I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t know how to feel like a colour. I don’t know what colours feel like. I mean, I know what they’re supposed to feel like, or at least what they ought to make you feel. I’ve studied colour theory—the usual set of primary colours, complementary colours, and the more touchy-feely categories of warm colours, cool colours, alarming colours, soothing colours, angry colours, sad colours. But I don’t remember ever realising in a moment that a particular colour is making me feel a certain way.
Hell, I don’t even remember ever having a favourite colour. But everyone seemed to have one, so anytime I was asked I’d come up with something, just so they don’t think I feel nothing in my hollow tin chest. I actually used to think black looks pretty good, but there’s always this one pedant in every group who’d pipe up to say, “Oh! But did you know black isn’t even a colour!” Yeah, I know, but can I not still like how it looks, what’s your damn problem? I sometimes imagine it would be fun to slowly increase the level of nuance in my colour connoissing (or whatever it is connoisseurs do). Why give simple answers like red and orange and blue, when you can give the fun and far more pretentious answers like, “I love that shade of turquoise you only find at a Maldivian waterfront” (who doesn’t?) or “the exact tint of pale pink that appears only once in 237 years when an orchid and daisy mate” (are orchids or daisies pink? I don’t know) or “that exact shade of crimson that Superman’s underpants are made of”(if Steve Rogers is the proud owner of America’s ass, surely this is undoubtedly America’s crotch. Freedom! Honour! Cheeseburgers!). Wait, what?
But maybe colours have always impacted me and I’ve just never noticed. Maybe I’ve been all too happy to take the entire blame or credit for my mood each day. Has my life been a lie? Come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t the best day of my life, maybe it was that dude with a pastel shirt who happened to walk past me. Or that time I sat at the beach bawling at the moon, was it just a case of the blues?
Whatever it is, I’m starting to realise it’s something I haven’t paid nearly enough attention to. And this is despite having come across some people who think in colours in incredible ways.
When I was in architecture school, I found people who would come up with the most outrageous colour schemes. Surely brown and neon green do not a combo make. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But not them. They’d learn the rules, and then break them, and make new ones along the way. It’s how I imagine you master anything. Somehow I could never do that (I think it’s a good thing I’m not a architect now).
One of my musician friends introduced me to a pianist who saw music as colours. Apparently it’s called Chromesthesia (sounds like a version of Google Chrome that forgets everything you do on it. Ah, if only Google had something to remind it to not be evil, maybe a neat little catchphrase). It’s a somewhat rare ability to visualise sounds as colours. Each note would appear to him, each tune would paint a little pattern in the air, one that only he could see. Sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? It reminds me of a song Pocahontas sings, “Can you sing with all the voices of the mountain, can you paint with all the colours of the wind?”
I’ve often wished I could do what they seem to do so effortlessly. But I think it’s something you’re either born with or not. But maybe I’m wrong, someone once told me I think too much in absolutes. “In black and white” was the exact phrase. And I think maybe that’s the problem.
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