Heart of the Rainbow: Life in the Gray

All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life. — Goethe: Faust

Dusk takes a gray breath and exhales darkness… In the heart of a rainbow, Green never quite fulfills its task at the core of the color spectrum, this green reaching for yellow and then leaping headlong into blue — doubling itself in the backwash — just before the sun obliterates the clouds and gives way to the shine. Indigo remains in the shadows with gray, in a constant to and fro with certified color-hood. Green is the silent sea that courses through the woods, no matter the season, since life weathers winters and droughts, through shelters that look like Death, sap giving way to the crunch, until softness emerges, oozing refreshment. At the poles of the earth, the essence of green dances on the blackness of the beautiful oblivion, where Aurora flickers the sky into fantasy. Colors spur us to look deeper. Thorns prick us, but it’s the trickling blood that leads us to imagined oceans, where thoughts drift upon a beauty beyond the reddest rose. Paint a purple sky at noon and face the scrutiny of the heavens, until the paint dries and the sunset calls it true. Gray returns, the authentic heart of colors, neither here nor there, since gray is always fleeing into light and dark. Gray is Dusk looking over its shoulder and finding itself to be Dawn. Green is only a part of life, just as wet is an attribute of water. No amount of theorizing answers the riddle of colors. Everlasting doubt is the only truth that runs throughout theory. Nature keeps her secrets.

No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes And no flags wave me home In the caves, all cats are grey In the caves, the texture coats my skin — The Cure: All Cats Are Grey

Gray is the marshland in our heads. Just as thoughtful steps impress the marsh, so they carry on without leaving tracks, only the sloshing remains that soon drift back down into murk. Gray settles back in. But those trackless thoughts agitate what’s buried beneath, giving rise to muddy remembrances that drift along the thick terrain of the mind, drifting to channels unexplored and forgotten, before settling back into undistinguished mud. Gray is the place water seeks after it reaches the valley, realizing that the ground is the peak of the highest point of what lies beneath. Down is where the wellspring lies… When darkness drinks the moonlight, Midnight wipes her gray lips and thirsts for more. Even the purple dust of butterfly wings finds the yellow pollen and mingles into grayness, a cooling and warming that keeps the flowers bright. Green is the boat-bound face that contemplates death by nausea on the sickly-sea of silver waves, leaving the solidity of shore a verdant dream. Colors mix into themselves, like and unlike each other, until all fades to shadow, ever-lengthening, until night claims the palette and another spectrum emerges, revealing colors beyond the confines of light. Dream-colors become…

Light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general expression is preferred, light and its absence, are necessary to the production of color… Color itself is a degree of darkness. — Goethe: Theory of Colours

Light is the afterthought of color. Purple reaches down into the dreams of darkness and emerges hidden to us, becoming ultraviolet, a secret only those initiated by the cocoon will ever see. Beyond this world, galaxies spiral into blue, while elliptical ones tend towards red, leaving a green valley of light between them, a light show no greater than the red rose against the cobalt sky, while the green of thorns supports it all. There is no distinction as to where red ends and orange begins, just as midnight in June is not the darkness of the dead of night in December, while the world slowly nods on its axis in agreement. Ice clouds gather sunlight’s retreat and project manic colors, as far beyond the limits of language as a cello playing darkly at Dawn. Colors settle into our eyes and lie down to dream with us, crowning nightmares with flickering crimsons, while rainbows unravel and lead us back into the green valleys of whimsy. Gray haunts the twilight of consciousness, like a cipher for the living and the dead. Green is the tree of life, but its branches hold colors yet to be dreamed. Gray lurks in the sleeping shadows…

Hayden Moore