Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which like a jewel (hung in ghastly night),
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.
T
HE
S
ECRET
L
IFE OF
B
LACK
IN TERMS OF PHYSICS, BLACK OCCURS WHEN AN OBJECT IS absorbing all of the coloured wavelengths. This is why nothing is reflected back. Black represents pure hunger for colour; it exercises no generosity, the eye receives nothing. When it looks at black, it is looking at the grave of colour. It is not surprising that black has been the colour of grief and mourning. In Western tradition, the priest wears black vestments when celebrating the funeral liturgy. The mourners wore black. When the husband died, for a period the woman wore widow’s weeds.
Goethe says that colours are the deeds and sufferings of light.
Yet it is not that black is without colour; it is rather that it is the absence, the outer surface, behind which colours secretly dwell. The heart of blackness is full of colour. The outer absence veils a rich interiority of presence. This casts an almost comic ambivalence on the wearing of black as a symbol of the ascetic.
Black is also the colour of ink. Books are printed in black ink. There is again some irony here: the most colourful worlds, characters and adventures live inside lines of black narrative. In contrast to prose, a poem leaves more room on the page for the white silence and space to intensify the black lines where the music is distilled. Indeed, in a world where colour is often garish, the simple clarity of black and white maintains a lovely dignity. This is especially true of photography. Fergus Bourke’s stunning black and white photographs of Conamara succeed in bringing out the unwatched stillness of this landscape. He looks carefully and waits for the days when Conamara unexpectedly reveals itself. He manages to delve deeper beneath the deft weave of colour until he can glimpse and catch in black and white the hidden liturgy of primal forms that shape this place. In film too, black and white can be hugely effective. Andrei Tarkovsky’s early film Andrei Rublev is magnificently constructed in a black and white sequence which schools the eyes in shadow and light all the way through until they become drenched in the glory of its final epiphany. Black has also been a dominant colour in spirituality. As we saw earlier, the mystics speak of the Dark Night of the Soul. Meister Eckhart said: ‘The Light that is God flows out and darkens every light.’
T
HE
C
OLOUR OF THE
D
ARK
IN THE LAST MONTHS OF HIS TURBULENT LIFE, CARAVAGGIO (1571–1610) completed his extraordinary dark painting, The Denial of Peter. It depicts Peter before a fireplace in the courtyard of the High Priest where one of the women is accusing Peter of being a follower of Christ. Two soldiers are also pointing their fingers at him and Peter is denying the three accusations. This canvas is so dark; it has none of the beauty or the softness that colour brings. It is a black painting of relentless and bleak psychological portraiture. The figures are shrouded in black and dark brown earth colours. The only light is meagre and illuminates the faces of the accusers and the startled, helpless eyes of the old, bald Peter, the betrayer. His finger points at himself. He knows what he is doing. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are wet with tears. His presence is not fearful but limp with resignation and shame; this contrasts with the alertness and vigour of his accusers. The betrayal of a friend, of a loved one, is an undignified, demeaning thing. Caravaggio’s powerful portraiture draws out the irreversible awfulness of the deed as the light of kindness and belonging fades in the encircling gloom. This is an incredible portrait of a moment when weakness killed beauty. This darkening gloom seems forever beyond the dream of dawn.
T
HE
P
ASSION OF
R
ED
THE NIGHT BREAKS WHEN THE RED FIRE OF DAWN IS KINDLED and the world glows again in the beauty of colour. Of all colours, red is perhaps the most passionate and intense. Red is never neutral. When red is present, something is happening: red is for danger. It is not a colour that dwells in some secure middle region where rest and stillness prevail. Red is a threshold colour; it tends to accompany and intensify beginnings and endings. Red is also the colour of birth and is probably the colour in which the universe was born. It is believed that the Big Bang was the primal red explosion out of which the cosmos emerged. Our earth was born in a red fire. Despite its solid outer surface, the heart of the earth is a wild fire-dance of red magma. When a volcano erupts we begin to understand that ground is only vaguely solid. The torrential red rivers that flow from a volcano reveal what a tenuous foundation ground is. Underneath the surface of the land and beneath the floor of the oceans, there is no solid stone-like foundation. The earth is grounded on a primordial red ocean. If it was red at the origin and is red at the root, it is somehow natural that the intense threshold experiences of life are often accompanied by the colour red.
Each colour has its own scale of brightness and red has many hues that range from dark crimson to faint orange. It has such force and vibrancy because it is the colour of life. Blood is the fluent stream that keeps the body alive, forever flowing out from and flowing back into the red well of the heart. Blood is also our most ancient stream. The secrets of ancestry, the blueprints for future descendants, sleep within this flow. It is a surprising image: within the permanent darkness of your body a ceaseless red-bush streaming. Like a mild bellows in the dark, breath deepens the life of the red: black and red are the primary colours at the heart of identity.
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.