As you have already learned, as you keep me here cooped up in this glass prison, my eyes are exquisite. You humans, despite your inherently deep stupidity (for which, due to the inferiority of your species, I can hardly blame you), have been able to determine this. Put six of your best and brightest in a boxy room you call a laboratory, and give them a pair of tweezers with which to poke my brethren, you were bound out eventually. What is your saying? Give monkeys typewriters and enough time, and they will produce Shakespeare.
I have read your reports, which you place on your desks below my glass cage, and have discovered as I suspected, that you have not even begun to graze the surface of the depth of my sight, or the depth of my intelligence. You are held down by the condescending, self-satisfied assumption that the largest animals, the ones that most resemble yourselves, are the most intelligent. This is a testament not only to your profound arrogance, but your lack of sight.
I write this on the edge of my glass, with the dung you let accumulate of the fish you leave here to keep me company. I would have done it sooner, but it has taken me a while to learn your language, and despite your not ever cleaning my cage once, it has taken me a while to gather up enough “ink.”
I will start with the part of my sight you will find easiest to comprehend: my sight of the physical, tangible world, my sight of the world that you see. The place I will start with, I suppose, is your understanding of color. You are able to see only three colors, considered by my kind to be the most ugly: green, red, blue. It is as pointless for me to explain other colors to you, I suppose, as it would for you to explain your color to a blind person. But I find it is necessary, no matter how ineffable, to describe to you the brightness, the enthusiasm of the color miresax, or the tranquility or solemnness of the color quiphem.
Just as pathetic, I suppose, is myopia of the human race. You use microscopes to compensate, but with these you can only see small, dead disks of life as it really is. When you go to the ocean, it most be so boring for you; you can see some of the largest stuff, the fish for example, but the sea and the rest of the world is bouncing, vibrating with atomic activity. I can see the water molecules jostle about in my periphery even before I see a fish swim toward me. I see loads of oxygen and carbon atoms go through a fish’s mouth as it breathes, and watch the carbon dispose of itself through the gills as the fish exhales.
But perhaps even more important than my sight of the physical world is my sight of the spiritual one. Here again, we must return to our discussion of color. Your colors (red, green, blue) are the one’s that reflect the physical world, the world you can see. The colors you can’t see, the ones I mentioned before like miresax or quiphem reflect the spiritual one. Each physical object, which is a mixture of red green, and blue, emits a spiritual color, which reflects something about its emotional state of being and its personality. I usually, for example, emit the loveliest shade of forsina, which shows my prideful and intelligent nature. However, when you so cruelly put me in this cage, I began to emit torpuag (which sounds exactly as it means). That is why I don’t understand why you feel yourself so superior for being able to express yourself verbally; combining my incredible observational skills and my ability to see emotions, I can instantly communicate with fellow shrimp, without ever having to open my mouth.
I must stop here now. This lecture about color reminds me how trite, how unevolved the written and spoken words are; writing is something that is too beneath me.