Have you ever experienced a pain so bright that all you can do is stare at it?
Last Friday, I found myself asking my students this question during a preliminary discussion regarding the diaries of Frida Kahlo. For my second semester of PhD work, I am required to teach two sections of an undergraduate writing course. I have to ensure my students learn about and successfully execute four major academic forms, but the thematic material through which they achieve this is entirely up to me. So I've created a course that focuses on the publication of famous individuals' private journals and letters, that questions the murky ethics of buying these texts and reading them for pleasure. Four weeks into the semester, we've gone through Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson, now we've progressed to the visual arts starting with Kahlo.
I had found a presentation via the Google Arts and Culture site that displayed evocative sections of her personal writings--some about her unending love for her husband and fellow artist Diego Rivera, others about her Communist ideals and struggles with chronic pain. But it was her entry on colors--her personal interpretations of them--that caused our session to deviate and me to voice the question at the top of this post.
Frida Kahlo believed green represented "...good warm light" (Kahlo et al. 211), that blue exuded "...electricity and purity love" (Kahlo et al. 211). Dark magenta cuddled into the color of mole. Black--she asserted--wasn't actually anything. I read the descriptions and saw my students' heads nod calmly from their tiny Zoom cubes, accepting each correlation sketched by Kahlo's hand. Her assessments weren't far off--many of them were ones we grew up with or could have posited ourselves even without reading Frida's diary--but it was her description of yellow that made us all pause:
"...madness sickness fear part of the sun and of happiness..." (Kahlo et al. 211).
The nodding stopped. My students were confused, and each cocked their chins and stared through their webcams, expecting me to agree with what I assumed they were thinking: that these descriptions were incongruous, the colorful equivalent of 2+2=5. I wanted to shrug and say I didn't get it either, but instead I rattled on about the color being similar to a Tarot card that possesses two interpretations depending on how it receives you. Some of my students were familiar with Tarot and the immediate slump of their shoulders indicated they'd reached a kind of interpretive comfort; the persistent skeptic expressions of the others revealed I needed to provide them with a little more for them to get there.
I lifted my right hand into a horizontal position and began to flip it over from palm to back, believing this pantomime would be enough to convey the inverse and potential threat of brilliance, of yellow. When it wasn't, I tried to verbalize it, and finally out came the question: Have you ever experienced a pain so bright that all you can do is stare at it?
If you've never taught in a classroom setting and experienced these spontaneous pedagogical shifts during a lecture, I'd like to compare it to launching a bowling ball down the polished alley toward the set of ten pins waiting for it at the other end. The intention is always a strike, but somewhere along the way you see the ball lean into an odd swivel and the chances of getting a gutter ball increase exponentially.
That's what it was like, only my chances deviated into full gutter ball. Some of my students smiled and laughed, intrigued by my question; others had already zoned out and there were a few that seemed to have only sunk deeper into their confusion that it now almost read as worry. Either way, no points for me.
My students didn't understand yellow, and deep down I was grateful, because if my grappling for an explanation revealed anything, it was that I did.
When colors began to matter I was a teenager trying to choose between red and blue. I'd always believed in the concept of power colors--hues that didn't just hold a general social meaning but possessed a magnetism as well as a near-medicinal quality. A power color didn't just flatter you, it heightened and safeguarded your being. It was something you could possess in clothing, food, jewelry whenever you needed to feel stronger. At the time I was seriously considering power colors, I didn't have one and was driven to find it. I'd read Maggie Nelson's Bluets and became convinced that if I was going to love well, I had to first love blue, but the color always brought the word "deep" to mind and soon I found it debilitating to contemplate how far "deep" actually traveled. When I tried red I was in my junior year of undergrad with wrists that cracked softly like wet wood from all the writing my poetry workshop required. For some reason the plush shift and pluck that occurred every time I circled my hands made me think of an animal. Smooth, red, mercurial. I wrote about this Red Animal until I realized I wasn't writing about myself or anything I'd ever experience. I wasn't an animal, I was a girl. I wasn't unpredictable. I wasn't red.
When I thought my life was finished--this isn't the same as believing your life is over--I relied on green because I believed the rest of my years would be this lush background I would stand in front of and smile. I even had my bedroom painted a deep emerald and chose to offset its intensity, its promise, with decor that was either black, white, or cream. For contrast--or maybe as a subconscious joke--I kept a bright red blanket over my bed as if to remind myself of the time I was convinced I could be wild.
Green represents a different kind of eternity for me now. It's one where I'm not an active participant in it or even aware it's happening. I can walk into the green bedroom I used to love, notice how its hue still covers the walls, and only recognize in it an absence. The color remains, but it doesn't pulse like it used to.
In Maggie Nelson's Bluets, there's only one section that discusses yellow, and in her speaker's opinion it's a failed color. She embraces it hoping to achieve joy after a bad breakup and paints her entire apartment with it. She even buys a yellow journal and uses it to write an inspirational motto (Nelson 31-32). But with every encounter, Nelson's speaker grows to loathe yellow to an alarming degree. It only reminds her of the color she doesn't have and soon she is back to blue.
If I was being honest, looking at my life, I could say that it's likely I'm doing the same thing. I've abandoned a beloved color--not blue--and suddenly I'm claiming kinship with yellow. For my birthday, I've request a pair of yellow Converse high tops. While writing this post, I've impulsively bought a bottle of yellow nail polish for $8.63 and then painted my nails gold to soothe myself while I wait for it to arrive. When I imagine myself, I am wearing my favorite yellow sweater with my cicada earrings. I've started to long for Maggie Nelson's Something Bright, Then Holes which is bound in a bright yellow cover with an abstract sun emanating from the top lefthand corner. I wear the topaz locket my parents got me for Christmas two years ago even though the picture it once held has been removed. The only difference is the more yellow I surround myself with, the more I find that I'm engaged in a kind of returning rather than a conscious avoidance of something I'd rather have.
If I was being even more honest, I would acknowledge that yellow is the color that's been with me the longest. It's the color my mother has always said I looked best in, the color of the dress that was my favorite as a young girl. It's the color of sunflowers. All my life it always seemed like the world ran to meet yellow. Living things looked to it in the sun for life. It's only natural--I just never knew how natural until I read Kahlo's description.
I find it important to state that I have never once said I love yellow. Even as I surround myself with it, seek it, claim it even, I can't say it's actually a preference--just something I currently have. I think of last summer, the sun so intense I felt like my brain was cooking. This was also yellow. When I have experienced fear, anxiety, loss, love, grief--emotions so intense it was like a light coming closer and closer until it overwhelmed my sight--this was yellow, too. So bright I cannot look away. Yellow is a thing that demands to be suffered.
When my class reveals that they cannot understand the other side of yellow, my immediate reaction is to smile and I do.
I do, not because I want to own what the color represents, but because I find it comforting there are people yet who do not identify with something in possession of such sharp dualities.
In Bluets, Nelson's speaker finds a kind of power in blue but this isn't exactly happiness--rather, it is something to recognize in living. Right now, my existence is occupied--supported, even framed--by yellow and sometimes it isn't enough to save me from the moments of doubt and despair that impact all of our lives. But its presence exists and whatever occurs, I know if I see a swatch of it, I can tell what is happening is true.
I thought a power color would make me feel invincible. Instead, it has made me feel real.
With purpose, Eni
Works Referenced
Kahlo, Frida, Barbara Crow De Toledo, and Ricardo Pohlenz. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. Abrams, New York, 1995.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, Seattle, 2009.