The Suggestion of Color

I saw one of those quizzes on social media the other day, where you’re led through a series of seemingly innocuous questions until something is revealed about your true nature. This one had to do with color and how you see it. There was a square of a cool gray and the first question asked: What color do you see: gray, blue or green? And I immediately thought that I might have chosen gray, but now that blue and green had been suggested to me, those hues were apparent in the sample. It wasn’t green enough to be called green though, and certainly not blue enough to be blue, but now the gray was infused with these more lively tints and couldn’t really be seen as mere “gray” either. The fact that choices were offered had made me unsure of my perception.

 

It occurred to me that writing is an exercise in the offering of choices, in the suggestion of new or nuanced ways to view the world. Isn’t that what we’re doing by inhabiting a fictional world or the mind of a character, especially one who may see blue where we see gray?

 

Recently, I was inspired by an article about paint colors in a home decorating magazine. We’ve all wondered about the people who come up with the inventive names—because, certainly, there’s a quintessential human element in these names and their visceral modifiers, obscure historical references, and strange evocativeness. In fact, here’s an amusing article about what happened when a non-human tried to name paint colors. To me, color can infuse an entire setting, such as the endless green of a forest or the far-reaching blue of an ocean. It can be an intense character feature—a rancher’s dust-covered figure, a red-faced curmudgeon. It can set the mood for a story, such as all the feelings yellow brings to mind. Thinking this way inspired several stories in a collection I’m still working one; some of the stories take a color title: “Resonant Blue,” “Cadmium.”

 

Some people are born color blind, or can only see limited color. We’ve all seen the viral videos of a color blind person looking through special glasses that allow him or her to see color for the first time. How strange that must be, we think, a whole new world.

 

In Chekhov’s story, “Gusev,” a soldier returns from service, dying from an illness. He dies at sea and is tossed into the ocean. The men who remain on the ship watch stoically, Gusev’s body passes schools of fish and a large shark, and Chekhov’s narration then turns very inclusively omniscient:

 

“And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors . . . A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one . . . The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such a tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.”

 

Gusev’s experience, such as it is, the ultimate, unknown perception—death—is relayed with colors and strange sights. Imagine, Chekhov seems to be suggesting, imagine the unimaginable. Surely there are colors we’ve never seen, colors we’d hardly know how to describe. As writers, this is a quest we embark on joyfully, time and again, hoping to bring at least a few along with us.