Green and Red

Two suggestions for stream of consciousness colour pieces were made a week or so ago and I have now written them. The rules of these exercises are simple - once you start writing keep going for fifteen  minutes without stopping to edit or revise. After fifteen minutes stop.

I write them longhand in a notebook with a fountain pen and then come back later and type them up. The pic. above/to the right is of the first exercise I tried, Blue, as it came out of my pen. Generally I make no change unless there is something so obvious (like a missing verb) that a tweak is necessary. Otherwise what is written here is exactly what comes out of my head.

Anyway, for what they are worth, and at the request of my small band of readers, here are the two exercises.

GREEN

Green, a colour associated with life, with eyes, with jealousy and envy, and by extension with witchcraft. Where to begin? Perhaps with the Irish Pink Floyd covers band whose "Shine on You Crazy Emerald" never caught on?

      Green: verdancy, spring and lushness. The turning of the year's cycle towards rebirth and new life. It is one of the pleasures of the year when I look out of my kitchen window and see green buds appear on my apple trees. This is partly because I know the blossom will soon exhibit itself and partly because of the pleasures of autumn that they presage. Cooking apples for pies and crumbles and the fabby eaters - Katy and Cox's Orange Red - which explode with flavour in September and October respectively.

     Of course green, too, is the moss which now dominates what was once a back lawn and is seemingly uncontrollable.

     I wonder why 'green eyes' have become associated with envy (as too 'green with envy'); if anything it should be reversed, green eyes having their own character quite distinct from the unpigmented blue or James Bond's cold grey. The association with witchcraft too: green eyes, red hair and a real or vestigial sixth finger being the reputed indicators. Except for the sixth finger this looks like fear of the Celtic to me. My memory stirs to tell me that one of Henry VIII's wives was reputedly so endowed - Anne Boleyn perhaps?

     Oddly, these characteristics were not so determinative as to stop puritans and others condemning so many women with other eye colours to a nasty end, celebrated now in some places by the treatment of their deaths as the basis for a tourist economy: Salem and Pendle I am looking at you.

     Which brings me to another green - sickness, real or metaphorical. This I can understand insofar as I once flew back from Shetland to Edinburgh in a small plane in a storm while in the grips of a relentless hangover. At least wo people afterwards commented that I looked a very odd shade of green for most of that flight, and I believe them unhesitatingly.

RED

Red: the colour of Mars, the warbringer. The colour of rubies and PJ Harvey's ruby red lips. Red, the colour of blood, of danger, of an instruction to stop. Red is the colour of one's hands when caught in the act, a usage which is, I think, of Saxon vintage.

     And yet also the colour of roses, carnations and poppies, freckles of beauty in fields of green and gold, even as they become metaphors for death and violence. The red poppies, row on row, in Flanders' fields.

     This makes red interesting as a bipolar symbol, a symbol of both beauty ('my love is like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June') and violence. This bipolarity has been expertly exploited in popular culture - nowhere more so than in vampire stories and legends. This has been so since the technicolour sanguinity of Ingrid Pitt in Hammer movies to the more baroque creations of Anne Rice and her Byronic undead protagonists - at least one of whom, per my previous exercise, had red hair, green eyes and an extra finger.

     Red hair - a sure sign of a fiery temper and a passionate nature, something my memories of adolescence tacitly, if anecdotally, confirms! Given the geographical/genetic propensity of the red-headed to be in predominantly 'celtic' areas, one wonders what lies behind the tales associated with the red-haired.

     And some of my favourite actresses are red-haired: Pat Tallman of Babylon 5, Karen Gillan of Dr. Who and, fieriest of the lot, Maureen O'Hara, magnificent with Victor McClaggan and John Wayne in 'The Quiet Man'. A corny old tale to be sure but a great one. Was Maureen worth the efforts of the fight scene that seemed to fill most of the second half of the film? You bet.

     Maureen O'Hara as the incarnation of Mars, bringer of war, but also of fiery passion and the impulse that drives us tpwards the Dionysian. The impulse which means it is often better to seek forgiveness than to seek permission. The impulse that says 'No regrets, Coyote'.