wonderful, ever-changing-evolving things into black and white to make room for the necessary facts of life so facts can be easily retrieved. Memories are a file of dehydrated sponges, flat as crepes, wafer-thin, and upon recall they fill out to their fullness and make you happy. Writing a memoir is retrieving a stack of dry, flat sponges all black or all white and exposing them to clean water to reconstitute them revealing their color - your wise adult mind is clear, cool water. Look for the humor, the sympathy. Now you see things from mom’s point of view. That evil nun who locked you in the basement laundry room to scrub bed sheets at the orphanage and then pulled you by the ears up to a dinner of overcooked dried out beef liver and mooshy, pale canned peas washed down before gagging with fizz-tablet root beer served in a scratched up spun aluminum “glass” has a third dimension. She was the Betty Page of Topeka, Kansas in her youth; black or white, reasonable or insane. Just add water.
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9/26/15