Anam Cara

In the outer world too, these colours were often wed to evoke or confirm primal kinship. One thinks of wars and killings. Every event happens in time, and time moves on. Time erases even the most vibrant events. But place is somehow different. An experience never simply happens in a place: regardless of how hidden or internal an experience between people might be, it does not remain sealed between them, it leaks out and happens to the place as well. Landscape absorbs experience. There has always been the recognition that the earth holds a particularly intense memory in those places where blood was spilt. It is interesting that the colour red as such is rarely present in the land, yet primitive peoples may have imagined that the very earth itself calls out for revenge against the evil ones who spilled human blood. There is a mythic sense here that the flow of human blood can render a place disturbed – not merely some human frontier but a natural boundary has been violated: earth and blood should not be mixed. Traces of human biography seep in to disturb the pre-conscious stillness of the earth. It seems that when spilt on earth human blood leaves an indelible stain. The red tears of human blood disturb the innocence of the earth; through the blood, thoughts seep inside the clay to perhaps infest its stillness with the virus of narrative.

The letting of blood is one of the oldest ritual expressions of entering into a new bond. Blood brothers do it – so do the Mafia. When two people have a child together, the child is of them: their own flesh and blood. In the new child, the two red streams of ancestry flow further and forth into each other.

Few colours are as freighted with symbolic significance as red. In a girl’s life, the arrival of the red flow signifies the transition to womanhood. She becomes a daughter of the moon, kin to its rhythm of red tide. In the life of a revolutionary movement the ultimate sacrifice for the fatherland is often seen as the willingness to spill one’s blood.

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IN RELIGION RED IS A VITAL COLOUR. ONE OF THE CENTRAL ICONS of the Catholic Church is the Sacred Heart. This is a picture of Jesus with the red heart exposed and framed in thorns; it is portraiture of love as sacrifice. At the heart of Christianity the colour is red. The pinnacle of love is realized in the spilling of the blood of Jesus. In the Eucharist, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The ultimate gift is a red gift. Kinship with Jesus is not achieved merely through sentiment, idea or faith but in the visceral act of eating his body and drinking his blood: filling oneself with the redness of Jesus. It is no wonder that red was the primary colour in medieval art and chemistry. After Pentecost Sunday the priest wears red vestments at mass. Here red symbolizes the flame of new courage and transfiguration which the Holy Spirit brings. One of the most beautiful religious uses of red is the red of the sanctuary lamp. It is lovely at night to enter a dark oratory and find that lamp aglow, a red womb-light that invites you to kneel in reverence before the Presence of Presences.

Before electricity came to rural areas, the candle and the oil lamp were the means of light. These lights left the room still predominantly wrapped in shadow. Such shadow provided the ideal darkening to bring out the red mysteries of the open fire. The fire was wonderful to watch. People who lived on their own would say: the fire is company. The fire was a happening, a narrative that began as a spark within a cold mound of darkness. Then it built and bloomed until each sod of dead turf became fluent and the whole fire was entwined in the dance. The sounds crackled and deepened and fell gradually into white, silent ashes.

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MY FAVOURITE PAINTING IN RED IS LA COIFFURE BY EDGAR DEGAS at the National Gallery in London. It is a painting of an older woman combing a girl’s hair. Her head extends over the back of the chair and the woman combs her red hair out into the same red background of the canvas. The older woman is wearing a white apron and a cerise blouse. The girl wears an orange-red dress and there is a white table angled at the front of the painting. Matisse owned and loved this painting. In some strange way you are made to feel as if the orange redness of the scene is being combed from the young woman, out through her hair. Her fiery red interiority is being combed out. And although a vibrant red/orange takes over almost the entire canvas, there remains a profound serenity at the heart of this painting.

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Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt

eye and saying: ‘The walls in my room should be painted this

colour’.

WITTGENSTEIN