"Most people think of winter as white—snow, frost, ice. I think of Paynes gray, made up of Prussian blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake. When the trees are leafless, the blue-gray hue saturates everything. Chickadee, snow, ice, tree bark, moods. It’s an edgy color in its soothing wash. Powdered slate. Medieval castles. And women. On the surface, we are shadows and slants, curved angles, hidden recesses, moody and damp. Inside are yellow ochre and crimson lake, ready to geyser and take over the world." |
Photograph by anniroenkae
White
Today the sky is like whale skin, thick and smooth with slashes of white streaks. Like a whale back crusted by leagues of travel. A Jack London sky. The vast wilderness rushes along, and yet is supremely still. I see a lope of tail surfacing, a fifty-ton mammal swimming above my head. The sky is like a whale’s skin. I sense the markings of a wild thing.
The day before was the white wind. It came in gusts measuring 50 miles an hour, bending young saplings at acute angles, ripping white birch bark off trunks into flying sheets, and throwing copper beech leaves that usually stay attached all winter long. Titanium winds. It is February. The light is white, the snow is white, the wind is white, like shards of bone. My partner has a titanium rod in his arm from when he fell off a 45-foot waterfall, shattering a pool of ice and his bones. That was also in February. A silver rod inside a white body.
White is almost impossible to describe unless it is contrasted against another color. White light shooting through a clear blue sky onto white snow makes shadows appear ultraviolet. The snow seems lit from within, glowing. Yet the essence of white is really the absence of color. Like the wind. Colorless, yet hard like titanium.
The color white is structurally complex, and contains an equal balance of all the colors of the spectrum. Artists and alchemists have struggled for centuries to create the purest white. In 400 BC, white was made from gray metallic lead, vinegar, and cow dung. In the 1500s, it was discovered that this white paint caused lead poisoning. Artists still prized the white pigment for its opacity, density, and durability. Also called Spirits of Saturn, lead white was used in makeup from the 16th century until 1830, when it was replaced by zinc white, a safe, inorganic compound. It wasn’t until 1978 that the United States banned the production of lead white paint. In the meantime, all those women were taking in lead through their skin.
Today, the wind smolders and then screams, stirs what is stagnant, unearths buried fury. Nothing is exempt from wind, not people, trees, animals, insects, microbes, or atoms. You can’t fight it, rail as you might. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks.” Hold your rage close lest it loosen and you burn.
Last autumn the wind blew the roof off my garden shed and uprooted a beloved old white birch. After raking a mountain of last year’s maple leaves, the wind sent them swirling back, blown uphill where I’d dumped them the day before. The gusts today could cleave the shirt right off your back. This kind of wind causes nightmares, the kind where you never find the exit when you’re being pursued, or your feet are lead, incapable of flight.
I suppose I could turn on the radio or listen to Led Zeppelin to cover this impossible howling sound. It’s a banshee of a wind. A gentle breeze raises only dust, with no thermals. The twigs might do a slow waltz. A strong breeze is where large branches do a tango, swaying, and seeds are airborne. In a moderate gale, even walking becomes difficult and butterflies are grounded. In a strong gale like now, children are blown over, branches break, and only swifts are airborne.
On Crete one summer, the Meltemi, “the bad-tempered wind,” ripped the shutters off windows and never relented for two weeks. Made it difficult to think, sleep, or go outside. Sand was everywhere; in ears, eyes, teeth. A slashing grit, making living impossible. My boyfriend and I fought relentlessly. When the Meltemi ceased, I left the island, broken.
Greece is another land of white. The chalk white buildings and white sun seem idyllic until you are riding a small motorcycle behind a man you think you might marry. Neither of you are wearing a helmet and the month is August and it is midday. The hot air is stagnant even though you are careening down a winding narrow mountain road with the wind, probably a moderate gale. My skirt gets caught in the back wheel, à la Isadora Duncan, which causes the motorcycle to wobble uncontrollably. Luckily my boyfriend is heavy enough to subdue the beast by standing up. When we come to a stop at the edge of the cliff, he proceeds to scream at me in Greek, blaming me, of course it was my fault.
Even though white symbolizes innocence and purity, he was in a white rage and burning, and I was a butterfly grounded. I felt sick, as I usually did on our motorcycle adventures, due to the fact I was pregnant but didn’t know it yet. Eventually, I fled Greece (chalky white) and returned to Manhattan (brown on brown) to have an abortion (bloody red).
With another boyfriend, E, we wanted to see the ancient city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert. This was before ISIS destroyed the Pearl City, the gleaming white capital of the Palmyrene Kingdom. An old robed man with a long white beard in the souk told me, “You must go!” I’d never heard of Palmyra but being young and mystically inclined, I took it as a sign. We hitchhiked and were picked up by an old man in a beat-up van. After an hour, driving in the middle of the desert, we headed straight into a sandstorm. Wind whipped the car, making it impossible to see. We hadn’t even been following a road, just one long sheet of yellow sand stretching into the long horizon.
The driver stopped and began a long stream of irate Arabic. We had no idea what he was saying. The wind squealed and spun. It felt like the van would be lifted into the sky by the spiraling force.
All at once, out of the wind tunnel, walked a person. He was dressed in sheepskin, head and face covered, massive shoulders square as a block, a long robe swinging wildly. He moved across the space of the windshield, looked me in the eye, and then vanished. In the next instant, the sand cleared and the man was nowhere to be seen. The driver said something like comam, which we later found meant shepherd. The wind had rendered the apparition into Krishna: ethereal, godlike, impossible.
Paynes Gray
Most people think of winter as white—snow, frost, ice. I think of Paynes gray, made up of Prussian blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake. When the trees are leafless, the blue-gray hue saturates everything. Chickadee, snow, ice, tree bark, moods. It’s an edgy color in its soothing wash. Powdered slate. Medieval castles. And women. On the surface, we are shadows and slants, curved angles, hidden recesses, moody and damp. Inside are yellow ochre and crimson lake, ready to geyser and take over the world.
A male friend said that women were creatures of lace and satin skin, as well as cruelty, silliness, and massive generosity. We’re hewn from stone and flesh, from snake and apple, from leagues of legends, but in the flesh we are born to floods of crimson blood and dry ochre winds from years of caretaking. You have no idea how cruel we can be. If I let my rage gush I too could part the Red Sea and render every dictator dust.
But we are often shaded shadows, waiting to pick up the pieces of a man’s world that insists on destruction. All those gray areas we sweep over to be politically correct, all inclusive, to be thought lovely and appealing. Think of all the women confined to gray, hiding their true self in shadows or behind their children for fear to be found out that they are dissatisfied. All the women who have stood by as war after war annihilates, waiting for their lover, husband, father, son, brother to come home in one piece.
Franco, supported by Hitler, ruled over Spain from 1939 to 1975. In the first four years alone, 200,000 civilians died from forced labor, concentration camps, and executions. At Franco’s request, Italian and German planes leveled the small Basque village of Guernica, which Picasso protested with his 26-foot-wide painting in gray, black and white. Most of the civilians that were killed were women and children (the men were away fighting). It was market day so everyone was in one convenient place to be murdered. Albert Camus said of the Spanish struggle: “It is now nine years that men of my generation have had Spain within their hearts. Nine years that they have carried it with them like an evil wound. It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.” Gray—the color of desolation, malaise, despair, and most certainly disgust.
Putin, Assad, Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan—these are not gray areas in history though seeped in crimson red, spewed with hatred. The women stay home and take care of the babies, the wounded, the dying, the dead. They gray themselves to move inside the horror and to mask their crimson rage and blue hearts grown cold. They can’t function otherwise.
There are a lot of blue-gray foods, which may not seem delectable but are rich in vitamins and minerals. Anchovies, oysters, mackerel, truffles, morels, guava, musk melon, Hubbard squash, blue cheese. For centuries women have known how to work with these foods. They know how to feed.
My mother was what you would call a peasant cook. She made hearty chilis, and liver and onions, which my three brothers loathed. I happened to love the liver and onions, along with my mother and her mother, probably all the way back to Prussia where we all hailed from.
Sometimes the word “sorrow” has been replaced by the word “depression,” which has an altogether different meaning. Depression is a deep drop, usually for a duration of time. Sorrow is a more penetrating, pervasive ongoingness that never abates, never shifts its presence. I can ignore it but as soon as I think of my mother, the sadness is right there, undiminished in intensity and meaning. Like the image I saw once of a steel trap clamped to a snow leopard’s foot, high in the Himalayas on a snow-covered ledge, standing with paw in the air, the trap clenched tight. I can’t stop the impact of that image, a dense, complex sorrow, like the devastation of the rainforest and old growth trees, like traps for endangered animals and ripping out tusks, like fracking and clear cuts, and chemical waste. Sorrow mixed up with rage is what leaves me impotent and confused.
Paynes Gray was discovered by accident, as most colors are, by William Payne. Born in England in 1760, Payne moved to London and became a civil engineer with a vocation for watercolor. Eventually he taught art, encouraging his students to not paint what they saw, but their feelings for what they saw. Paynes didn’t outline his landscape forms with pen, instead inventing this moody tint composed of indigo, raw sienna, and lake. Paynes Gray is a perfect color for evoking his English fog and damp Thames. A poetic moodiness. Sadness.
My mother once told me that she had always wanted to be a dancer. This was said backstage after one of my dance performances. And after taking me to ballet lessons when I was four, the tap and jazz lessons, the every-year recitals, my pointe shoes and leotards, after all my shows and reviews, that she’s finally told me her dream to dance—I was 35. Why did she not do for herself what she’d done for me, for all of us? You may consider this great mothering or, as I do now, a Greek tragedy shared by so many mothers shuttling bodies and anger and heartbreak from place to place. Shuffling her heart away so as not to be touched by the hurt of bearing a tortured son and marrying a tortured husband. She swam in the ocean every day until it became a pool in assisted living and then there was only an assisted shower in memory care to quench her yearning to dance. She drove a car until she forgot where she lived.
She could be so still, looking off, somewhere else. No one knew her, least of all herself. If she had known, if she had had a sense of herself, the confidence, a different mother, had not had a brain tumor when she was seven, had not been born so late or too soon, if I had been her friend and given up being her daughter—I would have taken her away. Instead, she lived to 92 in a dementia fog. I’ve always thought the dementia allowed her to have some rest before she rested for good.
Prussian Blue
I usually take my longest walk just before evening begins its dance. The roads are dirt; icy ruts in winter, muddy sump holes in spring, smoothly flat and hard in summer. March is sugaring season in Vermont where heavy tractors carrying tanks of maple sugar sink these roads into corrugated slime. Walking isn’t easy.
But cars are few. Evenings, farmers milk their cows, bed down goats, coop the chickens, make dinner. Fox and coyote are many and ever cunny in their trickery. The farmer we get our eggs from finally lost every chicken to a red fox, despite the fact the man had sat up many a night, rifle in hand. “Never could catch the bugger.” Those eggs had the orangest plump yolks too. I’ve seen that same fox a number of times crossing my land but I’d never tell the farmer. I now know where the term foxtrot comes from.
Evening can come loud or soft. Yesterday the sunset blazed streaks of salmon and gold, bookending the equally dazzling sunrise that woke me from my dream of being pursued. The congregation of ebony black crows were again at the posts where we leave chicken bones and black sunflower seeds. They make a loud and raucous racket if the posts are empty, sounding like those gaggle of Greek women, also in black, who tried to drive me out of the village with their curses. I knew enough Greek to detect the word whore and shame. This was after the Papas of the village, the town priest, had plied me with Metaxá and tried to touch my knee, then my thigh, and then lunged at my neck. I screamed and ran. I would have told the whole village what he'd done except I knew what would happen did happen the next day with the flock of women casting me out because the Papas got his story out before I did. Crows have wings that fly away when you get too close.
As the luminary of crimson colors dim, a shaft of sky is revealed. First pale blue, then teal, and rapidly turning into Prussian blue, a lavish indigo, deep and mysterious. What lay beyond this blue is the next layer of evening’s evolution into night. Deeper and deeper still, then black. Illuminated black.
Blue is the rarest of colors because there’s no naturally occurring blue pigment in nature, only tiny flecks in flowers, birds, and stone. Prussian blue is the color of the beauty spot on the wing of a mallard duck, the stamina of the bluish-purple anemone flower, and is visible on azurite, a copper mineral. Prussian blue is the lighter Berlin blue mixed with a considerable portion of velvet black, and a small quantity of indigo blue; the blue of the brief entrance and exit of evenings when I walk the dirt roads in silence that are purely silent. Even the birds become still. If there is a slight wind, it’s up high through the tall white pines, far off. It is March after all; no leaves and heavy snow still rings the road where the town plow pushed the snow into six-foot drifts. Like walking through a tunnel of white snow on gushy chocolate-brown.
As I walk, the Prussian blue evening gives way to thick black. The yellow porchlight my husband left on for me, along with smoke rising from the chimney, beckons me home. Back to breath that had seemed suspended for the entire display.
Green
I had a dream recently that my mother was in bed in her pale green bedroom. Did I ever see her in bed? Sick? Crying? Angry? When my father whipped us with his belt where was she? When he swore and raged did she leave the room? When I snuck out in the middle of the night, skipped school, had sex, did she know?
Every so often she and I would have a candlelight dinner of our favorite garlic pasta with a glass of red wine. We’d giggle, quietly, so as not disturb my father in the den. Still, he would yell at us to blow out the candles--You’ll burn the house down! But it wasn’t the fire or the house, it was his jealousy. He was always trying to stop us from being friends. We were going to Paris together. She was going to live with me after he died. He never let her leave him, feigning one excuse after another. Mom and I never went to Paris. She had dementia when he died and couldn’t be moved. It was too late.
I gave an alpaca an Asian pear. The pear got caught in his throat, stuck round like a goiter. He choked to death. My fault. My fault. I should have cut up the pear. I should have bought the tickets for Paris. I should have never blown out the candles.
Absinthe is incandescent green, made from wormwood, and 130 herbs and plants. T, my beloved, and I tried to make it once when it was still illegal, hoping for hallucinations of the Picasso and Lautrec kind, like in their paintings, The Absinthe Drinker and Absinthe Lady. Van Gogh wrote about his painting, Night Café: “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad, or commit a crime… in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulfur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern.” The green fairy visits and offers visions, with jealousy and madness overlapping. Perfect for an actress playing Goneril in King Lear, which I have done. The chartreuse color is halfway between yellow and green, a vibrant apple green. I imagined Goneril was green with envy and greed.
In most theaters there’s a green room where the actors can lounge when they aren’t on stage, as a place to regain equilibrium before going back on stage or out into the “real” world. It was considered a respite, restful like a field of grass or shade under a tree. The poet Pablo Neruda always wrote in green ink, believing it was the color of hope. Feng Shui claims that green eases absent-mindedness, nervousness, and rudeness. The Russian artist Kandinsky believed that green sounded like a middle-position violin.
Once T and I found an emerald green hummingbird caught in a spider’s web, twirling from the ceiling of our mudroom. T, being tall, was able to cut her down, but it took a long time to untangle the web before she strangled herself trying to escape. T held her trembling emerald green body while I carefully removed one strand after another, the silk stronger than my fingers, stronger than grip, stronger than emotion. I needed to remain calm to calm her, like my mother did with my father’s rage. Eventually the hummingbird lifted off and flew away. My mother did not.
In my first paid acting job, I toured with a theater company. One town we performed in was Shreveport, Louisiana. In 1973, one side of the street was for whites, the other side for blacks. Restaurants, drinking fountains, cafés, toilets were all segregated. I went to the black side to practice on emerald green tables and then to the white side pretending I could play pool, oh you cute thing, and then wham, pocketed the balls and made way with the pot to supplement my meager actor’s pay.
The history of the color green, with its blend of danger and beauty, reads like a detective novel. The creation of the color, its mythology, and endless uses are a testament to its strong yet difficult temperament. In nature, green is wild, untamable—broad strokes wash across a map of the world. Green is probably the most organic of colors and yet down through time it has been a difficult color to reproduce and use safely.
Ancient Egyptians used finely-ground malachite mined in Sinai. They also used malachite on their eyelids which made a pale green shadow, believed to protect eyelids from the glare of the sun. Verdigris was used by artists in the 15th through 17th centuries for painting landscapes and drapery. Verdigris was made by placing a plate of warmed copper, brass or bronze into a vat of fermenting wine for several weeks. Luscious, inimitable, and unstable if exposed to dampness and didn’t mix well with other colors. It was also toxic. Mix verdigris with lead white and the color is lethal. Emerald green, also known as Paris green, was used to color wallpaper, upholstery, clothing, and to kill rats in the Parisian sewers, but was later discovered to release arsenical fumes. Cézanne often used Paris green which couldn’t have relieved his suffering from severe diabetes.
In the Sinai Mountains, hiking with E, we stumbled upon a tiny monastery hewn into the rock. An ancient Coptic monk lived there alone, surrounded by crows that swarmed around his long black cloak embroidered in red with skull and crossbones. The monk was working on an illuminated manuscript while he sat facing the sacred Mount Sinai, which a few days before E and I had climbed. The tall book on heavy papyrus was covered with a flourishing script, inked by his hand. Along the borders of each page were intricate designs painted in gold leaf, lapis lazuli, India ink, ochre, carmine, silver, and verdigris green.
The old monk points to himself and says, Belidi; he has done this. He laughs. We laugh. For thirty years he’d been working on the manuscript in ancient Sumerian. He exudes ecstasy. It’s only later that we learn the real Mount Sinai is Jabal al-Lawz, in Saudi Arabia. We, along with everyone else, had climbed the wrong sacred mountain. I wonder if the real mountain had any green on it, because the fake one was mostly dusty yellow rock.
I write this now on a table of weathered wood, the turquoise paint peeling into the knot beneath my notebook.
Today the sky is like whale skin, thick and smooth with slashes of white streaks. Like a whale back crusted by leagues of travel. A Jack London sky. The vast wilderness rushes along, and yet is supremely still. I see a lope of tail surfacing, a fifty-ton mammal swimming above my head. The sky is like a whale’s skin. I sense the markings of a wild thing.
The day before was the white wind. It came in gusts measuring 50 miles an hour, bending young saplings at acute angles, ripping white birch bark off trunks into flying sheets, and throwing copper beech leaves that usually stay attached all winter long. Titanium winds. It is February. The light is white, the snow is white, the wind is white, like shards of bone. My partner has a titanium rod in his arm from when he fell off a 45-foot waterfall, shattering a pool of ice and his bones. That was also in February. A silver rod inside a white body.
White is almost impossible to describe unless it is contrasted against another color. White light shooting through a clear blue sky onto white snow makes shadows appear ultraviolet. The snow seems lit from within, glowing. Yet the essence of white is really the absence of color. Like the wind. Colorless, yet hard like titanium.
The color white is structurally complex, and contains an equal balance of all the colors of the spectrum. Artists and alchemists have struggled for centuries to create the purest white. In 400 BC, white was made from gray metallic lead, vinegar, and cow dung. In the 1500s, it was discovered that this white paint caused lead poisoning. Artists still prized the white pigment for its opacity, density, and durability. Also called Spirits of Saturn, lead white was used in makeup from the 16th century until 1830, when it was replaced by zinc white, a safe, inorganic compound. It wasn’t until 1978 that the United States banned the production of lead white paint. In the meantime, all those women were taking in lead through their skin.
Today, the wind smolders and then screams, stirs what is stagnant, unearths buried fury. Nothing is exempt from wind, not people, trees, animals, insects, microbes, or atoms. You can’t fight it, rail as you might. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks.” Hold your rage close lest it loosen and you burn.
Last autumn the wind blew the roof off my garden shed and uprooted a beloved old white birch. After raking a mountain of last year’s maple leaves, the wind sent them swirling back, blown uphill where I’d dumped them the day before. The gusts today could cleave the shirt right off your back. This kind of wind causes nightmares, the kind where you never find the exit when you’re being pursued, or your feet are lead, incapable of flight.
I suppose I could turn on the radio or listen to Led Zeppelin to cover this impossible howling sound. It’s a banshee of a wind. A gentle breeze raises only dust, with no thermals. The twigs might do a slow waltz. A strong breeze is where large branches do a tango, swaying, and seeds are airborne. In a moderate gale, even walking becomes difficult and butterflies are grounded. In a strong gale like now, children are blown over, branches break, and only swifts are airborne.
On Crete one summer, the Meltemi, “the bad-tempered wind,” ripped the shutters off windows and never relented for two weeks. Made it difficult to think, sleep, or go outside. Sand was everywhere; in ears, eyes, teeth. A slashing grit, making living impossible. My boyfriend and I fought relentlessly. When the Meltemi ceased, I left the island, broken.
Greece is another land of white. The chalk white buildings and white sun seem idyllic until you are riding a small motorcycle behind a man you think you might marry. Neither of you are wearing a helmet and the month is August and it is midday. The hot air is stagnant even though you are careening down a winding narrow mountain road with the wind, probably a moderate gale. My skirt gets caught in the back wheel, à la Isadora Duncan, which causes the motorcycle to wobble uncontrollably. Luckily my boyfriend is heavy enough to subdue the beast by standing up. When we come to a stop at the edge of the cliff, he proceeds to scream at me in Greek, blaming me, of course it was my fault.
Even though white symbolizes innocence and purity, he was in a white rage and burning, and I was a butterfly grounded. I felt sick, as I usually did on our motorcycle adventures, due to the fact I was pregnant but didn’t know it yet. Eventually, I fled Greece (chalky white) and returned to Manhattan (brown on brown) to have an abortion (bloody red).
With another boyfriend, E, we wanted to see the ancient city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert. This was before ISIS destroyed the Pearl City, the gleaming white capital of the Palmyrene Kingdom. An old robed man with a long white beard in the souk told me, “You must go!” I’d never heard of Palmyra but being young and mystically inclined, I took it as a sign. We hitchhiked and were picked up by an old man in a beat-up van. After an hour, driving in the middle of the desert, we headed straight into a sandstorm. Wind whipped the car, making it impossible to see. We hadn’t even been following a road, just one long sheet of yellow sand stretching into the long horizon.
The driver stopped and began a long stream of irate Arabic. We had no idea what he was saying. The wind squealed and spun. It felt like the van would be lifted into the sky by the spiraling force.
All at once, out of the wind tunnel, walked a person. He was dressed in sheepskin, head and face covered, massive shoulders square as a block, a long robe swinging wildly. He moved across the space of the windshield, looked me in the eye, and then vanished. In the next instant, the sand cleared and the man was nowhere to be seen. The driver said something like comam, which we later found meant shepherd. The wind had rendered the apparition into Krishna: ethereal, godlike, impossible.
Paynes Gray
Most people think of winter as white—snow, frost, ice. I think of Paynes gray, made up of Prussian blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake. When the trees are leafless, the blue-gray hue saturates everything. Chickadee, snow, ice, tree bark, moods. It’s an edgy color in its soothing wash. Powdered slate. Medieval castles. And women. On the surface, we are shadows and slants, curved angles, hidden recesses, moody and damp. Inside are yellow ochre and crimson lake, ready to geyser and take over the world.
A male friend said that women were creatures of lace and satin skin, as well as cruelty, silliness, and massive generosity. We’re hewn from stone and flesh, from snake and apple, from leagues of legends, but in the flesh we are born to floods of crimson blood and dry ochre winds from years of caretaking. You have no idea how cruel we can be. If I let my rage gush I too could part the Red Sea and render every dictator dust.
But we are often shaded shadows, waiting to pick up the pieces of a man’s world that insists on destruction. All those gray areas we sweep over to be politically correct, all inclusive, to be thought lovely and appealing. Think of all the women confined to gray, hiding their true self in shadows or behind their children for fear to be found out that they are dissatisfied. All the women who have stood by as war after war annihilates, waiting for their lover, husband, father, son, brother to come home in one piece.
Franco, supported by Hitler, ruled over Spain from 1939 to 1975. In the first four years alone, 200,000 civilians died from forced labor, concentration camps, and executions. At Franco’s request, Italian and German planes leveled the small Basque village of Guernica, which Picasso protested with his 26-foot-wide painting in gray, black and white. Most of the civilians that were killed were women and children (the men were away fighting). It was market day so everyone was in one convenient place to be murdered. Albert Camus said of the Spanish struggle: “It is now nine years that men of my generation have had Spain within their hearts. Nine years that they have carried it with them like an evil wound. It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.” Gray—the color of desolation, malaise, despair, and most certainly disgust.
Putin, Assad, Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan—these are not gray areas in history though seeped in crimson red, spewed with hatred. The women stay home and take care of the babies, the wounded, the dying, the dead. They gray themselves to move inside the horror and to mask their crimson rage and blue hearts grown cold. They can’t function otherwise.
There are a lot of blue-gray foods, which may not seem delectable but are rich in vitamins and minerals. Anchovies, oysters, mackerel, truffles, morels, guava, musk melon, Hubbard squash, blue cheese. For centuries women have known how to work with these foods. They know how to feed.
My mother was what you would call a peasant cook. She made hearty chilis, and liver and onions, which my three brothers loathed. I happened to love the liver and onions, along with my mother and her mother, probably all the way back to Prussia where we all hailed from.
Sometimes the word “sorrow” has been replaced by the word “depression,” which has an altogether different meaning. Depression is a deep drop, usually for a duration of time. Sorrow is a more penetrating, pervasive ongoingness that never abates, never shifts its presence. I can ignore it but as soon as I think of my mother, the sadness is right there, undiminished in intensity and meaning. Like the image I saw once of a steel trap clamped to a snow leopard’s foot, high in the Himalayas on a snow-covered ledge, standing with paw in the air, the trap clenched tight. I can’t stop the impact of that image, a dense, complex sorrow, like the devastation of the rainforest and old growth trees, like traps for endangered animals and ripping out tusks, like fracking and clear cuts, and chemical waste. Sorrow mixed up with rage is what leaves me impotent and confused.
Paynes Gray was discovered by accident, as most colors are, by William Payne. Born in England in 1760, Payne moved to London and became a civil engineer with a vocation for watercolor. Eventually he taught art, encouraging his students to not paint what they saw, but their feelings for what they saw. Paynes didn’t outline his landscape forms with pen, instead inventing this moody tint composed of indigo, raw sienna, and lake. Paynes Gray is a perfect color for evoking his English fog and damp Thames. A poetic moodiness. Sadness.
My mother once told me that she had always wanted to be a dancer. This was said backstage after one of my dance performances. And after taking me to ballet lessons when I was four, the tap and jazz lessons, the every-year recitals, my pointe shoes and leotards, after all my shows and reviews, that she’s finally told me her dream to dance—I was 35. Why did she not do for herself what she’d done for me, for all of us? You may consider this great mothering or, as I do now, a Greek tragedy shared by so many mothers shuttling bodies and anger and heartbreak from place to place. Shuffling her heart away so as not to be touched by the hurt of bearing a tortured son and marrying a tortured husband. She swam in the ocean every day until it became a pool in assisted living and then there was only an assisted shower in memory care to quench her yearning to dance. She drove a car until she forgot where she lived.
She could be so still, looking off, somewhere else. No one knew her, least of all herself. If she had known, if she had had a sense of herself, the confidence, a different mother, had not had a brain tumor when she was seven, had not been born so late or too soon, if I had been her friend and given up being her daughter—I would have taken her away. Instead, she lived to 92 in a dementia fog. I’ve always thought the dementia allowed her to have some rest before she rested for good.
Prussian Blue
I usually take my longest walk just before evening begins its dance. The roads are dirt; icy ruts in winter, muddy sump holes in spring, smoothly flat and hard in summer. March is sugaring season in Vermont where heavy tractors carrying tanks of maple sugar sink these roads into corrugated slime. Walking isn’t easy.
But cars are few. Evenings, farmers milk their cows, bed down goats, coop the chickens, make dinner. Fox and coyote are many and ever cunny in their trickery. The farmer we get our eggs from finally lost every chicken to a red fox, despite the fact the man had sat up many a night, rifle in hand. “Never could catch the bugger.” Those eggs had the orangest plump yolks too. I’ve seen that same fox a number of times crossing my land but I’d never tell the farmer. I now know where the term foxtrot comes from.
Evening can come loud or soft. Yesterday the sunset blazed streaks of salmon and gold, bookending the equally dazzling sunrise that woke me from my dream of being pursued. The congregation of ebony black crows were again at the posts where we leave chicken bones and black sunflower seeds. They make a loud and raucous racket if the posts are empty, sounding like those gaggle of Greek women, also in black, who tried to drive me out of the village with their curses. I knew enough Greek to detect the word whore and shame. This was after the Papas of the village, the town priest, had plied me with Metaxá and tried to touch my knee, then my thigh, and then lunged at my neck. I screamed and ran. I would have told the whole village what he'd done except I knew what would happen did happen the next day with the flock of women casting me out because the Papas got his story out before I did. Crows have wings that fly away when you get too close.
As the luminary of crimson colors dim, a shaft of sky is revealed. First pale blue, then teal, and rapidly turning into Prussian blue, a lavish indigo, deep and mysterious. What lay beyond this blue is the next layer of evening’s evolution into night. Deeper and deeper still, then black. Illuminated black.
Blue is the rarest of colors because there’s no naturally occurring blue pigment in nature, only tiny flecks in flowers, birds, and stone. Prussian blue is the color of the beauty spot on the wing of a mallard duck, the stamina of the bluish-purple anemone flower, and is visible on azurite, a copper mineral. Prussian blue is the lighter Berlin blue mixed with a considerable portion of velvet black, and a small quantity of indigo blue; the blue of the brief entrance and exit of evenings when I walk the dirt roads in silence that are purely silent. Even the birds become still. If there is a slight wind, it’s up high through the tall white pines, far off. It is March after all; no leaves and heavy snow still rings the road where the town plow pushed the snow into six-foot drifts. Like walking through a tunnel of white snow on gushy chocolate-brown.
As I walk, the Prussian blue evening gives way to thick black. The yellow porchlight my husband left on for me, along with smoke rising from the chimney, beckons me home. Back to breath that had seemed suspended for the entire display.
Green
I had a dream recently that my mother was in bed in her pale green bedroom. Did I ever see her in bed? Sick? Crying? Angry? When my father whipped us with his belt where was she? When he swore and raged did she leave the room? When I snuck out in the middle of the night, skipped school, had sex, did she know?
Every so often she and I would have a candlelight dinner of our favorite garlic pasta with a glass of red wine. We’d giggle, quietly, so as not disturb my father in the den. Still, he would yell at us to blow out the candles--You’ll burn the house down! But it wasn’t the fire or the house, it was his jealousy. He was always trying to stop us from being friends. We were going to Paris together. She was going to live with me after he died. He never let her leave him, feigning one excuse after another. Mom and I never went to Paris. She had dementia when he died and couldn’t be moved. It was too late.
I gave an alpaca an Asian pear. The pear got caught in his throat, stuck round like a goiter. He choked to death. My fault. My fault. I should have cut up the pear. I should have bought the tickets for Paris. I should have never blown out the candles.
Absinthe is incandescent green, made from wormwood, and 130 herbs and plants. T, my beloved, and I tried to make it once when it was still illegal, hoping for hallucinations of the Picasso and Lautrec kind, like in their paintings, The Absinthe Drinker and Absinthe Lady. Van Gogh wrote about his painting, Night Café: “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad, or commit a crime… in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulfur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern.” The green fairy visits and offers visions, with jealousy and madness overlapping. Perfect for an actress playing Goneril in King Lear, which I have done. The chartreuse color is halfway between yellow and green, a vibrant apple green. I imagined Goneril was green with envy and greed.
In most theaters there’s a green room where the actors can lounge when they aren’t on stage, as a place to regain equilibrium before going back on stage or out into the “real” world. It was considered a respite, restful like a field of grass or shade under a tree. The poet Pablo Neruda always wrote in green ink, believing it was the color of hope. Feng Shui claims that green eases absent-mindedness, nervousness, and rudeness. The Russian artist Kandinsky believed that green sounded like a middle-position violin.
Once T and I found an emerald green hummingbird caught in a spider’s web, twirling from the ceiling of our mudroom. T, being tall, was able to cut her down, but it took a long time to untangle the web before she strangled herself trying to escape. T held her trembling emerald green body while I carefully removed one strand after another, the silk stronger than my fingers, stronger than grip, stronger than emotion. I needed to remain calm to calm her, like my mother did with my father’s rage. Eventually the hummingbird lifted off and flew away. My mother did not.
In my first paid acting job, I toured with a theater company. One town we performed in was Shreveport, Louisiana. In 1973, one side of the street was for whites, the other side for blacks. Restaurants, drinking fountains, cafés, toilets were all segregated. I went to the black side to practice on emerald green tables and then to the white side pretending I could play pool, oh you cute thing, and then wham, pocketed the balls and made way with the pot to supplement my meager actor’s pay.
The history of the color green, with its blend of danger and beauty, reads like a detective novel. The creation of the color, its mythology, and endless uses are a testament to its strong yet difficult temperament. In nature, green is wild, untamable—broad strokes wash across a map of the world. Green is probably the most organic of colors and yet down through time it has been a difficult color to reproduce and use safely.
Ancient Egyptians used finely-ground malachite mined in Sinai. They also used malachite on their eyelids which made a pale green shadow, believed to protect eyelids from the glare of the sun. Verdigris was used by artists in the 15th through 17th centuries for painting landscapes and drapery. Verdigris was made by placing a plate of warmed copper, brass or bronze into a vat of fermenting wine for several weeks. Luscious, inimitable, and unstable if exposed to dampness and didn’t mix well with other colors. It was also toxic. Mix verdigris with lead white and the color is lethal. Emerald green, also known as Paris green, was used to color wallpaper, upholstery, clothing, and to kill rats in the Parisian sewers, but was later discovered to release arsenical fumes. Cézanne often used Paris green which couldn’t have relieved his suffering from severe diabetes.
In the Sinai Mountains, hiking with E, we stumbled upon a tiny monastery hewn into the rock. An ancient Coptic monk lived there alone, surrounded by crows that swarmed around his long black cloak embroidered in red with skull and crossbones. The monk was working on an illuminated manuscript while he sat facing the sacred Mount Sinai, which a few days before E and I had climbed. The tall book on heavy papyrus was covered with a flourishing script, inked by his hand. Along the borders of each page were intricate designs painted in gold leaf, lapis lazuli, India ink, ochre, carmine, silver, and verdigris green.
The old monk points to himself and says, Belidi; he has done this. He laughs. We laugh. For thirty years he’d been working on the manuscript in ancient Sumerian. He exudes ecstasy. It’s only later that we learn the real Mount Sinai is Jabal al-Lawz, in Saudi Arabia. We, along with everyone else, had climbed the wrong sacred mountain. I wonder if the real mountain had any green on it, because the fake one was mostly dusty yellow rock.
I write this now on a table of weathered wood, the turquoise paint peeling into the knot beneath my notebook.
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Dian Parker’s nonfiction and fiction has been published in numerous literary journals, magazines, newspapers, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art and artists for art publications. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and currently lives in the hills of Vermont.
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