In the Native American tradition a whole new era of transfiguration is initiated by the birth of the sacred white buffalo calf. Within the Christian tradition, the new time was to begin with the lamb: ‘And behold the lion shall lie down with the lamb . . . And there shall be no more hurt or pain on all my holy mountain.’ One of the most exhilarating epiphanies in the New Testament is the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor. In this moment, the poet-carpenter let ‘his glory be seen’. This is an event of the most radiant, blinding whiteness.
It is interesting that the Spirit of inspiration, renewal and transfiguration, the Holy Spirit, is symbolized by a white dove. Peace and serenity too are symbolized by the dove. White is also the colour of surrender. Elementally, the poles where the earth ends are also white: the Arctic and the Antarctic. White is the colour of the ocean when she is restless or when she dances, her white foamy waves crashing to the shore.
The appearance and definition of white is made possible by the presence of darkness and perhaps the softest light that shines upon the earth is moonlight. The white light of the moon is infinitely gentle with the dark. It insists on no awakening or disturbance of colour except for the occasional illumination of a breaking wave. The moon guides the rhythm of the tides and the red rhythm of the blood. Held with such nobility in the dome of night, it offers an ever-ebbing journey of light. It wanes to a clean, vertical arch of light, almost a question mark high in the night. Then over the course of a month, its faith of light grows until it becomes a full circle of the most subtle illumination, at ease with the singularity of the dark but faithful to the courage of individual forms which it visits and holds in outline everywhere. The colour of moonlight against the black dome of night seems blue-white.
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OLOUR
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HITE AND THE
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EAUTY OF THE
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NFINISHED
WE INEVITABLY ASSOCIATE BEAUTY WITH PERFECTION. BUT THERE can also be great beauty in something that is imperfect and unfinished. One of the best examples of this is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and is by the German painter Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528): a painting in oil on wood called Salvator Mundi. It is a powerful painting. When you enter the room, it immediately claims your eye. It depicts Christ, the ‘Saviour of the World’. His right hand is raised in blessing. The earth is represented by the globe he holds in his left hand. Christ is dressed in a beautiful rich blue alb, with a crimson cloak draped over his shoulders. His hair hangs down his shoulders in long, rich brown ringlets and his face is angled to the right. Dürer began this painting shortly before he departed for Italy in 1505 but he never finished it. Portions of the hands and the face of Christ are not painted. Dürer had however drawn in the features of the face and hands and these drawings are visible against the white panel. Against the deep, rich coloured background and drapery the unpainted face is a white illumination shining forth from the painting. We know that the uniqueness of Jesus is his essence: God in the form of a man. This unfinished painting achieves the happy accident of enabling the beauty and radiance of a divine face to shine from a human body.
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The beauty of colour . . . derives from shape,
from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter,
by the pouring in of light, the unembodied . . .
PLOTINUS, Enneads
THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF COLOUR THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN the suspicion that colours belonged only to the surface. Deep down everything was dark and black. Farm life seemed to confirm this. In spring the plough would turn a green field into a black one. Turned over, the green skin of grass revealed dark earth underneath. Work on the bog brought further evidence of dark under-surfaces. Externally, the bog is the most sophisticated patchwork of subtle colours: saffron, purple, brown, white and green. Even in the midst of winter one can discover on the boggy black summit the most beautiful traces of burgundy. In springtime when turf is cut the bog is laced with colours. The top scraw is cleaned off to isolate the layer of turf to be cut. The browner turf is on top. The deeper you cut, the darker the turf becomes until you finally reach the last layers of turf down on the stone. This turf comes out like large slabs of black butter. It is called cloch mhoin, literally, stone turf. When it dries, this is always the hardest turf. Cutting down is a journey into the black archive of the bog’s memory. The blackest turf belongs to the oldest time; on a cold winter’s night, by the open fire, the blackest turf burns longest and gives the brightest flame.
Our ancestors were persistent voyagers in the dark. Without the benefit of artificial light, their day was lived between dawn and dusk. Their homes were caves – the dark mouths that nature had cut into the sides of hills, cliffs or mountains. Even during daylight it remained dark in there. Now and again, they must have longed to bring in some of the outside colour to adorn their caves. Imagine a mother gathering a bunch of the most beautiful wild flowers in blues, purples, yellows and whites, and placing them on some altar within the cave’s darkness. Imagine her seeing her dark home brightening with brief colour. Dwelling constantly in such a world of darkness, it is no wonder that sun and moon in their bright journeying would appear to be deities.
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HADOW BETWEEN THE
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BLACK IS PROBABLY THE MOST ANCIENT COLOUR, THE PRIMAL birth-source whence everything emerged. Darkness is the great canvas against which beauty becomes visible. Darkness withholds presence; it resists the beam of eye-light and deepens the mystery. The slightest flicker of bright wings can make the darkness of a night unforgettable. It is fascinating to consider that ancient kinship of light and dark, white and black. White light always shapes the darkest shadow. Indeed the shadow is the child of the threshold where black and white converge. There could be no shadow without light. A shadow is a dark figure cast on some surface by a body which stands in the way of light and takes the form of the intruding body. It is the counterpart of that body in black form. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung seizes upon this image for his theory of the shadow as the dark aspect of the self. The conscious self usually rejects the shadow and it is forced to dwell in the unconscious. The shadow originates in all the negative experiences a person has accumulated, and part of the task of becoming free is the retrieval of the banished shadow. There are many difficult riches trapped in the shadow side. Jung said the shadow held 90 per cent gold. To learn to recognize, accept and integrate the shadow is to transfigure much of the bruised areas of the heart which dwell in fear and unease and rob us of joy and creativity. For instance, an incredibly nice, smiling person who is doomed to please people often has a shadow side where anger and disdain are nested. Often the outside clown is internally sad and despairing. An abrasive, awkward presence can sometimes conceal the kindest heart. When we meet someone, we never know who we are actually meeting.
There are two words in Irish for shadow: scáth and scáil. Scáth includes the positive meaning of shelter. There is an old proverb: ‘Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine’, i.e., People live in one another’s shadow. This proverb suggests the intimacy of Celtic folk culture as a cohesive web which protects individuality in its shelter. The phrase gan scáth was also used (literally, ‘without shadow’) and it signified one who is fearless. Interestingly, scáil also means spirit, which together with soul and body makes up the threefold division of the person. And there is a wonderful poetic phrase for a very thin person: mar scáil i mbuidéal, like a shadow in a bottle. There is a poetic import to the phrase ‘without a shadow of a doubt’: in all probability, there is no doubt without a shadow. Doubt is the shadow cast when something gets in the way of the light. Ironically, doubt itself often brings greater light because of the shadow it casts. In Sonnet 27 Shakespeare has this lovely quatrain: