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  • Red Thread

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    Jarrett Earnest
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    BHQFU Color Feelings "The Red Thread" chapter from Jessa Laird's The Rainbow Reader

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    BHQFU Color Feelings "The Red Thread" chapter from Jessa Laird's The Rainbow Reader

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Scarica in formato PDF o leggi online su Scribd
    Segnala contenuti inappropriati
    68 visualizzazioni13 pagine

    Red Thread

    Caricato da

    Jarrett Earnest
    BHQFU Color Feelings "The Red Thread" chapter from Jessa Laird's The Rainbow Reader

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Scarica in formato PDF o leggi online su Scribd
    Segnala contenuti inappropriati
    di 13
    i: How to hegin talking about colour, and notjust any colour, but this excessively emorivecolout? Where on earth to begin with red? In earth? The first colour ofthe spectrum is also that ofthe base chakra the ancient Hindu "subtle system’ of points on the spine which relate o different colours, nocd, attributes and powers Kundalini isa coiled serpent, dormant a the base ofthe spine. Once awakened, she travels through the seven centres, and human, potential is fully realised. Mulahaa is che fis tation Kundalini pastes chrough on her ascension, and this the red, root chakra, relates to issues of security and sexuality. Starting in red and slowly coiling ides like the rainbow serpent that is Kundslin, I hope to achieve f not enlightenment, then some sense of avakened attention and purpose. Following the rainbow template, which alzo corresponds tothe trajectory of the chakras I will explore the colours one at time. Peshaps this sequential dance in six chapters will become the literary equivalent ‘of that Orientlist cliché, the dance of the seven veils! know thi rnuch already, that the East, its topes, and the West's use and abuse ‘of those tropes, will weave in and out ofthese texts like the reedy sound of the nay flue, ro whick hips and cobras altke have swayed for millenni * Ie used to amaze me thatthe light of our sun cleat and bright, when fered through the flimsy layer of my eyelid became a rich scarlet, as though Ii just buried my face in crimson velvet How was this posible? And then it dawned on ny young mind thar was red inside! The whole of my interior was coursing with this opulent substance, che recognition of which is peshape the “originary aesthetic awakening of every human being. From the dak 2 Thee mrecren lou in New wean ofthespeorum bt als inecetempeaty scene chose erty cre whiney hoe) a8 peli the Bl chaper 6 ARAINBOW READER ‘womb our first encouncer wth light must be mediated by these, our cycids, not to mention the bloody mucus we come wrapped in. Red, realise, is about labour in all ts guises. Birth and colout. have a story to tell about eis When was. git I visited my father during school holidays He owned some flat and desolate land outside of Dargaville. My father had visions ofa hounteous organic orchatd sun by himself anda bevy of international beauties in various states of undress bur che reality was infact avery lonely one. Often | wasthe only ‘other human he would see for months, The orchard was never large enough to become a going concern chough it produced far too ‘much for one man to consume aloe. He ruined his teeth eating fifty pieces of fruit a day ‘He wat vegetarian but aot an animal love, grazing cattle on his property ro make @ few extra dollars even though most ofthese baste were destined forthe meatworks. Once he had a pregnant ov, and eat one morning, he helped deliver her calf. He woke me up full of excitement for me to see the unsteady new eeature in the fresh morning de. My father was a perennial morning person, while I was sepeical about anything todo with farming ac any time of day. Iwas city stl and bookworm and hated having to muck in with gardening and chores, so I was less than joyous to he shaken out of sleep and lnc my guraboots inthe cll aie this sualight, and wet, tangled Tcan'trememberf the calf had the black and white map-like patches ofa Friesian, it was chocolate, or a honey-coloured Jersey. But I was absolutely transfixed by the aftebirh, staring in alhuge pile in the gras, as though aliens ha just landed and left something utterly foreign on earth I was translucent and opasue, selatinous and covered in rainbow swirls and sweat chere were colours in there which I have never seen before o since. It was ike looking into the eye of nebula and I fel ight then, that this was divinity, what Hindus call darshan, or looking into the eye of God Like when the baby Krishna ae mud and his mother made him spit ‘tout, and she looked into his mouth and saw the univers. Perhaps 7 THE RED THREAD ic is no accident that cows are steed in Inia or that Krishna isthe cosmic cower * Bur wait —I remember something else now, which preceded and presaged the alien visitation of the placenta a drop of blood under 2 microscope. ft was when {was five Years old and [used to play with Gabriel White who lived around the corner fom me in Ponsonby His older brother had a microscope ~ the pinnacle of sophistication ~ and | was ao flattered when he invited me to peer through it! But sy reaction betrayed my youth I simply coulda believe that Iwas looking at blood, because everyone knows that blood i ed, and what he showed me was 2 psychedelic mosaic of colours, jewel ike jon the glas slide, Blood carries our DNA, and the double-helixcan he seen as r80 intestwined serpents. Jeremy Narby suggests in The Cosmie Serpent that in ayahwasea-induced trances, hese microscopic snakes which live inside our bodies nd raake us who we are, present externally as giant, multi-coloured bons and anacondas. Then there isthe ‘Australian aboriginal Rainbow Serpent, ond Quetzalcoatl, the ‘Aztec feathered serpent (shimmering with the rainkow of iridescent feathers ofthe jungle), nat to mention the Kundalini serpent and her rainbow trajectory through the chakras. Fethaps rainbows ‘exist in our teeming wer insides as much as they do in ou stormy, seudding skies * Tm not the first to write a Tove letter to acolo, to press my ‘thoughts between sheets of paper only to find thar — ike Rorschachi blots ~they have grown toeth, wings and tongues ‘William Gass wrote a litle book about bg dings, like language nd ltertuse snd the colour blue? Alexander Theroux filed two books with galloping, attention deficic disorder essayson colours, 2 Gam Willa. On Heng Be: A Phils Eoiy (Bo R Gadi sor 8 ARAINBOW READER rating off every possible chromatic fcrod he could muster: they are coked-up and kaleidoscopic!” Michael Tausig broke my heart by writing the book on colour was planning to write he must have read my mind! Bus Derck Jarman's i the most moving tale ofall he wrote his paean to colour ashe was losing his sight from AIDS related complications: "T wrote this book in an absence of time. IFT have overlooked something you hold precious ~ write it in the margin. (..) had vo write quickly as my sight eye wa put ‘out in August... and then ie was 2rur-in with that dark. I wrote the red on a hospital drip, and dedicate i othe doctors and nusses ar Bart’. Most of twas writen at four inthe morning, scraled almose incoherently in the dark until sleep blissfully overcook me, know that my colours are not yours. Two colours are never the same, even if theyre fom the same tube" * “The firs thing I did when commencing thiscolour study, was to stretch red hessan over an old noticeboard and cover it with Photographs of chings red, mostly gleaned from the pages of the National Geographic, that paramount sourcebook for white (Orlenealists like me. Thad been obsessed wich coloured hessan ever since | intalled a pseudo-museum inthe crumbling display cabinets of the University ‘of Auckland's Department of Anthropology. These cabinets were frted with pinboard, each stretched witha different hue of musty hrssian, faded and patchy where photographs had lived for years before finaly disintegrating. remember the original Victorian brown hessian covering the wooden walls of any bedroom in the old Ponsonby villa we lived in when I was seven of eight loved 4 Themus, Alexander, The Pray Colo Thre Ess Londons pos), gp ted Toes, Alesade, The Sender Clear ‘Three Enews Henry Hal C196 14 Taig Maha, What Col he Sore? (Chegs Univeriy of ‘Cacao Pres 209. 5 rman Derek Chroma: A Book of Calor, June’ $n Centr 9. THERED THREAD bur kitchen, which we had painted pumpkin yellow with chocolate trim. [remember pondering the vaaris of fashionable colours when, in the early 198s, e painted another kitchen in another house pastel pink with grey trim. [elt we had lost something. still th, ‘But I got something back recently when my mother tol me, ss we wore searching for hessan inal colous of the rainbow at Spotlight Faris, chat | had been born into a room whose walls were covered with purple hessian, while my nursery was covered ‘mvorange hessian; the apogee of hippie interior decoration. Babies cant see clearly on arial, and colour vision i init for some weeks, but just knowing tbe hessian had been there made sense tome. And here was, making tiny art-portals iro that sacred experience, the moment of birth, rd, which sits between purple and range on the spectrum, Rei is or labour | was born at home ina very small house in bush-elad Tiirang. My afterbieth was ken by the midwife for her shubarb patch. Lalays loved the ia thatthe bloody package thachad sustained me was transmuted into ruddy stall of rhubseh “Maori have che same word for aftrbirch as for land, whenua, forthe two are indivisible; the place where your whenuais buted is your \whenua. Dust codust. Everyone, i seems, was mate fom clay * In The Space Between Pakeha aft historian Pound takes up the ‘cause of Pakcha modernist painter Gordon Walters, defending his against charges of appropriation of Maori motif levelled nt him by Maori att historians? There isa passage in which Pound tries (Inde rg eraiangagthe et human the ert fat Haters and the ger fous to allcopora eng ale Toth, ‘The Chaldeans he Paha Maden adh Heties al hie teing Adin bch means orgie’ wooded xan ery relent andes cath” Le Stn, Cle, The Sap id (Cheng: Unetyof igs Po). 966 ts demi Now Zand Art (Acland Worksep Pre) 194 10 ARAINBOW READER to diceredie something Ngabuia Te Awekotukw sid about Wate tuse of colour. Most famous for painting in black and white, Walters! ‘Mahuike is black snd blue. Te Awekotuki rages at his ignorance, since Mahuika is the goddess offre: these bruised colours seem to hheran entirely inappropriate choice forthe representation of heat, Pound asks, “must coloue in art always have a naturalistic oran expressionist connotation’ Are we then to asume for instance, thatthe standard red ochre ofthe carvings in the Mori meeting house has some particular descriptive relation tothe various personages those carvings represent, as ifeach were meant 0 represent a particularly ruddy complexion, or an especially sanguine ‘or fiery temperament!"* Pound’ language makes my fae reden. Sanguine temperaments ‘were an invention of medieval European quackery, not rooted in the realities ofthe Pacific. In routing Te Awekotuku's claim of a mismatch, Pound creates further discomfort by superimposing European terminology over Polynesion concent. The Elam library's copy ofthe book was heavily graffitied; an angry but anonymous “Maori eader kept pace with Pound throughout the book, Here, she ore paused long enough t scrawl, "This is a Eurocentric reading of red ~ ed ochre, the blood of papardinuku and ite use on whakairo establishes connection — whakapapa/tuanuku! You are an iiot! Red is blood, thats whakapapa and the mana chat flows from i. * 19 Farhan render rom eevee, Papasan ithe ath tes, naka isdecoratve caving shaky genealogy, and ane Taipan perme gn Mare Maun lane Livi Stun an othe The ae Pt Rob aperined ake termi vers whalapapey declaring himsls35% Mn Innaenos aletinein thee open. nesting he a the medi! European trope of the hance” nds angi tnsclpaal wor 1 THEREDTHREAD Iman essay simply tiled Red, Alexander Theroux diops into his whirlwind of references thae Miri possess hundreds of words forthe eponymous colour" This wes news to me, and I doubted ‘Theroux’ scholarship, particulaey since in another passage he spelled pohucukiwa Spahucukawa! Then l eame aross William Colenso's 188 pamphlet On the Colour Sense of the Maors in which, the eccentric but learned missionary discusses the superior sense of vision of Maori a the time of European contact. One example !mong many is their abilcy to discern Jupiter satellites without telesconicasistance:"Colenso lyrical writing evokes an era in ‘which the subelest variations of hue are matched with intricate language; a poetry of ehe everyday, When the white man introduces blue cloth, Maori invent a raf of terms for its many subtle shades, CColenso laments that Pakeha encouraged Mor to use only one ‘word to cover this gamut of hues: the elumsy transliteration mr But iis about the colour red that Colenso has the most rosay “{n nature around them, they saw plenty of «red colour, ~ in the rainbow, and inthe gorgeous hues of che clouds at sunsets in some oftheir birds, — a5 i the ced beaks an feet of the pigeon, the ‘oystercatcher, and the blue swamp-hen, and in the red features of| the lange parrot, and on the heads ofthe two species of parakeet; in their fish, asthe red gurnard che snapper, and the crayfish; in many of their seaweeds; and in the flowers an small ruts of several trees and shrub" ‘Colenso notes that red is tapu, sacred, and that the uses of red ochre are subsequently limived to chiefly adornment, important so: Thons The Py Cole 1 thas 1 Thi wtabo ated by Chale Darin inhi Beng voyage eating thelnlpeour people Tera del Figs. Michael Tau roles ‘hi enue of edge insu by King xh ‘shen charcetone in Mime ond Alen: A Pla sory the Sens (Ne Yr: Rode, 1938 +3 Gok, Won, Oth Calor Sena the Mao Chritchurh in False 208 3 12 ARAINBOW READER houses (including kumarastorchouses), gateways and wa canoes. Maori reddened their korero, speech, in ways both metaphoric and specific; red colours crept into their faces as well as thet words ‘When this happened, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued old Mion "very ‘quickly detected the alteration in the colour ofthe face and ofthe yes, arising from bashfulness,appeehensivenes, or shame, or fom, concealed vexation or open anger and not unfrequentiyplaily told the actor or sufferer of i! co is, or her, further vexation and

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