The Three Dimensions of the New Silk Soul 一带一路 魂
Maritime Silk Roads
21世纪海上丝绸之路
blue - oceanic - deep - limbic - subconscious
21st Century Space Race
中华人民共和国航天
red - fast - conscious - escape velocity
Continental Silk Road Economic Belt
丝绸之路经济带
grey - everyday - dreamsend - treadmill
27.02.2020. Dear [ ] Have been trying to develop this week a project called Chromabellum 1988 2049, I put together a really rough first video iteration – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VXMPBbJDrA- but trying to parse out and draw on the work of Derek Jarman into a chromatic lineage of Cold War relations between the west (blue) and east (red) that latently still machine the present
am working on another video for now drafted as The Three Dimensions of the New Silk Soul… and working with the below triptych… a blue oceanic limbic liner moving slowly through a blue storm (there is in a sense something deeply meditative, unconscious, slow in the colour blue) … a red long march 5 rocket launching… escape velocity (in red, there’s something fast, conscious)… and a grey rail freight train moving across an empty landscape (a grey as a sort of everyday, a weight between the two dimensions), in a way I’m trying to open up a psychological model, the way Freud had his depth model, or Deleuze/Guattari their three ecologies, that the psyche is a movement vector of colouration which I think ties in with the story we are developing.
They are also the three spaces of the Silk Roads, the maritime ocean roads… cosmic satellite space … the continental land belts.
P.S. The notes below are from Derek Jarman’s Chroma, published shortly after his death in 1994:
Into the Blue
Page 103
Blue light. A spectral light. Leni’s full moon falling through a crystal grotto in the High Dolomites. The villagers draw their curtains against this blue. Blue brings night with it. Once in a blue moon …
The blue men of the High Atlas arc dyed by the indigo sweated from their clothes.
Blue spaces and places. The Blue Nile, and the Blue Grotto. The grotto is lit by light that is refracted through the water from a small opening five feet high into a vast cavern. The ferrymen sing ‘0 Sole Mio’. The silent magic is broken.
Black blue sadness in Gecrtgen’s Nativity at Night. The virgi- nal blue robe which mirrors the blue sky is swallowed by black.
Page 104
The sky blue damselfly, iridescent, flits across the blue lagoon.
The blue Buddha smiles in the realm of joy. Dark blue embroidered with gold.
There are gold flecks in the lapis.
Blue and gold arc eternally united.
They have affinity in eternity.
The Buddha sits on the blue lotus supported by two blue ele- phants.
The blues of Japan. The work clothes, the blue of the roofs of its houses.
The blue work clothes of France. The blue overalls here in England, and the blue Levis that conquered the world.
Royal blue of the garter robes. Deep cobalt blue.
The great master of blue – the French painter Yves Klein. No other painter is commanded by blue, though Cezanne painted more blues than most.
BLUE IS BLUE.
Blue is hotter than yellow.
Blue is cold.
Icy blue.
Cura~ao with ice.
The earth is blue.
The virgin’s mantle is the bright blue sky.
Page 105
This is the living blue. The blue of Divinity.
Blue movies. Blue language. Bluebeard.
‘Blue gives other colours their vibration’, Cezanne. TRUE BLUE.
The first artificial blue was Russian, discovered early in the eighteenth century.
the Lapis Lazuli was given this colour because its jovial power was against Saturn’s black bile.
Colour the little wall maps of the universe you are making. The sapphire colour for the spheres of the world. It would be useful not just to look at it, hut to re- flect on it in the soul. Deep inside your house you might set up a little room and mark it with these figures and colours. (Ficino)
One can know the whole world Without stirring abroad Without looking out of the window One can sec the way of heaven
The further one goes The less one knows.
In the pandemonium of image
I present you with the universal Blue Blue an open door to soul
An infinite possibility
Becoming tangible.
Page 106
Asaao ya Ichivin fukaki Fuchi no ivo.
Ah! The blossoming Morning glory
Deep pool of blue (Yosa Busoi)
For the Japanese, the morning glory is the English rose, or Dutch tulip – deep blue, it blossoms at dawn and fades in the sunlight.
The Japanese slept under blue mosquito nets to give the illu- sion of peace and cool.
Something old, Something new, Something borrowed, Something blue …
I am sitting with some friends in this cafe drinking coffee served by young refugees from Bosnia. The war rages across the newspapers and through the ruined streets of Sarajevo.
Page 107
I step into a blue funk.
The doctor in St Bartholomew’s Hospital thought he could detect lesions in my retina – the pupils dilated with bella- donna – the torch shone into them with a terriblc blinding light.
Look left Look down Look up Look right.
Blue flashes in my eyes.
Blue Bottle Buzzing Lazy days
Page 108
The sky blue butterfly Sways on a cornflower Lost in the warmth
Of the blue heat haze Singing the blues Quiet and slowly
Blue of my heart Blue of my dreams Slow blue love
Of delphinium days.
Blue is the universal love in which man bathes~ it is the ter- restrial paradise.
I’m walking along the beach in a howling gale ~ Another year is passing
In the roaring waters
I hear the voices of dead friends
Love is life that lasts forever.
My heart’s memory turns to you
David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul …
Page 108
Look left
Look down
Look up
Look right.
The camera flash Atomic bright Photos
The CMV ~ a green moon then the world turns magenta.
Page 109
My retina
Is a distant planet
A red Mars
From a Boy’s Own comic With yellow infection Bubbling at the corner.
I said this looks like a planet The doctor says~ ‘Oh, I think It looks like a pizza.’
The worst of the illness is the uncertainty.
I’ve played this scenario back and forth each hour of the day for the last six years.
Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.
I am home with the blinds drawn HB is back from Newcastle
But gone out ~ the washing Machine is roaring away
And the fridge is defrosting These arc his favourite sounds.
I’ve been given the option of being an in-patient at the hos- pital or coming in twice a day to be hooked to a drip. My vision will never come back.
The retina is destroyed, though when the bleeding stops what is left of my sight might improve. l have to come to terms with sightlessness.
If I lose half my sight will my vision be halved?
The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them. At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. ln churches on their knees, running, flying silent or shouting protest.
It started with sweats in the night and swollen glands. Then the black cancers spread across their faces – as they fought for breath TB and pneumonia hammered at the lungs, and Toxo at the brain. Reflexes scrambled – sweat poured through hair matted like lianas in the tropical forest. Voices slurred – and then were lost forever. My pen chased this story across the page tossed this way and that in the storm.
The blood of sensibility is blue.
I consecrate myself
To find its most perfect expression.
My sight failed a little more in the night. HB offers me his blood.
It will kill everything he says.
The drip of DHPG Trills like a canary.
I am accompanied by a shadow into which HB appears and disappears. I have lost the sight on the periphery of my right eye.
I hold out my hands before me and slowly part them. At a certain moment they disappear out of the corner of my eyes. This is how I used to sec. Now if I repeat the motion, this is all I sec.
Page 110
Awareness is heightened by this, but something else is lost. A sense of reality drowned in theatre.
Thinking blind, becoming blind.
I fill this room with the echo of many voices
Who passed time here
Voices unlocked from the blue of the long dried paint The sun comes and floods this empty room
I call it my room
My room has welcomed many summers
Embraced laughter and tears
Can it fill itself with your laughter
Each word a sunbeam
Glancing in the light
This is the song of My Room.
Blue stretches, yawns and is awake.
In the pandemonium of image
I present you with the universal Blue Blue an open door to soul
An infinite possibility
Becoming tangible.
Page 113
If the Doors of Perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.
The dog barks, the caravan passes.
Marco Polo stumbles across the Blue Mountain.
Marco Polo stops and sits on a lapis throne by the River Oxus while he is ministered to by the descendants of Alex- ander the Great. The caravan approaches, blue canvasses fluttering in the wind. Blue people from over the seas – ultramarine- have come to collect the lapis with its flecks of gold.
The road to the city of Aqua Vitae is protected by a laby- rinth built from crystals and mirrors which in the sunlight cause terrible blindness. The mirrors reflect each of your betrayals, magnify them and drive you into madness.
Blue walks into the labyrinth. Absolute silence is demanded of all its visitors, so their presence does not disturb the poets who are directing the excavations. Digging can only proceed on the calmest of days as rain and wind destroy the finds.
The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been undertaken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which cast everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.
Page 114
My sight seems to have closed in. The hospital is even quieter this morning. Hushed. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart- a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is death in the air here but we’re not talking about it. But I know the silence might be broken by distraught visitors screaming, ‘Help Sister! Help Nurse!’ followed by the sound of feet rush- ing along the corridor. Then silence.
Blue protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it
Blue is darkness made visible
Page 115
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.
The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your educa- tion, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psycho- logical world.
I have walked behind the sky. For what are you seeking? The fathomless blue of Bliss.
To be an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable house that imprisons you with reassurance. Remember, to be going and to have arc not eternal – fight the fear that en- genders the beginning, the middle and the end.
For Blue there arc no boundaries or solutions.
Page 121
All the old taboos of
Blood lines and blood banks Blue blood and bad blood Our blood and your blot)d
I sit here -you sit there.
As I slept a jet slammed into a tower block. The jet was almost empty but two hundred people were fried in their sleep.
The earth is dying and we do not notice it.
Ages and Aeons quit the room
Exploding into timelessness
No entrances or exits now
No need for obituaries or final judgments We knew that time would end
After tomorrow at sunrise
We scrubbed the floors
And did the washing up
It would not catch us unawares.
The white flashes you are experiencing in your eyes arc com- mon when the retina is damaged.
The damaged retina has started to peel away leaving in- numerable black floaters, like a flock of starlings swirling around in the twilight.
This is a hard wait. The shattering bright light of the eye spe- cialist’s camera leaves the empty sky-blue after-image. Did I really see green the first time? The after-image dissolves in a second. As the photographs progress, colours change to pink and the light turns to orange. The process is a torture, but the result, stable eyesight, worth the price and the twelve pills I have to take a day. Sometimes looking at them I feel nauseous and want to skip them. It must be my asso- ciation with HB, lover of the computer and king of the key- board that brought my luck on the computer which chose my name for this drug trial. I nearly forgot as I left St Mary’s I smiled at Jean Cocteau. He gave a sweet smile back.
Pearl fishers
In azure seas
Deep waters
Washing the isle of the dead In coral harbours
Amphora Spill
Gold
Across the still seabed
We lie there
Fanned by the billowing
Sails of forgotten ships
Tossed by the mournful winds Of the deep
Lost boys
Sleep forever
In a deep embrace
Salt lips touching
In submarine gardens
Cool marble fingers
Touch an antique smile
Shell sounds
Whisper
Deep love drifting on the tide forever The smell of him
Dead good looking
In beauty’s summer His blue jeans
Around his ankles Bliss in my ghostly eye Kiss me
On the lips
On the eyes
Our name will be forgotten
In time
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble.
Page 113
If the Doors of Perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.
The dog barks, the caravan passes.
Marco Polo stumbles across the Blue Mountain.
Marco Polo stops and sits on a lapis throne by the River Oxus while he is ministered to by the descendants of Alex- ander the Great. The caravan approaches, blue canvasses fluttering in the wind. Blue people from over the seas – ultramarine- have come to collect the lapis with its flecks of gold.
The road to the city of Aqua Vitae is protected by a laby- rinth built from crystals and mirrors which in the sunlight cause terrible blindness. The mirrors reflect each of your betrayals, magnify them and drive you into madness.
Blue walks into the labyrinth. Absolute silence is demanded of all its visitors, so their presence does not disturb the poets who are directing the excavations. Digging can only proceed on the calmest of days as rain and wind destroy the finds.
The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been undertaken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which cast everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.
Page 114
My sight seems to have closed in. The hospital is even quieter this morning. Hushed. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart- a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is death in the air here but we’re not talking about it. But I know the silence might be broken by distraught visitors screaming, ‘Help Sister! Help Nurse!’ followed by the sound of feet rush- ing along the corridor. Then silence.
Blue protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it
Blue is darkness made visible
Page 115
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.
The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your educa- tion, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psycho- logical world.
I have walked behind the sky. For what are you seeking? The fathomless blue of Bliss.
To be an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable house that imprisons you with reassurance. Remember, to be going and to have arc not eternal – fight the fear that en- genders the beginning, the middle and the end.
For Blue there arc no boundaries or solutions.
How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky- some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they sec Death with the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black, growing dark in the absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?
Page 116
David ran home panicked on the train from Waterloo, brought back exhausted and unconscious to die that night. Terry who mumbled incoherently into his incontinent tears. Others faded like flowers cut by the scythe of the Blue Bearded Reaper, parched as the waters of life receded. Howard turned slowly to stone, petrified day by day, his mind imprisoned in a concrete fortress until all we could hear were his groans on the telephone circling the globe.
Page 116
The drip ticks out the seconds, the source of a stream along which the minutes flow, to join the river of hours, the sea of years and the timeless ocean.
The side effects of DHPG, the drug for which I have to come into hospital to be dripped twice a day, are: low white blood cell count, increased risk of infection, low platelet count which may increase the risk of bleeding, low red blood cell count (anaemia), fever, rash, abnormal liver function, chills, swelling of the body (oedema), infections, malaise, irregular heart beat, high blood pressure (hypertension), low blood pressure (hypotension), abnormal thoughts or dreams, loss of balance (ataxia), coma, confusion, dizziness, headache, nervousness, damage to nerves (paraesthesia), psychosis, sleepiness (somnolence), shaking, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite (anorexia), diarrhoea, bleeding from the stomach or intestine (intestinal haemorrhage), abdominal pain, in- creased number of one type of white blood cell, low blood sugar, shortness of breath, hair loss (alopecia), itching (prur- itus), hives, blood in the urine, abnormal kidney function, increased blood urea, redness (inflammation), pain or irrita- tion (phlebitis).
Page 117
The darkness comes in with the tide
The year slips on the calendar Your kiss flares
A match struck in the night Flares and dies
My slumber broken Kiss me again
Kiss me
Kiss me again
And again Never enough Greedy lips Speedwell eyes Blue skies.
My eyes sting from the drops The infection has halted
The flash leaves
Scarlet after-images
Of the blood vessels in my eye.
Teeth chattering February Cold as death
Pushes at the bedsheets An aching cold Interminable as marble My mind
Frosted with drugs ices up
A drift of empty snowflakes
Whiting out memory
Cross-eyed meddlesome consciousness A blinkered twister
Circling in spirals
Shall I? Will I?
Doodling death watch
Mind how you go.
On Seeing Red.
page 31
A red eye test. The eyes are most sensitive to red. My eyes were tested in St Bartholomew’s by Peter this morning. I had to look him in the eyes while he moved a red-tipped pen into my field of vision. At a certain point, the grey flashed to a bright red. As bright as traffic light.
Red. Prime colour. Red of my childhood. Blue and green were always there in the sky and woodland unnoticed. Red first shouted at me from a bed of pelargoniums in the court- yard of Villa Zuassa. I was four. This red had no boundary, was not contained. These red flowers stretched to the horizon.
Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum.
Red adapts the eye for the dark. Infra-red.
Red which is the consequence of a powerful impression of light may last for some hours (Goethe)
page 32
If you look the light of the world in the eyes, creation turns scarlet.
In the hospital they drop stinging belladonna in the eyes to open the pupils, and then take photos by flashlight. Is this that moment in Hiroshima? Did I live to tell the tale? For a fraction of a second there is a sky blue circle, and then the world reassembles itself in magenta.
I am sitting here writing this in a bright red T-shirt from Marks and Spencer. I shut my eyes. In the dark, I can remember the red, but I cannot see it.
Page 33 – Red is rare in the landscape. It gains its strength through its absence. Momentarily, in an ecstatic sunset, the great globe of the sun sinking below the horizon … then it’s gone. I’ve never seen the legendary green flash. Remember, great sun- sets are the consequences of violence and cataclysm, Krakatoa and Popocatepetl.
I blink, there’s Red Riding Hood in the dark forest. A bright red cloak in the gathering gloom. The red-eyed wolf licks its scarlet chops.
Page 34
In the 1960s, Mary Quant betrayed red with a blue lipstick which brought the shadow of death to many a lip. Red has its place. Lips arc ruby. Blue lips make me shudder. Colour has its boundaries, though we are pushing at them. Imagine a blue geranium. They are imagining a blue rose- which will he a contradiction until the end of time. He bought me a dozen blue roses to declare his love! One cannot bring a message of love in the blues …
The Red Sea heals, crossing it causes a transformation, a baptism. The exodus from Egypt was a flight from sin. The Red Sea brings death to those who are unconscious, but those who reach the other side are reborn in the desert.
Page 35
The first stop the rock of Gibraltar, then across the Mediter- ranean and the skies turned blue. Port Said, conjurers and miracle-working gully-gully men, elaborate gifts from Simon Artz. Down the canal to the Bitter Lakes, on our left, Arabia Felix, home of the Phoenix. The ancient Egyptians regarded the sea as untrustworthy, the home of the dark god Set, Typhon, a place of storms. We sailed one evening into the Red Sea, in a calm sunset, flushed pink and red. I took a silver ball off the Christmas tree and tied it to a cotton reel, lowering it into the wake of the ship where it sparkled across the waves, red sails in the sunset.
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morn- ing, shepherd’s warning.
Red, Red, Red. The daughter of aggression, mother of all colours. Extreme red, the colour of brigades and flags, marching Red, Red on the borders and fringes of our lives. I saw that when I lost my innocent eye. Red f11lcd the intervals between the musical notes, was a rousing anthem, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘The Internationalc’.
I did not paint the town red until I was in my twenties. Then I lost myself; as you went to bed, I took off to the Red Light district of Soho. Our queer world was imprisoned in shadows. Not the shop windows in Amsterdam or Hamburg where the girls flaunted themselves in the red light. Red Hot Mammas! Scarlet Women! In our world the flashing red light warned us that there was a police raid.
Page 36
Vermilion is a red with a feeling of sharpness, like glowing steel which can be cooled by water. Vermilion is quenched by blue, for it can support no mixture with a cold colour. The glow of red is within itself. For this reason it is a colour more beloved than yellow.
(Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art)
Page 37
Red is a moment in time. Blue constant. Red is quickly spent. An explosion of intensity. It hums itself. Disappears like fiery sparks into the gathering shadow. To warm our- selves in the long dark winter when the red has departed. We welcome the robin redbreast, and the red berries that sustain life. Dress in the Coca Cola red of Father Christmas, the bringer of gifts. We sit around the table and sing ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’. ‘The holly hears a berry as bright as any blood.’ Our winter faces arc dyed a cheerful red. We preserve the red like a flame. Life is red. Red is for the living, but the scarlet berry of the yew poisons, keeps the devils at bay in the churchyard.
Red memory. The first Adam formed by God from the red soil was a red man. Was it the dark red soil of the Nile flood that gave its name to Egypt, the land of Khem? The Arabs gave us the word al-kimiya, out of which grew our scientific chemistry. Lost in the scientific labyrinth we pray for Ariadne to rescue us with a red thread.
Four stages are distinguished in alchemy: MELANOSIS (blackening), LEUCOSIS (whitening), XANTHOSIS (yellowing) and IOSIS (reddening).
Page 38
It is in these colours that the modern pharmaceutical in- dustry was born. The great dye factories experimenting in scientific and artificial colour in the nineteenth century. The invention of mapsychlveine, aniline, fuchsin, the red dyes, were the foundations of Bayer and Ciba, and many other multina- tionals. Colour was turned into explosives. The fiery orange of nitre. Not only were they making explosives but they were also making drugs. The pills you swallow came from the dyers’ works. In antiquity, colour (chroma) was considered a drug (pharmakon ). Colour therapy.
Red may have been purple in antiquity, as the Greeks had a very different conception of colour to ours. For instance they had no word for true blue. Was Clytcmnestra’s carpet purple, or was it crimson? Was the imperial purple, in fact, red? Let us believe that Clytcmnestra wove a crimson carpet for Agamemnon – blood red with a touch of blue in the blood. When he stepped on this first red carpet he com- mitted the sin of hubris, and was murdered. Red carpets lead to assassination. Revolutions die in their own red. Have you ever stepped on a red carpet? Felt the pomp and circum- stance? Before it was pulled from under your feet? Red betrays.
Red Spots and Planets.
Red is the colour of Mars. The bloody god who rides into battle on a red lion. It is his red that Saint George carries on his cross. The red cross of the Crusaders who carry their heraldic banners in Gules and bloody Sanguine. Back home they picked the red rose of Lancaster and fought the white rose. Red Russia, white Russia? The red one, the winners in a lost battle.
We put on Red Coats, and died in red hospital blankets, concealing terrible wounds. But Mars is put to f1ight by that other red, the Red Cross. The red Christ of sacrifice. The son who is the red of the Trinity. The blood of whose sacri- fice burns in a thousand red votive lights in the gloom of churches.
Each victory of the red cells brings death … for the virus is red. This dance of death. Red plague cross. Red as a scarlet fever- the smallpox. Red has always embraced the hospital. The tenth-century physician, Avicenna, dressed his patients in red clothes. Red wool tied about the neck protected. Like for like. Colour could cure. Red moved the blood. Avicenna made medicine from red flowers. If one gazed intently at red the blood would flow. This is why you should never let a per- son with a nose bleed sec red. Cclsus plastered wounds with brightly coloured plasters; of the red plasters he writes: ‘There is one plaster almost of a red colour which brings wounds very quickly to cicatrise.’ Edward had a room en- tirely decorated in red, to ward off the scarlet fever. Red Stop Red Stop Red Stop Red …
I’m coming back from the blast furnace of St Anthony’s fire, an eczema which turned me red. Violent red soreness. l turned almost purple. My skin no longer welcomed the world, but shut it out. I was in the solitary confinement of the senses. For two months I could not read or write. Work stopp~d on this book. The red eczema spreads across my face. Where have you been on holiday?’ passers-by asked. A short stay in hell.
Page 40
Nature, the unnatural Red in tooth and claw Out to destroy me.
In the good old days you went mad.
I’ve kissed the scarlet lips of insanity And sent him on his way.
Of the medieval humours, choler (anger) was hot-blooded and red: colour shews blood, but fiery, flaming, burning hot, shew choller, which by reason of its suit-ability, and aptness to mix with others, doth cause diverse colours more: for if it he mixed with blood, and blood he most predominant, it makes a florid red (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy)
Page 40
Red with anger, they proclaimed the Revolution. Red Phry- gian caps thrown high. The scarlet neckerchiefs of Gari- baldi. ‘Libertc! Fratemite! Egalite!’ Viva la Iiberta! Blood the guillotine and old women knitting scarlet. Social red.
Liverpool. Early 1980s. I join the march. V. (REDgrave) says, ‘Derek, you carry a red flag.’ There are fifty of us. The ghostly galleon of revolution past. We march through the deserted and derelict city with the sound of the wind whip- ping through the flags, a rosy galleon on the high sea of hope. The sunlight dyeing us red. Shipwrecked on the last coral-reef of optimism. Someone says to me, ‘The red of the square is beautiful. The root of the red is life itself.’
As we march, the red-necked gentlemen of England, in hunting red, are sweating away their Saturday afternoon chasing the red fox. But our eyes are focused on Lenin’s tomb. The tomb of the Revolution. Its proportions as fine as the Parthenon, in red granite. High above it on the Kremlin a great red flag flutters, even on days without a breath of wind, as the flagpole hides a wind machine to keep the flag flying. Someone else says, ‘The Spartan army was dressed in red wool, with red-leather shoes. This is an old march.’
RED CARDINALS BETRAY …
We came to alter the world, not join it, Curse all assimilationists,
Burn the blue out of Britain,
Curse ALL closeted queers,
Throttle government with red tape,
Curse ALL theatre queens,
Set the red devils free in the palace,
Curse ALL those who dance the night away, And do nothing but sleep through the daylight.
Drive the banks into the red.
Proclaim hell on Earth!
Throw red bricks through grey windows. Scorch Heaven,
Celebrate your Red Letter Days …
Page 42
I wrote this hook in an absence of time. If I have overlooked something you hold precious- write it in the margin. I write all over my books, as markers fall out. I had to write quickly as my right eye was put out in August by the ‘sight oh! mcgalo virus’ … and then it was a run-in with the dark. And dark always comes after light. I wrote the red on a hos- pital drip, and dedicate it to the doctors and nurses at Bart’s. Most of it was written at four in the morning, scrawled almost incoherently in the dark until sleep blissfully over- took me. I know that my colours are not yours. Two colours
arc never the same, even if they’re from the same tube. Con- text changes the way we perceive them. I’ve usually used one word to describe a colour, so red remains red with lapses into vermilion or carmine. I’ve placed no colour photos in this book, as that would he a futile attempt to imprison them. How could I be certain that the shade I wanted could be reproduced by the printer? I prefer that the colours should float and take flight in your minds.
Dcrck.
P.S. To be red is to have a colour, not a look. Of course an object may look red for a while, like the Parthenon in the dying rays of the sun.
Grey Matter.
Page 112
Lightning flickers through the hospital window – at the door an elderly woman stands waiting for the rain to clear. I ask her if I can give her a lift, I’ve hailed a taxi. ‘Can you take me to Holborn tube?’ On the way she breaks down in tears. She has come from Edinburgh. Her son is in the ward- he has meningitis and has lost the use of his legs – I’m helpless as the tears flow. I can’t see her. Just the sound of her sobbing.
page 6
Grey was the colour of the Slade. Sir William wore grey suits. My tutor, Maurice Field, who had iron-grey hair, wore an iron-grey laboratory coat. Squinting at me through his gold-primmer spectacles he said, ‘I know nothing about modern colour – but we could talk of Bonnard.’ So we talked of Bonnard. And he said hardly a word about my work. Maurice had taught all the other tutors to paint even slower. But we were a generation in a hurry. After all, The Bomb was expected to drop at any moment. So the Slade style, after the model, with little flat, grey areas and pink crosses to show you had measured her up with a pencil held at arm’s length, painting the paraphernalia of painting, held little interest for me. At school I’d left the Post-Impressionists behind, had dabbled like a child in a sweetshop in Cubism, Suprematism, Surrealism, Dada (which, I noted, wasn’t an ‘…ism’) and finally in Tachism and Action painting.
page 11
If you spin a colour wheel fast enough it turns white, but if you mix the pigments, however much you try, you will only get a dirty grey.
‘That all the colours mixed together produce white, is an absurdity which people have credulously been accustomed to repeat for a century, in opposition to the evidence of their senses.’ (Johann von Goethe, Theory of Colour)
page 15
In 1942, I was born in Albion, a little white middle class-boy, behind the great white cliffs of Dover, which defended us against the black-hearted enemy. As I was christened, the white knights fought an aerial battle through the cumulonimbus clouds above Kent. At four, my mother took me to see the sights – the great White Tower of London, no longer lime washed but grey and sooty. Whitehall, where the Houses of Parliament were even blacker. I learnt quickly that power was white, even our American cousins had their own White House, built like the imperial monuments of antiquity in marble.
page 19
Passing through the Great Salt Lakes of Utah on the Greyhound bus. Shimmering white salt stretched to each horizon, blinding the eyes.
Page 4
If I say a piece of paper is pure white, and it’s now placed next to snow, and it then appeared grey. I would still be calling it white and not light grey (Wittgenstein, op. cit.)
Where in red is the true red? Th which all other reds aspire? .
Grey Matter
Page 51
We’re starved of technicolour up here …
‘Grey is void of resonance,’ says Kandinsky, ‘an inconsol- able immobility.’
He sat in the wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at the elbow. (Wilfred Owcn, Disabled)
The achromatic grey scale shunts from black to white, the greys measured in the light they reflect.
‘The shadows of black cast on white.’
Ostwald invented the grey scale at the turn of the century.
The detuned television flickers grey, waiting to be flooded with colour, waiting for the image. Grey has no image, is a shrinking violet, shy and indecisive, caught in the shadows almost unnoticed. You can travel from it to black or white. Neutral, it doesn’t shout its presence. Unlike red, which creates noise on video, this detuncd grey is a source of light, contradicting Wittgcnstcin’s remark that ‘Whatever looks luminous does not look grey’.
Page 52
Grey were the dismal rain-sodden days of my childhood. The depressions following, one after another, like a goods train to dump the misty waters of the Atlantic on my holi- days. Rain rattling on the grey roof of the Nissen hut, ennui and boredom, I stared out of the window waiting for the sun.
To what degree the cloudy sky of northern climates may have gradually banished colour, may also admit of explanation. (Goethe)
Page 53
The clothes of my schooldays were grey, grey flannel shirts and suits. In the 1950s everyone wore grey, the purples and reds of the Coronation were enchanting – hut we saw them in grey on our televisions. Everything had its place in a world ruled by grey, the porter at the station doffed his cap and said to the little grey schoolboy, ‘Good morning, sir.’ This grey would he dispelled in the 1960s hy youth fashions, spawned from Cccil Gee’s tomato and sky-blue drape jackets, worn with defiance by Tcds.
Ash grey. Potash made the fine glaze for the pots we fired in the old brick kiln. Grey took on the colours of the spectrum … greenish, reddish glazes.
In the 1960s, all colour was swallowed in the Gatterdiimmc- rung of Pasolini’s Pig Sty in which a naked business man, stripped of his respectability and his grey suit, runs through the desolate purgatorial volcanic ash. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Lost in emptiness, all dreams and ambitions founder. Incarcerated in the dead lead coffin of illusion. The dream ends in grey. Dull, clouded, depressing, dismal grey. Penitential, sackcloth and ashes.
Grey surrounds us and we ignore it. The roads on which we journey arc grey ribbons dissecting fields of colour. In the distance, the towers and spires of medieval churches and cathedrals, with their lead grey roofs, loom over village and town. Lichficld, the field of corpses. If they had colour it long since washed away. In the High Street banks, money is handled by little grey men, trustworthy in their uniformity, who put an ideal before self. Unthinking grey. The guard-ians of a grey area. Grey in their state of mind.
Page 54
Present politics.
In grey days of spring
The colours sing in my garden Grey days cool with mists.
At the edge of the horizon, behind the grey bulk of the nuclear power station, lies the grey area of secrecy. Home of the colourless atom, but grey in the mind’s eye. The corner- stone of the half-truth on which governments huild their defence, atomic half-truths which we live here. Nuclear Electric monitor the radiation. 0.05 milli-sievcrts per hour in my kitchen. Though nothing is said ahout the gamma rays from the inadequately protected Magnox A, running past its sell-hy date which was in the last decade. No one will give you any answers unless you kick them in the shins. The Berlin Wall may have been demolished, hut it still runs through our institutions. I’m told I’m living on the fringes of society, hut what if the world was awry?
I spent an afternoon in a silver grey wood, a dead wood on the hanks of the Mississippi. Its lunar atmosphere a pre- monition. Nature morte. Lunatic. What colour is the hole in the ozone layer? A grey area?
Wondrous this masonry wasted by Fate! Giant-built battlements shattered and broken! The roofs arc in ruin, the towers are wrecked, The frost-covered bastions battered and fallen. Rime whitens mortar; the cracking walls
Have sagged and toppled, weakened by Time. The clasp of earth and clutch of the grave
Grip the proud builders, long perished and gone, While a hundred generations have run.
(Anon. Trans. C W Kennedy, Old English Poetry) Can I think of grey writers? Possibly Beckett. Certainly
Old grey heard, Leonardo. Grey matter.
As I write, the little steam train of the Romncy, Hythc and Dymchurch Railway rattles past, sending out plumes of grey smoke. The smell of fire and hot ash drifts across the land- scape. The scent of my childhood, waiting for the train to take me hack to school from Waterloo.
And we end in deathly grey.
Grey is the sad world
Into which the colours fall Like inspiration
Sparkle and are overwhelmed Grey is the tomb, a fortress From which none return.
Page 80
Before the roads were asphalt grey, still dirt tracks, the dun- coloured earth turned to mud in the winter, and in summer to dust. Travelling was a filthy business. Perhaps that is why country coats were brown and city coats were black. I once heard a hundred-year-old man asked what the greatest change had been in his lifetime. He might have answered flight, television or radio, hut he said it was the tarring of the roads. You can’t imagine what it was like travelling before they were mctallcd.
Page 85
We walk through the galleries XXI and XXII, the roman numerals heavy above the doors until we reach an afterthought in some converted storage room with the white paint already grey with the neglect the English keep for the twentieth century. Here there is a poor little Gilman of a sad little lady drinking PG Tips in the greys of Camden Town. There arc no Stanlcy Spencers and no trace of one of his nude self-portraits; after all the police raid book shops and theatres and we don’t want them in a gallery. There is a yellow and green Suther- land of a tortured tree root that looks like a little detail blown up from The Hareling shepherd, a Piper of a Suffolk church tower splodged and blodgcd.
Page 87
At the foot of the manger the Madonna’s blue robe has turned the inky black of night; the sky is the same colour seen through the door of the byre. On a distant hill, the shepherds’ barely discernible shadows are minding a flock of gun-metal grey sheep. Above them, the angel Gahriel hovers in angelic and spectral white. While, down below, the ox and ass, almost unnoticeable in the shadows, worship the child. Gecrtgen conveys the colour of night with a brilliance I have not seen in any other painting~ this is not possible in a photo, and might just be possible in film, though it would cost a fortune in lights to achieve the effect.
The night in Hampstead is this colour. The trees turn inky. The moon glows white like the angel. The grasses arc a spec- tral brown. The silver birches chalky-white, and every form is dissolved in shadows.
Page 122
The white flashes you arc experiencing in your eyes arc com- mon when the retina is damaged.
The damaged retina has started to peel away leaving in- numerable black floaters, like a flock of starlings swirling around in the twilight.
I am back at St Mary’s to have my eyes looked at by the specialist. The place is the same, but there is new staff. How relieved I am not to have the operation this morning to have atapputinmychest.I must try to cheer up HB as he has had a hell of a fortnight. In the waiting room a little grey man over the way is fretting as he has to get to Sussex. He says, ‘I am going blind, I cannot read any longer.’ A little later he picks up a newspaper, struggles with it for a moment and throws it back on the table. My stinging eye drops have stopped me reading, so I write this in a haze of belladonna.
The little grey man’s face has fallen into tragedy. He looks like Jean Cocteau without the poet’s refined arrogance. The room is full of men and women squinting into the dark in dif- ferent states of illness. Some barely able to walk, distress and anger on every face and then a terrible resignation.
Jean Cocteau takes off his glasses, he looks about him with an undescribable meanness. He has black slip-on shoes, blue socks, grey trousers, a Fairisle sweater and a herringbone jacket. The posters that plaster the walls above him have endless question marks, HIV/AIDS?, AIDS?, HIV?, ARE YOU AFFECTED BY HIV/AIDS?, AIDS?, ARC?, HIV? This is a hard wait. The shattering bright light of the eye spe- cialist’s camera leaves the empty sky-blue after-image. Did I really see green the first time? The after-image dissolves in a second. As the photographs progress, colours change to pink and the light turns to orange. The process is a torture, but the result, stable eyesight, worth the price and the twelve pills I have to take a day. Sometimes looking at them I feel nauseous and want to skip them. It must be my asso- ciation with HB, lover of the computer and king of the key- board that brought my luck on the computer which chose my name for this drug trial. I nearly forgot as I left St Mary’s I smiled at Jean Cocteau. He gave a sweet smile back.
Page 145
Iridescence brings hack childhood, shifting like a kaleido- scope.
The sad eyed chameleon volcano grey
sits on his rock
on a thundery day
grey is his coat
and grey is his heart grey-eyed chameleon in deep grey thought.
A rainbow appeared in a sudden squall and big fat rain drops started to fall.
Oh rainbow colour please wash away the grey in my life the grey of the day.’
Squall heard this wish and there and then blew him away
to the rainbow’s end where on the ground lay a lustrous shell rainbow bright Mother of Pearl. Opaline pearl moonstone bright petrol on puddles and shimmering bubbles Mother of Pearl is my delight.