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Notes from Below Sea Level
“On Yellow Leaves and Butterweed”
Years ago—in the mid-80s—I was gifted a first edition of The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, considered one of the first books consisting mostly of horror, supernatural, poems, and romance spread out among an assortment of nine stories. The title is taken from the name of a play mentioned in the stories and yellow is something of a motif through the book. The fact of it being yellow, I don’t know. But I pulled the volume this morning for no reason but I was reminded of it by its title from reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 last night.” The one that begins, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs which shake against the cold.” A poem about growing old and still being loved; a poem about loving something you know will be lost at some point in the future.
For me, the color of yellow represents memory. The pale, desiccated yellow of a leaf in the fall, the lush, moist yellow of the ubiquitous Butterweed that pushes up in legions along the bayous here in early spring, the amber yellow of a poised young woman in a photograph of my father’s great grandparents. We may not think about colors much—in their purest forms—but they are what define our realities in a way.
The friend who gifted me the volume of horror is an artist in his own right, and once explained to me the difficulty of working with yellow. The lightest hue in our spectrum, it can be the trickiest color to use. Working wet on wet, it becomes dirty; any contact with red will result in an undistinguished brown; a touch of blue gives you green. So translucent it has trouble at times covering painted white canvases. Despite its challenges, it remains a historically important color in the arts. Oscar Wilde, In “Symphony in Yellow,” takes us on yellow’s cycle throughout the year in three short verses, while Emily Dickinson observes
Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,—
Prodigal of blue ...
In an article by Kelly Grovier there is an explanation about one particular shade of yellow that was “created by a process that allegedly restricted cows to a diet of mango leaves, leaving them in a state of near starvation.” A while back, I wrote here about Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette; and in that book she discusses a particular yellow made from saffron and famously used by Cleopatra to seduce her lovers. Yellow—like many of the basic colors—carries a multi-layered and often conflicting history. A history synchronized with our own.
Yellow is one of the oldest pigments known to man (ocher and the mineral orpiment) dating back to the early Egyptians. For the Greeks, yellow signified divine wisdom—the sun god Helios wore a robe of yellow and rode a golden chariot—and hope and happiness. From the Old English “geolu,” for us English speakers yellow is more associated with cowardice (yellow-bellied) and maybe caution (yellow lights and caution tape). In the Christian Old Testament, yellow is most often associated with God’s word and purification; in Islam, the color symbolizes wisdom; and for Sikhs and Buddhist, the color (from saffron and sometimes tending toward orange) is partly associated with selflessness and sacrifice. For me, yellow is forever associated with the color of the leaves announcing the arrival of fall.
One of my earliest posts on this site was an overly-pedantic (yeah, even for me) essay on the yellow used in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and the meanings behind the depiction of chicken feet in that painting. I even edited that essay multiple times and used it once in a writing class a couple years back, learning one important lesson: my obsessions aren’t necessarily mainstream or universal and the term “chicken feet” just doesn’t travel well outside this Louisiana bayou town and certain Caribbean islands.
In art, though, yellow is a facile shade despite its inherent difficulties. Spiritual in nature for JMW Turner, uplifting but troubling for Van Gogh, it’s also a dominant presence in Andres Serrano’s Cibachrome print Piss Christ. Paul Gauguin (who spent some time in Van Gogh’s Yellow House in Arles, France) painted The Yellow Christ; Van Gogh added to the spectral canon during his self-proclaimed “Yellow Period” (1886-1890) with depictions of the sunflowers and wheat fields of Provence. In more modern times, Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian used yellow as a sort of connective tissue of primary colors. Rothko’s Orange and Yellow presents a gateway to brightness, while Mondrian’s Composition No. II with yellow, red and blue frees up yellow from its weighted history and gave us a new scale to measure its purpose. Contemporary art has taken yellow in yet another direction (or perhaps back to ancient roots)—that of a life force and continuity. Wolfgang Laib, who often uses pollen as one of his sculptured materials in this art, “constructs simple but potent monuments to being and the nothingness that forever brackets it.”
Yellow—it is a complicated color. For me, like I said, the color of memory.
All the while, this morning, a yellow cat has come and gone multiple times from my house, looking for food and attention, providing the distraction that marks the abrupt transitions in this writing today. The yellow of regret, of loss, of goodbyes brings to mind a heartbreaking poem by the (recently deceased) Irishman Matthew Sweeney that was first on my mind when I sat to write about a hue.
Five Yellow Roses
What stopped her bawling was the doorbell
ringing, and a man standing there with five
yellow roses, bulked up with green fronds
and tied in a dinky knot with olive twine.
There was no card to say who the flowers
came from. The man’s uniform was blue
with a brown insignia of a spider on his right
top pocket that she saw he kept unbuttoned.
As he waltzed down the path to the gate
the Siamese cat that frequented the garden
raised its back and hissed. The man laughed
and flounced out to his waiting white van.
Oh, the shit-faced side streets of life! OK,
she’d been born in Madras, in a flowery tea shop
while an albino conjurer magicked a hare
to leap from his heavily-ringed brown fingers.
Five yellow roses? Enough to encourage her
to cook saffron rice, with turmeric-tinged prawns
and sautéed yellow courgettes. She didn’t play
the Ry Cooder where yellow roses say goodbye.
(August 2018 — April 2024)
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My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?