Colors

I've always been fascinated with colors, and with the feelings and characteristics which conglomerate themselves with colors. It seems to me almost like synaesthesia, perhaps because I've always known what color each day of the week is.

Colors, their shadows and their penumbras... Red with anger, red with shame. Yellow cowardice. Green with envy, or just a greenhorn. Pure as the white-driven snow, terror white as a sheet. A black mark against his name.

Purple and orange don't resonate so much, but I suspect that's because you don't run into these colors until you hit a language which has names for a good many colors. (Sapir and Whorf, take a bow.) Purple and orange are Johnny-come-latelies. Black and white and red, those you find in any language which names at least three colors. I forget which various colors may come fourth, but I do believe blue is always fifth. Seems I've read that somewhere, blue always comes fifth.

Blue is also the color that has by far the widest range of emotional and characteristical and linguistical conglomerations. Some years back, William Gass wrote a book entitled On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, which begins more or less as follows:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings... that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit— dumps, mopes, Mondays— all that's dismal— low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch... blue bottles... social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese...

More blue things and para-things than you can shake a stick at.

Alexander Theroux wrote a book entitled The Primary Colors; and another volume called The Secondary Colors, wherein orange and purple come into their own, at greater length than you might imagine possible.

Of course you know me, philosophical realist that I am: I still dare, in a nominalistic age, to think that beneath all this colorly conglomeration— in and with and under it, so to speak— there lurk deep truths and dark mysteries which a reductive and controlling technocratic age would rather that we neither name nor ponder. A person who is concerned to fathom the manifold mysteries of which blue is a natural sacramental, is a person who is just that much less easy to control and to trammel within the confines of good citizensheep. Or as Number 6 put it: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered... I am not a number— I am a free man."

In his Theory of Colors, Goethe said, "Colors are the deeds and the sufferings of light." My favorite color is red. There's something exalted, and at the same time strong and comforting to me, about red. Once when I was six years old I had a dream that I got an infected tooth, and I died and went to heaven. Everything in heaven was red, a bright luminous red lit up from within. I cannot read paragraph 919 of Goethe's Theory of Colors without thinking of that dream:

When we see them bring forth green below and red above, it will be hard to resist the thought that the green is connected with the earthly creation of the Elohim, and the red with their heavenly creation.

My favorite color is red. Oddly enough, my favorite two-color combination is yellow and black. When I see something colored yellow and black, it often sends a tingle up my spine, particularly if it is something at all artistic or aesthetic. But my favorite color is red.