Anam Cara

Different colours arise when certain wavelengths are filleted from the spectrum. Colour is always the result of a subtraction from whiteness and not the singular, lonely choice of outer garment by an object. Each object is already pulsing to a certain frequency and the hunger or generosity of this frequency determines how much colour an object absorbs. Each bird, stone, tree, wave and face is sistered to sunlight in an individual way. Each thing comes alive in the sun: how a stone vibrates to the sun is how it absorbs the light’s energy at that frequency and the rhythm of the frequency is the key to its colour. This frequency fillets out a specific colour from the spectrum of light and this then becomes the colour of the object. For centuries a granite rock might lie in the corner of a field, perfectly still, dressed in sure colour – this is what the eye sees, yet what the eye cannot see are the secret vibrations and continuous inner change that underlie and indeed create this still, coloured image. Colour is never dead or neutral: it issues from individual, secret frequencies.

What is the spectrum of colour? It is the reservoir, the broad band of colour that is always present. But the human eye can never behold the whole visual/non-visual range of that spectrum. In this sense, each object is an abbreviation: its individual frequency absorbs one colour from the spectrum, while the other colours are still present but remain unseen. This is why there is transparency. When the rays of light do not correspond with the individual pulse of an object, the object reflects the light. But we never actually notice or see the light rays which pass through. It is the light rays which the object resists and will not let in that return and reach our eyes. The very thereness of a flower or a stone is an act of resistance to light, and colour is the fruit of this resistance. The colours we cannot see are the ones the object absorbs. The colour it rejects is, ironically, the one in which we see it dressed. For instance, a rose absorbs yellow and blue, and it rejects red. So we see a rose as red. A daffodil absorbs blue and red, but rejects yellow and yet it is this yellow we see.

While the object resists the light, the object is also penetrated by the light. The activity that gives an object its colour has all the play and excitement of lovemaking. Yet much remains hidden in the solitude of the object where the unseen colours continue to dwell. If an object could get up and look at itself in a mirror, it would undoubtedly be surprised at its public countenance. In all probability this is not how it would see itself; the mirror would offer no glimpse of the inner colours which have no need of the outside eye: they continue to live concealed within the object.

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WHEN WE COME TO GLIMPSE HOW COLOUR ARISES, WE BEGIN TO understand what a rich symbolic world colour suggests. Colour is not simply a surface pigment or covering. The very heart of an object glows through its colour, and colour is always reaching towards us. Without our eyes there is no colour. All colour is colour reflected from an object towards us and the eye is the secret destination of colour. What happens between the granite stone and the sun is read by the brain and the eye as colour. We could say, then, that it belongs to the psychic grandeur of the human heart, that it is fashioned to behold the world in the vitality, warmth and wonder of colour. We are creatures fashioned to behold colour because the soul loves beauty. Plato stated this elegantly in the Phaedrus. He suggests that our present love of beauty is an awakened echo of our earlier life in the eternal world. There we knew beauty because we lived in her grace: ‘But of beauty, I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here too, shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense . . . But this is the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight.’