Purple Prose (13 page)

[readers] will have very quick physical reactions to [colour] words, and some of them will immediately see what you see, and some of them will see quite some other thing, and some of them almost won't see anything. And this can lead you philosophically to think about the fact that really, truly no reader reads the same text as another reader.
¹¹

The notion of
purple
– of what that word means (and its changes in meaning) through time and culture – offers an example of the depth and range, but also the slipperiness, of colour language. In the Ancient World, purple obtained from shellfish (
Murex
and others) was the most highly valued dyestuff. But lustre and glow were more important than hue (colour) in defining purple; even the very cost and preciousness defined a thing as
purple
. A dichotomous dark–
light property of shellfish purple was much admired: ‘though it seems to be dark, it gains a peculiar beauty from the sun and is infused with the brilliancy of the sun's warmth'.
¹²
The best purple– red cloth was described as looking ‘dark by reflected light, but a fiery-red by transmitted light'.
¹³
In later times ‘
purpura
was … the name of a silk fabric, not a colour … we find many “purples”, from white and yellow to blue and black, as well as red and green'.
¹⁴

The Ancient Greek idea of colour (
chroma
) was related to skin (
chros
) – the surface or appearance of a thing – but also to movement and change.
¹⁵
Reflecting this, the most important colour-technology of the Ancient World – producing
Murex
purple – was multi-stage and complex, itself a process of transformation, development and change, producing a sequence of colours from yellow, yellow–green, green, blue–green, blue and red, to violet.
¹⁶

Colour sequence and transformation also characterised alchemy, which sought to transmute unstable substances into stable substances (lead to gold, say) in a process marked by colour change in a particular sequence, perhaps black to white to yellow to violet.
¹⁷
Isaac Newton's own alchemical notebook referred to the ‘peacock's tail' stage of the alchemical process – the shimmering iridescent surface of heating metal.
¹⁸
The peacock was frequently depicted in early Christian textiles and mosaics as a symbol of immortality, shedding and renewing its tail-feathers each year, but in alchemy, the peacock came to symbolise the notion of everything in one, the one containing many: the whole array of peacock colours emerges from a single white egg.
¹⁹
More specifically than that general symbolism of all in one, though, it's an embodiment of the presence of all colours in white, the peacock-tail spectrum of light fanning out, via the prism, from egg-white light. When Newton – scientist, philosopher, alchemist – named the colour spectrum in seven steps, he not only made it in the likeness of the musical scale,
²⁰
he also drew alchemical connections. His conception of the presence of all colours in white light owes much to the peacock.

There are peacocks in that story of mine, ‘The Blind Astronomer'. The narrator – the astronomer – dresses in ‘peacock blue with clashing pink'.
²¹
Later, she sees a peacock's tail feather on a railway track, odd and out of context, disturbing:

The sun's dying light hit the track, showing a milky streak curved across four of the railway ties, like the spine of a big fish picked clean by eager teeth … it was a peacock's straggly tail feather, its eye eaten away, or maybe just tucked … out of sight … Aunt once told me that peacock feathers are bad luck. But I've always and only seen their beauty … a universe unfolding into colour and movement … how could those hundred shimmering eyes be anything but lucky?
²²

That story is full of eyes. There's the ‘artist's eye' that the narrator employs, seeing the beauty in her science: ‘I've seen the planets with an artist's eye, charted their courses with a sense of … beauty … It is a gift Aunt has given me'. But many more of the story's eyes are flawed: the peacock's feather with ‘its eye eaten away'; the childhood operation to correct vision; a mark on a photograph that ‘scratched out' eyes; even the disembodiment implied when the narrator remarks on resemblance, ‘She had my Aunt's eyes'.
²³

Flawed eyes and different ways of seeing provide insights about colour and vision, the brain and perception, light and physics. The effects of eye-defects (including temporary abnormalities, ageing, and drugs) can be seen or surmised in art. Rembrandt greatly reduced the number of pigments he used in old age, restricting his palette. The shape of a long-beaked bird appears in the later works of Edvard Munch, painted while he was suffering from vitreous opacities that disrupted his field of vision. J. M. W. Turner's eyesight was failing with age and illness when he painted the glorious hazy
light and steam of ‘Rain, Steam and Speed', the purple–orange sky of ‘The Fighting Temeraire'. The question remains whether the changing palettes and techniques of artists suffering from vision defects resulted from that blunted vision, or from artistic intent.
²⁴

Recording of visual phenomena was often first made by artists. Painter Philippe de La Hire reported from his studio in 1685, ‘The light which illuminates hues changes them considerably; blue appears green by candlelight and yellow appears white; blue appears white by weak daylight, as at the beginning of the night'.
²⁵
It was not until 1866 that the mechanisms for this phenomenon, whereby changes in light level affect how we see colours, were distinguished and described by scientists: rod cells were adapted for seeing in poor light, while cone cells operated in daylight.
²⁶
The physical properties of objects do not change as the light illuminating them changes, but our perception of their colour does.

Colour, in the end, comes back to our perception of it; in synaesthesia, perception is complex. Margaret Visser describes synaesthesia as ‘the mixing of senses so that taste (say) gives rise to geometrical images, hearing is coloured, shapes sing'.
²⁷
The two most common types of synaesthesia are colour-hearing (
audition colorée
), particularly musical colour-hearing; and the association of verbal sounds, particularly vowel sounds, with colours.
²⁸
The artist and synaesthete Wassily Kandinsky, reviewing synaesthetic experiments in his 1912 book
On the Spiritual in Art
, wrote:

[their effects] would seem to be a sort of echo of resonance, as in the case of musical instruments, which without themselves being touched, vibrate in sympathy with another instrument being played. Such highly sensitive people are like good, much played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibres at every touch of the bow.
²⁹

Synaesthesia circles us back to that first short story of mine. That story starts with synaesthesia, with colour and sense: ‘Synaesthetes
smell music, know numbers by their distinctive colours, letters by music'. Like Gwen, the widow in the story, I can't ‘claim that degree of sensitivity, that consistency of sensory overlap',
³⁰
but synaesthesia has always fascinated me. Margaret Visser, herself a synaesthete, notes that ‘synaesthesia shares a few characteristics with the phenomenon of perfect pitch'.
³¹

With my own far-from-perfect pitch, I've found myself singing two songs while I've been thinking about, researching, and writing this essay. They've come to me, these songs, for their textual connections, and they've stuck around, in that odd, earwormy way, the whole time I've been writing. One song I've sung for its title, that titles this piece. In Hunters and Collectors' ‘Do You See What I See?'
³²
the chorus repeats its title in a call and echoed response – ‘Do you see what I see?/do you see what i see?' – the response insistent, demanding, shouted, as if with caps lock engaged. I hear it in its broadest sense, encompassing the ideas I had in mind to write about here: colour, light, perception, different ways of seeing.

The second phrase I've been singing, over and over, is the chorus from a Paul Kelly song, ‘I'd Rather Go Blind',
³³
and this is more specific in its relevance. Paul Kelly might prefer blindness to heartbreak, but I can imagine few things worse than losing my sight.

It's twenty years since my mother lost her sight. She was in her early fifties then, the same age that I am now. My mother still has some peripheral vision, but has lost her central vision. In ‘The Blind Astronomer' I used an analogy my mother uses to describe her sight loss:

Like having a clenched fist held in front of each eye
is the way they like to describe the vision I'll retain. Why bother just
holding those fists there, I want to tell them, why not just punch my lights out and be damned. The horror of it.
³⁴

As I type this, I can see my mother do the movements to demonstrate: clenching her fists, holding them in front of her eyes, as if to mime exaggerated crying,
boohoo
.

My mother's condition has a similar effect, but with different cause, to macular degeneration, ‘robbing … sight entirely, from the centre out'.
³⁵
The artist Georgia O'Keeffe was eighty-four years old when she lost her central vision to macular degeneration. O'Keeffe is in ‘The Blind Astronomer', too; the story's epigraph quotes her: ‘My first memory is of the brightness of light, light all around'.
³⁶
I used my own experience for the story's O'Keeffe elements: I saw the O'Keeffe exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art that the story's narrator sees, and I posted to my husband the postcard photo of O'Keeffe that the story's narrator posts to her aunt:

The photograph showed O'Keeffe in the desert, the hot sky white around her, O'Keeffe glaring directly at the camera. Her trousers were black, her shirt white. She surrounded a bleached cow's skull, stark against the black of her trousers. Georgia's eyes stared out at me from the image, wide and unblinking, black as uncooked beans.
³⁷

My postcard was delivered, as was the narrator's, with a scratch across Georgia O'Keeffe's eyes.

A solid patch on the picture side was scratched out, perhaps by some sharp-edged sorting machine. There was a perfect, even rectangle where the thin laminate of printed paper had been etched from the photograph, leaving the blank, rough, white card exposed. The scratch covered – obscured, exactly – her eyes. They'd scratched out Georgia's eyes.
³⁸

My real-life scratched black-and-white postcard prompted the astronomer's fictional one, as my real-life hangover prompted hers. Georgia O'Keeffe never fails to trigger in me memories of summery Minneapolis and drunken nights, to a soundtrack of
Purple Rain
. Black and white and purple all over, life fuels fiction, the connections impossible to control.