Seeing the Colors
I once lived in a house near the Sacramento Delta whose weedy backyard contained several flourishing fruit trees. In the heat of early summer, I would stand out under those fruit trees in my underwear and eat warm apricots until I was cross-eyed. The backyard had an old wooden table I had painted cobalt blue. When one of my fellow graduate students came over for lunch one day, I picked a dozen velvety apricots and placed them in a bowl on the table for her to enjoy. I can still feel the visual perfection of the ripe, golden fruit against the intense blue of the table. The colors sizzled against each other in the hundred-degree sun.
The eyes live for color. If I stopped whatever task I was engaged in and simply let my eyes explore whatever they liked, the enchantment would never end. My eyes graze on the colors, shapes, and movements of the visual world as if it were a patterned rug inviting me to explore every dimension. Eyes were made to soak up the world, and the flirtatious world takes full advantage of the eyes’ desire. Go ahead. Open your eyes. What do you see?
My office for many years adjoined a tiny courtyard inset with a triangular koi pond. Each day as I walked by the pond, it came alive and bubbled with flashes of orange. The bottom of the pool was dark, so the large orange and gold koi were easily visible. They cruised along the bottom like sleek torpedoes, or floated up to the top to gaze at passersby. I would sit at the wide edge of the pool, between a bronze sculpture and a row of muscular agapanthus. The minute I sat down, the monstrous beauties would swim up to me. The fish loved the attention. I’m not sure who enjoyed the show more, them or me. The sight of these two-feet-long fish, scales glittering, floating and darting, gliding and begging for food, was hypnotic.
The patriarch of the pond was a huge blue-black creature with soft eyes and a perpetually open mouth. He would make insistent kissing motions with his lips, his great body framed by delicate fins. Even though the pond keeper frowned upon it, I loved to touch the koi, rewarding them with raisins or bits of oatmeal cookie. I don’t regret transgressing. The beautiful creatures from a watery planet were as sweet to watch as waves in the sea. The feel of their slippery heads was an unexpected pleasure for my hands.
Who can resist the mesmerizing effect of flames dancing, flickering, zigzagging from orange to red to purple along a pyre of logs burning in a fireplace or in a campfire on the beach? Flames are alive and unpredictable. They don’t tell us what they’re going to do next. That’s part of the allure. I would love to be a flame, to live as a fire does, burning brightly. When I light a fire in early winter, I’m doing it as much for the visual enchantment of flames and glowing coals going through their endless transformations, as to warm the house.
At the Jersey Shore on a recent September afternoon, I went out to walk along the wide sand, watching the horizon for fishing boats. At the very edge of the sea I saw a row of pale pink clouds, tightly clustered into a scalloped row. Several times that day I returned to watch the progress of the cloudbank as it rose higher in the sky, gathering volume and rosy hue. The clouds bulged; the moisture pressed against my eyes. My eyes were watching a storm brewing, that’s what the tall clouds foretold. By sunset the clouds had thickened into lofty knots of crimson and purple. My eyes were spellbound.
When I decided I had a favorite color (though I can scarcely believe it today, it was purple), I filled my life with it. I dressed in purple, painted my bedroom purple, wrote letters in purple ink. I was giving a gift to my eyes. And when my eyes wearied of purple—which took roughly one year—I fed them new colors. Now they love to look at red: red sunsets, rosy finches, garnet earrings, strawberries, cherry gelato. The older I become, the more omnivorous my ocular appetite.
Jack took me to Paris for New Year’s during our first year together. With so many visual feasts in that great city, one moment took my breath away. It was an afternoon in the jewel-box interior of St. Chapelle. The diminutive Gothic chapel, tucked away in the shadow of mighty Notre Dame cathedral, repaid us handsomely for the half-hour wait for admission. We walked through the ground floor of the twelfth-century church and climbed the stone staircase to the upper sanctuary. The low afternoon sun cast its light directly through a wall of stained glass, making colored patterns on the ancient stone floor.
“Look!” Jack cried, holding up his hand. There on his palm was a rich tattoo of colored light, caused by the sun slanting through an ancient lens of amber, scarlet, and lapis lazuli glass. I looked up and realized that not only was the light throwing rainbows of color on all the people gathered inside the chamber, the air in the room was alive with glowing color.
My eyes are always refreshed by the green of meadows, forests, and trees. They follow the flight of a resident blue jay, taking pleasure in the shock of indigo blue feathers soaring and weaving through the green lattice of sycamore branches. Blue feathers against green leaves, delicious. When I’m working at home the pond outside my window offers my eyes an infinity of greens, depending on the weather, time of day, depth of algae bloom, thickness of cattails and reeds, and the season. Willows at the far edge of the pond can wear hints of dusty turquoise in the winter and brilliant chartreuse in spring. My eyes cherish such abundance.
When a dear old friend suffered a stroke, I went to visit him wearing a special gift. He had been an artist in his youth and loved bold colors. As I went into the room where he lay on his couch, I paused for a moment. I wanted him to see me in my bright pink sweater—a long-sleeved pullover in a shade one could only call shocking pink. I wore that sweater because he had liked it and I hoped the color would lift his spirits. His face changed from frail to vibrant. His eyes actually danced. Only when I approached close enough to give him a hug did his gaze move from the bright pink sweater. Then we looked each other in the eye, while the pink sweater looked on.
