Musings On Another Colour On Another Day of Ill Health

Another day.  Another day of fog and illness.  I promised that today I would post the second half of the story I began yesterday.  Today I promise that I'll do it tomorrow.  I hope you can all bear the suspense.

Instead I'm going to muse on some more colours.  At least, one of them.  I'm just too exhausted today to think of exciting or dull things to write about the others.

Blue


The colour of pornographic movies.  A friend refused to believe that I was sweet and innocent until I told her that I have never downloaded pornography.  Why would I?  I confess I find the desire to watch or read about people having sex to be something my brain cannot quite comprehend.  Does that make me strange?  A question which, for reasons of my own, set my brain off singing a song called Jesus Freak to itself.  My best friends were not born in a manger.  At least I don't think so.  I've never asked them.

The colour of sadness.  During my life my shade of blue has often been indistinguishable from black.  And yet ...

The colour of the clear sky in which the sun shines.  At this time the sky contains almost as many shades of grey as to make it a pornographic bestseller.  Grey is a more blue colour than blue.  Blue is the colour, on a crisp winter day, that makes me glad to be alive and eager to have enough time and energy to walk beneath it by the ocean or in some wild place.

The colour of a Joni Mitchell song and album.  It's not the album I own.  And that's on vinyl, languishing unplayed.  I mention it because part of the song was played several times in the current National Theatre production of Hedda Gabler.  I saw it last week, with a friend who was not born in a manger.  We saw it screened to a cinema.  I find recently that half the people I know are intimately acquainted with Hedda Gabler and a wide selection of classic plays and literature.  I am not and that's unlikely to change soon because I'm finding it so hard to concentrate on reading.  I love books but I can't take in the contents.  That makes me blue.  At least I now know something of the story of Hedda Gabler though I confess it's not going to stay at the foreground of my mind for long.  She was sad.  She did some silly things.  She did some horrible things.  And then she killed herself.  Finally, someone said that people don't do things like kill themselves.  A completely erroneous statement to end a classic play.  It is unlikely that I will ever become a theatre critic.

The colour of the cold.  I associate it with chilblains even though they aren't blue, rather than frostbite and the painfulness of getting something from a freezer or having to chop a cold carrot.

The colour of the sea.  That's what they say.  Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  And began a tradition of oppressing the native peoples of the American continents that continues to this day.  The Mission was about such an oppression and powerful white men.  The church oppressed the locals and then the Jesuit missionaries were nice to them when they created what may have been the first socialist society on the planet.  Then they were killed by the oppressors.  That's the story in the movie.  Except in reality the socialist society was extremely rigid and authoritarian and not as freedom loving as Jeremy Irons' acting would make it seem.  His role was first offered to the then head of St. Beuno's Jesuit retreat centre in North Wales.  Someone from there led me through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.  Thankfully the good priest declined the offer.  If Ignatius walked in the sea he would have got very wet feet.  There was a purpose made hole in the sole of his shoe forcing him to walk in pain.  He called that a spiritual discipline and a penance.  I call it foolishness.

The colour of Buxton.  Not the place in Derbyshire that I won't be visiting next month.  Long story.  But the cat.  The blue cat.  From the classic movie "Dougal and the Blue Cat."  He says, "Blue is beautiful, blue is best.  I'm beautiful, I'm blue, I'm best."  He then replaces all of the colours in the magic garden with blue.  A sad day for Florence.

The colour of the fifth chakra, representing communication.  You want to communicate better.  Get something blue.  I have a blue stone I can wear over my throat.  I'm not sure that it improves my communication when I wear it but it looks good when worn with the right clothes.  I wouldn't know about that.  I am famed for my lack of colour coordination.

The colour of my cot blanket.  I still have it.  It's much smaller and much thinner than it was forty years ago.  If I hold it much more it will disintegrate entirely.  Fortunately I've been clutching a warthog in bed recently.  No rude jokes please.  Also the colour of the blanket in The Producers.

The colour of the creature which, poor thing, has been the wrong answer in questions in the panel game QI more than any other.  It's also been the right answer many times and on such occasions the panelists refuse to say its name in case it is wrong.  A blue whale fell from a great height onto the surface of Magrathea, where our own planet was designed by mice.

The colour of the Savannah in a song by Erasure released in 1990.  A friend in my first and only year at Bradford University was a big fan.  On occasions we would go to a bar, buy ourselves a packet of crisps and a pint of soda and something, and would proceed to win back the money on the general knowledge quiz machine there.  We knew not to gamble too much.  Don't go for the big money or we would lose everything.  Keep it small and we would know the answers.

The colour of a lampshade on the other side of this room.  It's a good shade.  It's a rubbish bulb.  One of the energy efficient bulbs that is less efficient in actually producing light.  With the light on there is not enough light to read.  Useless.  It's fortunate that I haven't been good at reading recently.



Indigo

This is NOT a colour of the rainbow.  A rainbow does NOT have seven visible colours.  It has six.  And indigo is not one of them.  We only think a rainbow has seven colours because of the influence of Isaac Newton.  He was steeped in the philosophies of alchemy and so knew that seven was a pretty special number.  There had to be seven colours in a rainbow.  Even though there were only six.  Because six wasn't a special enough number.  Indigo is a con.  It's often omitted from modern divisions of the visible spectrum.

That means I don't have to speak of it here.  That's convenient because my head is not jammed full of musings about it.

Indigo dye is the colour used for blue jeans.


Violet

I'd like to call it purple please.  No?  I'm not allowed.  Right then, I'm not going to talk about it at all.  Not the flower.  Not parma violet sweets and the sweet dinner lady.  Not Miss Beauregarde.  Nor amethyst - the name of the first soft toy I bought under the influence of a particular friend.  Just one toy.  And then dozens more.  Not the crown chakra and pure bliss.  They say that our ultimate reality is bliss.  Who are they?  And are they just trying to make us feel better?

If I can't call violet purple I'm going to have a temper tantrum.
I'm going to stop writing.
I'm going to end this here before I get too emotionally attached to anything purple.
Hopefully soon I will be well again.