July 2008 – Page 4 – hexachromatic

a huge, black pearl

“The insidious beauty of this place! Truly, it seemed to mock him—this
strangeness—this dark pool, surrounded on all sides by those wonderful,
soft, fir trees. And the water itself looking like a huge, black pearl
cast by some mighty hand, in anger possibly, in sport or phantasy
maybe, into the bottom of this valley of dark, green plush—and which
seemed bottomless as he gazed into it. . . .

And again he lowered his head and gazed into the fascinating and yet
treacherous depths of that magnetic, bluish, purple pool, which, as he
continued to gaze, seemed to change its form kaleidoscopically to a
large, crystalline ball. But what was that moving about in this
crystal? A form! It came nearer—clearer—and as it did so, he recognized
Roberta struggling and waving her thin white arms out of the water and
reaching toward him! God! How terrible! The expression on ther face!
What in God’s name was he thinking of anyway? Death! Murder!”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.

though your sins be as scarlet

“‘I bring you, Clyde, the mercy and the salvation of your God. He has
called on me and I have come. He has sent me that I may say unto you
though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white—like snow. Though
they be red, like crimson, they shall be as wool. Come now, let us
reason together with the Lord.’”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.

transparent color

“The relation of light to transparent color is, when you come to look
into it deeply, infinitely fascinating, and when the colors flare up,
merge into one another, arise anew, and vanish, it is like taking
breath in great pauses from one eternity to the next, from the greatest
light down to the solitary and eternal silence in the deepest shades.
The opaque colors, in contrast, are like flowers that do not dare to
compete with the sky. . . . It is is these, however, that are able . .
. to produce such pleasing variations and such natural effects that . .
. ultimately the transparent colors end up as no more than spirits
playing above them and serve only to enhance them.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from the ‘Supplement’ to his Farbenlehre
[Theory of Color], quoted by Walter Benjamin in ‘A Glimpse Into the
World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone;
from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.

the Taoist vision of perfection

“Sitting before his painted book, [the child] makes the Taoist vision
of perfection come true: he overcomes the illusory barrier of the
book’s surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted
partitions to enter a stage on which the fairy tale lives. Hua, the Chinese word for ‘painting’ is much like gua, meaning ‘attach’: you attach five colors to the things. In German, the word used in anlegen:
you ‘lay on’ colors. In such an open color-bedecked world where
everything shifts at every step, the child is allowed to join in the
game. Draped with colors of every hue that he has picked up from
reading and viewing, the child stands in the center of a masquerade and
joins in.”

—Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone; from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.

the ray of colored light

“Just think of the many games that proceed from pure perception to
fantasy: soap bubbles, parlor games, the watery color of the magic
lantern, watercolor painting, decals. In all of these, the color seems
to hover suspended above the things. Their magic lies not in the
colored thing or in the mere dead color, but in the colored glow, the
colored brilliance, the ray of colored light.”