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New writing
COLOUR

Guest Editor SARA MAITLAND introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of colour

EVERY May I am shocked by my own forgetfulness – by the sharp feeling that nothing has ever been this green, so green, so many greens, such an abundance of green. Then every May I remember that I thought it last year and every May I resolve that I will remember it the next.

This year I thought how wonderful it will be; I shall read all these Mslexia pieces about colour, I will have to think about colour; and about how, as writers, we capture it in language traps and force it, as much as painters do, to serve our turn. I got out the big Crayola set left behind from my children’s childhoods. There were three colours missing. One was a pinkish beige I expect someone threw across a room because, despite promises, it was never really flesh-coloured. One was a muddy purple, which – by its absence – I remembered the puppy, now old and arthritic, first chewing up then throwing up. And I cannot imagine what the third one is because there do not seem any more colours that it could be (was it Furtleburze red? Stillonic blue? Pirochasmic yellow?) This is because I do not see as well as I should, and I do not remember enough of what I do see. I know, though, that if I could see well and then write down exactly what I saw, I would have written something original, unique, because I am the only person in the whole of history with this particular pair of eyes to do this particular act of seeing.

So, I thought about colour and what a gift it was to a writer. Colour is like smell, it goes deep into one’s memory and tangles there with emotions and inchoate thoughts and ideas. Tiny differences in tone or shade convey a mountain range of different associations. But not just emotional associations; in one sense colour is even better than smell, because it carries such a wide range of ‘references’. Colour has a science – in optics and in dyeing. It has a dense bulk of history too – until the late middle ages blue was the colour of poverty, and immorality; then lapis lazuli was first imported for painters and it became associated with Mary’s robe and hence with purity. Colour thwarted the Platonists who wanted beauty to lie in symmetry and so they could not decide what to do with it. Later philosophers were more confused about how we could know if what each of us saw as ‘vermilion’ (say) was the same thing. Later still anthropologists threw in their pennyworth: all known languages have at least two colour words – black and white (different, always, from ‘dark’ and ‘light’). And apparently, as they add colours, all languages do it in the same order – first red, then green/blue, then yellow, then green and blue separately and so on. Always.

For the complete essay, and for Sara's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of colour, read issue 14 • Subscribe!

Read a poem chosen by
Sara Maitland:

The Laden Table
by C E McCULLOCH

For more on SARA MAITLAND, go to www.literaturenortheast.co.uk