Anam Cara

The beauty of colour is an intricate play of presence and absence. As we have seen, a colour is never alone, for each reflected colour arises through the interplay of other hidden colours which we do not see. After the perished paleness of winter, the sight of a field of new spring grass is pleasing in its hope and urgency. Yet such a field of breathing greenness is the achievement of chlorophyll, which has breathed in the red and blue of the sunlight to reflect and release green. Colour is always a dance where the vital partners are invisible. Indeed one could legitimately speak of the music of colour. A soprano can break a wine glass if her note happens to hit the natural vibrational note of the glass and, in a sense, this is the way that colour too is released. When a ray of light hits the natural vibrational note of an object, it alters the vibration; it becomes absorbed itself in this alteration and what is reflected outwards is the object’s colour. The Impressionist movement, for instance, was totally immersed in the attempt to capture these vibrations of colour.

From another perspective, we could say that the colour we perceive is the remains of the other colours which have been absorbed. The colour that gleams towards us lives from its invisible ghosts, the colours buried deep in the seen object. When we behold the magnificent and vanishing raiment of autumn colour, we are seeing a double valediction, the inner leave-taking of the hidden companion colours without which the outer autumn colours could never have attained visibility. Language is weak in bringing the visual to expression. The French philosopher Derrida said that colour has not yet been named. All colour has its origin in the brightness of white.

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For Lima has taken the white veil . . . this whiteness keeps her

ruins for ever new.

HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick

EACH COLOUR EVOKES ITS OWN WORLD OF FEELING AND association. White is associated with purity and innocence. Snow turns the earth white in a wondrous transformation. Snow does what the night does: it absolves the world of colour. Whereas the night gives black absolution, the snow gives white absolution. The totality and certainty of white in a landscape under snow must cause the night some unease!

Several years ago in Cape Town, a friend and I had the opportunity of visiting Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela and his friends were incarcerated for twenty-eight years. We also visited the lime mines on the island where they slaved by day. Imagine the searing exposure of their skin to the relentless bite of the lime. When the fierce African sun turned the lime into blinding whiteness, how their eyesight was tormented and seared. One exprisoner, now a tour guide, told us that after the long working day – the lime on their skin, the salt of their sweat and the salt of their tears – they were often forced to have hot showers in salt water. It must have seemed to them that not only their white oppressors but the very whiteness of nature itself was rising up against their colour.

In the Native American tradition a whole new era of transfiguration is initiated by the birth of the sacred white buffalo calf. Within the Christian tradition, the new time was to begin with the lamb: ‘And behold the lion shall lie down with the lamb . . . And there shall be no more hurt or pain on all my holy mountain.’ One of the most exhilarating epiphanies in the New Testament is the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor. In this moment, the poet-carpenter let ‘his glory be seen’. This is an event of the most radiant, blinding whiteness.

It is interesting that the Spirit of inspiration, renewal and transfiguration, the Holy Spirit, is symbolized by a white dove. Peace and serenity too are symbolized by the dove. White is also the colour of surrender. Elementally, the poles where the earth ends are also white: the Arctic and the Antarctic. White is the colour of the ocean when she is restless or when she dances, her white foamy waves crashing to the shore.

The appearance and definition of white is made possible by the presence of darkness and perhaps the softest light that shines upon the earth is moonlight. The white light of the moon is infinitely gentle with the dark. It insists on no awakening or disturbance of colour except for the occasional illumination of a breaking wave. The moon guides the rhythm of the tides and the red rhythm of the blood. Held with such nobility in the dome of night, it offers an ever-ebbing journey of light. It wanes to a clean, vertical arch of light, almost a question mark high in the night. Then over the course of a month, its faith of light grows until it becomes a full circle of the most subtle illumination, at ease with the singularity of the dark but faithful to the courage of individual forms which it visits and holds in outline everywhere. The colour of moonlight against the black dome of night seems blue-white.

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