A Fire in the Sun Parlor

I know nothing about chromatics or color theory—save for a smattering of Newton, a smattering of Goethe, Albers of course. I know Spengler felt that Newton's Optiks had profound and regrettable effects on the direction of theology; and, although I have only the most general notions of what those effects may have been, I like to think that the power of colors was not inconsequential. Indeed it may well be that my own lifelong susceptibilities to colors have something in common with the faith of those millions of believers who know little or no theology.

From a college textbook I remember illustrations labeled "The Color Shuffle," designed (like Albers's experiments) to demonstrate—and doing so convincingly—that, when it comes to human perceptions of color, context counts for quite a lot, as it does in many areas of human experience.

Two of my earliest secondhand memories involve colors. By secondhand I mean those stories that get told so often during one's childhood that they become almost indistinguishable from real memories.

When I was—what? two and a half? my young parents were awakened by cries so much more urgent than usual that they both came hurrying into my room. I told them a dog had been chasing me.

"Oh, you had a bad dream," my mother said.

"What color dog was it?" my father said.

"Blue," I'm told I said.

We were living then in a village that had grown up around the textile mill where my father worked. My parents' families lived in a slightly larger town about an hour away. On weekends the three of us would catch the P&N (the Piedmont and Northern passenger train) from Victor to Pollitt. In case I became restive on those journeys my parents would bring along a box of crayons. No coloring book—I was too young for that. Not even a tablet of paper. Just the crayons, which I would take from their box one by one and from which I would slowly and carefully peel away the paper wrapping, leaving each slender waxy column of color far more satisfying to eyes and fingers. According to my parents, this task would keep me happily occupied for most of the trip. (As for the long-term implications, the later manifestations of this undoubtedly sensual practice, that is a topic for another occasion.)

Nor can I catalog the most appealingly colorful phenomena of my early childhood—though there are times even now, some sixty years later, when I know beyond doubt that a certain numinous combination of colors has its counterpart in the tantalizingly distant and (brightly) clouded past. Combinations of colors, after all, can be as evocative as fragrances, even though the occasions they evoke are generally more elusive.

I do know that by the age of five or six I was much more attracted to flora than to fauna—primarily, I'm sure, because of color, one exception being the goldfish in my grandfather's lily pool, which were not golden but a vibrant orange verging on vermilion. I thought it was too bad there were no cats or dogs that color. I must have been about that same age when I took inchoate satisfaction in the information that the color of the rose one wore on Mother's Day indicated whether one's mother was living or dead—my first encounter with symbolic color. Or maybe the flag had come before that.

In early spring, when azaleas shattered the sepia mise-en-scène of winter, I became intoxicated. Azaleas bloom profusely in every southern town and city, and I would wander around Victor, and later Pollitt, in a state of mind and eye and spirit not at all unlike the slightly dreamy, slightly drunken, yet highly alert sensations I experience nowadays in an art museum or gallery. And perhaps now is as apt a moment as any to mention that these recollections on color were surely occasioned in part by the splendid concurrence in Manhattan (in the uneasy spring of 2002) of the first sizable Gauguin show in some forty...