Tag: Remarks on Color

This oceanic equine has been spotted in the mangrove forests of South America, sporting a spiny suit of luminous flames – a dapper, irreverent fellow who reads Rilke, Proust and Rimbaud, albeit, soggy in the shallows – he is the avatar of things to come, the irradiated, eradicated sea where dreams foment and roll into the shore to die, yet he rides the waves nonetheless in brilliant luminescence, his tiny bowtie skewed slightly to the left as he floats past the heavily burdened sperm whales and the needle nosed sharks. He is the true “dandy of the sea” the original model for The Kink’s famous song “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” as he wears the moniker well. Seahorse Yellow is the only fish who can gallop full tilt while remaining perfectly and deceptively still, barely skimming the surface of the water, yet swiftly pivoting around with a half-smile only to continue, ever so idly, in the opposite direction.

More often than not he rivals the brightly colored fish that surround him – the Queen Angelfish has suddenly fallen in the ranks and the Flowerhorn has most definitely wilted. The Moorish Idol is suave and sometimes lachrymose, having finally relinquished his pride at the altar of the spindly Horse of the Sea, yet there are moments of near Shakespearean confusion when, like his namesake, Othello, the fish is completely undone. The Royal Gramma protests yet again she is NOT a grandmother as the Striped Sweetlips swims dangerously close, coming in for a kiss. Only the Lionfish puts up a good fight, sporting a mane of solid gold and swimming in fierce and erratic circles for optimum effect.

But Seahorse Yellow is a quaint and solitary fellow, preferring his dandified ways to the boorishness of other fish, and for this reason he is and always will be, alone, bobbing along in brilliant attire past the Lumpfish and the Gulper Eel, the Sheepshead and the muscled Frilled Shark, into the deep and bottomless ocean beyond.

Khaki Green loves to talk. Her friends call her “Yacky Khaki,” and sometimes when they’re feeling annoyed, “Quacky Khaki.” But really, it’s a compulsion as at 5 AM every morning Khaki Green begins her rants – everything from contesting this year’s champion at the local dog show in her town (where coincidentally her Chihuahua named Fig Face was disqualified for pooping while the handler proudly cavorted her around the arena) to the ethicalness of Stem Cell Research. Khaki Green is regularly thrown out of movie theaters for talking during the film and sometimes even standing up and acting out the parts. Khaki lives with her mother and fifteen parakeets, all of which are green and named Kiwi.

An avid watcher of game shows, Khaki Green has applied to be a contestant on the $1,000,000 Pyramid two hundred and eighty-four times, and still holds out hope she will one day be discovered. She considers herself an adventurer and belongs to a women’s golf club where she regularly hits a hole in one (in her mind.) Khaki Green calls herself a true patriot as she hails from the rough-hewn lineage of the stoic British soldier of the Second Boer War, a combination of dismal grey and rustic brown, though she prefers tea to machine guns and good conversation to the battle cries of dying men. On the rare occasions when she allows herself to meditate on the meaning of life, Khaki Green smokes a cigarette alone on her patio, pondering these big ideas for exactly thirty-one seconds.

Abhorring silence, she soon finds herself culling numbers from her phone book, in search of the next talking fix. Her obsessions include all that is good and green in the world – sour apple gum, mermaids, overgrown forests, celery stalks and monster blood, the olives groves of Sicily and Puglia, and the ocean at certain times of the day, reflecting the gloriously variegated hues of the sea, as though Poseidon himself wore the most luminous sexy, shimmering coat.

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Bashful Blue is a dreamer of impossible dreams that more often than not involve the First Lady of either political party, having once written a love letter to Hilary Clinton, begging to be the paint on her walls, the silky blue sheets on her bed, the dusky scarf round her neck. She does have her favorites though, and being blue, leans mostly Democratic in her affections. 

Jackie Kennedy wore a Bashful Blue dress the night Marilyn sang Happy Birthday in breathy adulation, and Rosalyn Carter always wore blue gardening gloves when planting peanuts back in Georgia. Awed by Michelle Obama’s supreme wit and grace, Bashful Blue was more bashful than usual, but it was the Nurse Ratched like appeal of Nancy Reagan that crept up on her like a sickening dread. She imagined the wind storms raging behind Nancy’s frozen eyes, seething with the quiet desperation of librarians (divinely misunderstood and quietly passionate as they are), stealing glances with the White House dog walker who regularly wore a blue ascot when leaning down to pick up the turds from the rolling green White House lawns.

It was the wide, honest mouth of Eleanor Roosevelt that rapt her for days in a kind of intellectual fervor, a passion not from the groin, but of the heart, as Eleanor wore Blue Jeans every Friday when bicycling through Washington Square. But it was Mamie Eisenhower’s famous eyes that finally lured Bashful Blue, stumbling out of the closet – the kind of blue that burns your brain when you are sleeping and makes you weep when you’re awake. Mamie’s eyes launched fleets of ships and sent the cosmos spinning – a blazing blue to rival all the oceans of the world, the heavens and the even more pedestrian sky, Bashful finally realized the magical powers of being blue – not Dodger Blue, not Billie Holiday blue, singing the silent slippage of her life, and not the blue of an icy stare or a cold, frost-bitten hand, but electric blue, the heart of the flame that sets the world on fire. 

 

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Flamingo’s Dream has never missed a church social, eats all the watermelon at the weekly buffet, shoving the rinds in her purse to take home to her poodle. Flamingo never goes out without makeup, “putting her face on,” hoping to catch the eye of a bad boy, a scoundrel, a real life ruffian, or at the very least, the mechanic named Gus at the end of the block.

Flamingo’s Dream secretly despises Florida, the manicured lawns adorned with their requisite needle-legged birds, the occasional sun-basking alligator, hoping to feast on the family dog—truly a Flamingo nightmare, instead of a dream. Other seabirds are often prone to jealousy, being drab and generally overlooked. The albatross, for example, has never understood the reference to “dead weight,” considering himself a strong and agile flyer, and the blue-footed booby is sadly only ever described as “special” from the waist down. Still, other pelagics like the Fulmar and the Frigate bird, the Gannet and the Murre, can only dream of such highfalutin ornamentation, such garishness in the name of art.

Flamingo’s Dream is self-aggrandizing, haughty and sometimes insincere, considers herself a purist, a true connoisseur of brine-shrimp and larvae, snapping her fingers at the local “The Watering Hole,” demanding the waiter bring yet another glass of Rose. Wears push-up bras and color coordinates her shoes to match, yet deep down she longs for the comfort of a good, home-cooked meal and scintillating conversation, desperate to be taken seriously, and welcomed into the literary fold of scholars, philosophers and mathematicians, or even the company of a good Sunday painter, but no one can stop staring long enough to see beyond the pink effulgence, the nearly radioactive hue next to which all else seems meaningless and dumb. So, forlorn yet undaunted, she once again resolves to embrace her roots, dying her poodle the same color as her hair and skinny dipping at the local pool, hoping someone will notice.

 

Bright White, forever the blank page, the empty backdrop, illuminating the dreams and desires of other colors – added to, enhanced, augmented, amplified and enlarged – the beginning of everything and the end of nothing – it should be enough just to be yourself, but Bright White demands a Do Over, recompense from centuries of discrimination, being left out of every major world event – a silver rocket set against an indigo sky; Green soldiers running through the verdant underbrush in Saigon, and when the Declaration of Independence was signed, it wasn’t Bright White who soaked in the black ink, but an ochre parchment, another imposter to the throne. The most famous works of art are dangerous and filled with intrigue – Caravaggio’s David holds the red, bloodied head of Goliath, while the only trace of Bright White can be found on the boy’s simple tunic. BW is sexless and bored with himself, an empty life with little hope for excitement or adventure, only a few disparate stars asleep on the horizon. Hell, even the horizon is a soft and generous pink and to think it all starts with Bright White, forever waiting to be acted upon, a clean slate, a fresh canvas, a monumentally empty moment just waiting to be filled. Without white, nothing would be possible; white is the reason the firmament of heaven exists at all, for without the white billowing clouds, we could not see the blue backdrop that frames them there in the sky. It should be duly noted, (according to Bright White) that from this non-color, this innocence, this virginal exemplar of virtue, the entirety of the world derives, in perfect blinding white — the essence of the universe like an exploding star. It should be understood once and for all that everything can be traced back to Bright White, as the world was not forged in fire, but in light.