As we proceed with the journey of our lives from the darkness of the womb to the womb of darkness, what does obsess us is the infinite variety of colours that define the ever poignant moments of our lives flashing along now and then in a wave of nostalgia. Nostalgia is but to muse upon the salt sweet savor of the lavender scented past.
Every moment whose movement is witnessed by the sandglass somehow comes to have a definite association with some colour in our minds, a colour of happiness or sadness or perhaps a combination that transcends the narrow definitions of happiness and sadness and reaches the level of the sublime. The tendency to associate a particular mood with a particular colour is highly subjective and has a lot do with inherently cultural prejudices and preferences.
Thus to the traditional literary and philosophical minds, grey is associated with boredom but red would be associated with liveliness and vigour; purple becomes the colour of royalty and white becomes the colour of purity. Across numerous religious theories and cultures, marriage is all about bright and lively colours but widowhood is always represented through the ominous and mourning black or the dignified but lifeless white.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
What deserves our attention and reflection is the mystery of these colours that so inevitably command our undivided attention even before we understand the world properly and are merely trying to struggle with the consciousness of intelligent perception even while we are being weaned.
There is no gainsaying the fact that a kindergarten school which does not have a lively and crazy splash of colours on its walls would be condemned by the world for impeding the psychological development of the child. In other words, the child’s eagerness to know the world depends a lot on how colourfully it is presented to him.
The child who is deprived of colours in his life shall naturally accuse his parents of cozenage and the sting of this guilt is something that no parent can dare to risk. Hence, we find the would-be father rushing from pillar to post to create a colourful room for the baby in the house itself the moment he hears the merry bells of conjugal bliss metamorphosing into the anxious yet eager and anticipated cries at the labour ward.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Colours are perhaps a sugar coating to the world that we are expected to experience even as we learn to digest, as we grow up, the raven- black reality which can be too bitter a pill to swallow. Colours, early in our lives, protect us from the onslaughts of the greys and the blacks which we can gradually get adjusted to with age as we learn to compromise our multi-coloured glassy expectations crashing against the hard rock’s of reality.
But the fear of the black colour or the dark is another mysterious phenomenon. It doesn’t require rocket science to understand that blackness or darkness is the primary source of fear because it suffocates vision in the realm of light for we may have a red or a green beam but never a black beam! Staring into the black or the dark is essentially staring at nothingness and thus at the unknown.
Thus the infant cries in the dark night, it cries for the light till a soothing touch assures it that the dark unknown still continues to be blessed with that familiar motherly or fatherly touch which it has been used to. The mere touch of the parent brings back the colour in his life. Yet, is this darkness or blackness really so evil? Creativity, like life itself begins in darkness. Light shows you the way but the darkness shows you the stars.
No poetry is complete unless Mother Nature decides to bathe creation with the silver-coloured showers of the eternally mysterious and seductive moon. The colourful appeal of this silver shower is not worth anything unless the blackness of the sky forms a suitable and supporting background.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
If we seek colours, we have to understand that it is the sunshine of joy and the rain of sorrow that come together to create the colouful rainbow called life. We have to accept the infinite variety of colours that life makes us experience, enjoy, and suffer. The serene acceptance of life being beautiful while the ‘barr’d clouds bloom the soft dying day’ (John Keats) and paint the western sky with a maddeningly beautiful combination of colours can encourage us to bring hope in the lives of the people who have lost the eyes that could have witnessed the colours of hope trying to inch into their hopeless existence.