Anam Cara

Black is also the colour of ink. Books are printed in black ink. There is again some irony here: the most colourful worlds, characters and adventures live inside lines of black narrative. In contrast to prose, a poem leaves more room on the page for the white silence and space to intensify the black lines where the music is distilled. Indeed, in a world where colour is often garish, the simple clarity of black and white maintains a lovely dignity. This is especially true of photography. Fergus Bourke’s stunning black and white photographs of Conamara succeed in bringing out the unwatched stillness of this landscape. He looks carefully and waits for the days when Conamara unexpectedly reveals itself. He manages to delve deeper beneath the deft weave of colour until he can glimpse and catch in black and white the hidden liturgy of primal forms that shape this place. In film too, black and white can be hugely effective. Andrei Tarkovsky’s early film Andrei Rublev is magnificently constructed in a black and white sequence which schools the eyes in shadow and light all the way through until they become drenched in the glory of its final epiphany. Black has also been a dominant colour in spirituality. As we saw earlier, the mystics speak of the Dark Night of the Soul. Meister Eckhart said: ‘The Light that is God flows out and darkens every light.’

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IN THE LAST MONTHS OF HIS TURBULENT LIFE, CARAVAGGIO (1571–1610) completed his extraordinary dark painting, The Denial of Peter. It depicts Peter before a fireplace in the courtyard of the High Priest where one of the women is accusing Peter of being a follower of Christ. Two soldiers are also pointing their fingers at him and Peter is denying the three accusations. This canvas is so dark; it has none of the beauty or the softness that colour brings. It is a black painting of relentless and bleak psychological portraiture. The figures are shrouded in black and dark brown earth colours. The only light is meagre and illuminates the faces of the accusers and the startled, helpless eyes of the old, bald Peter, the betrayer. His finger points at himself. He knows what he is doing. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are wet with tears. His presence is not fearful but limp with resignation and shame; this contrasts with the alertness and vigour of his accusers. The betrayal of a friend, of a loved one, is an undignified, demeaning thing. Caravaggio’s powerful portraiture draws out the irreversible awfulness of the deed as the light of kindness and belonging fades in the encircling gloom. This is an incredible portrait of a moment when weakness killed beauty. This darkening gloom seems forever beyond the dream of dawn.

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THE NIGHT BREAKS WHEN THE RED FIRE OF DAWN IS KINDLED and the world glows again in the beauty of colour. Of all colours, red is perhaps the most passionate and intense. Red is never neutral. When red is present, something is happening: red is for danger. It is not a colour that dwells in some secure middle region where rest and stillness prevail. Red is a threshold colour; it tends to accompany and intensify beginnings and endings. Red is also the colour of birth and is probably the colour in which the universe was born. It is believed that the Big Bang was the primal red explosion out of which the cosmos emerged. Our earth was born in a red fire. Despite its solid outer surface, the heart of the earth is a wild fire-dance of red magma. When a volcano erupts we begin to understand that ground is only vaguely solid. The torrential red rivers that flow from a volcano reveal what a tenuous foundation ground is. Underneath the surface of the land and beneath the floor of the oceans, there is no solid stone-like foundation. The earth is grounded on a primordial red ocean. If it was red at the origin and is red at the root, it is somehow natural that the intense threshold experiences of life are often accompanied by the colour red.

Each colour has its own scale of brightness and red has many hues that range from dark crimson to faint orange. It has such force and vibrancy because it is the colour of life. Blood is the fluent stream that keeps the body alive, forever flowing out from and flowing back into the red well of the heart. Blood is also our most ancient stream. The secrets of ancestry, the blueprints for future descendants, sleep within this flow. It is a surprising image: within the permanent darkness of your body a ceaseless red-bush streaming. Like a mild bellows in the dark, breath deepens the life of the red: black and red are the primary colours at the heart of identity.