MUSINGS ON COLOR

when the noirs traveled to l.a. to visit christophe, esme had a conversation with ms. m. (christophe’s girlfriend) that has stayed with her for weeks.  in many ways, ms. m. is very different from esme:  she is tall, blue-eyed, straight-haired, and has really long legs!   however, in other ways, they could be soul-mates:  ms. m. READS (she even has a blog about books), she is a musician, and best of all, esme has discovered that she has been a MUSER from a young age.

we were discussing possible wall-colors for christophe’s place.  ms. m. recalled that when she was a child she loved to play with the paint chips that her father collected as part of his work re-modeling houses.  it was with a tad of embarrassment that she related a fantasy she’d had as a youngster:  she imagined that when she grew up she would invent a new color.  not a new shade, not a new tone, but a color entirely new and outside of the color spectrum we see as defining colors.  as though, like some animals, we could see in only black and white, and all of a sudden we saw….blue!

which lead us to musing about why we see the colors we see.  and what would a new color be like?  perhaps it would resemble a texture, or a sound, or…..esme recalled an article in the new yorker about a french pianist, helene grimaud, who hears in color:  synesthesia.  esme had always thought of this as a literary term (perhaps first encountered reading rimbaud, baudelaire and the like) in which one sense is used to describe another–e.g. the fragrant sky, a nubby note……she had not realized that it is in fact, a medical condition.

all i can say is, just try to imagine a totally new color.  the mind boggles.  and now esme can see why ms. m. is so good at combining color in her clothes!

tasting a bit…..orange,

esme