Özlem Demirel9The day was about to begin. I could swear to God it was a rainbow, or my eyes were misleading me, because of not sleeping until this time. Oh! But how could I sleep rather than drinking my coffee with milk and discovering the pleasure of sunrise? What was I saying? Indeed, the rainbow. Why was I so excited to see the rainbow, I even do not like colours except the black one. Was black a colour or not? I do not know this one, but I am quite sure that black is next to the darkness in my heart.
I could say that without black itself, there is no depth in light, surely. Look at my coffee! How it seems so brown. I should be honest to myself that I was actually addicted to black coffee. On the other hand, I always put some milk into my coffee, not because I loved my coffee with milk, but I was trying to escape, maybe, from this glorious darkness even if I find pleasure in it.
Or maybe I just enjoy how white colour melts into black, then create a new one, and how it changes the taste of my coffee just like life, thinking about all the delicate beauties in the darkness of the universe.
For sure, every taste has a colour, and every colour, a taste. The latter I thought of people, I was enlightened by the fact that people also had colours. However, it is quite easy to explain colours of objects or interpreting the meaning of colours of the things that I observed in detail, unlike people.
I do observe them. But, you know, we people are such ongoing and unpredictable creatures full of surprises. I must admit that when I wrote the lines above about coffee and stuff, I had much more balance in terms of my mental sanity. (I am still quite sane though, full of existential dreads and crisis. Yet, I am also pretty vivacious since I do love the tiny, delicious details of life, not the people.)
Nonetheless, putting aside my personal thoughts about people, I literally strove to storify this bizarre liaison between people and colour, which I still do. I’ll thereby get a bit of help from the people who had commented on it before I do.
The title, therefore, refers to one of John Mayer’s writing where he draws an analogy between people and colour boxes. He adds how most people appear to be the eight colour boxes.
However, most of them seek to find the ones who “are the sixty-colour boxes with sharpeners on the back.” He also frankly states that he can only find the eight colour boxes even though he fancies himself being the sixty-four-colour box.
I must admit that I excessively agree with him. Since there are plenty of colours of life. Don’t you think like that? I even spent quite an amount of my time to think about it. I think most of us have the same problem with Mayer, because most of us are not able to see the shades or the vibrancy of colours.
Emerald, for instance, also called emerald-green, is a tone of green that is particularly light and bright, with a faint bluish cast, even though most people would say that it is simply green, which is not. The reason I choose this particular colour is because it reminds me of the infinite, more precisely, how infinite we are. I don’t know whether you think of such things when you look at colours or not. (I do accept it is kind of odd.)
Anyway, the thing I am trying to resemble is that there are quite things in the world, yet some of us live on the surface without realising the tiny little cutie details. We even don’t stop to think for a second what they do feel like. We indeed live on the surface, yet what we want or expect is far deeper than that.
Never mind. Let’s talk about colours more, shall we? I had a question in my mind which I barely answer:
“What is the colour of your life?”
Of course, I asked this question to one of my friends at that time. He answered: “blue is my colour because it reminds me of the sky, sea and air. I feel like I’m free and alive.” I did even fancy with his unexpected long answer, I must also say that I found it a little bit of superficial. It’s maybe because I expected something like extraordinary. Something like Navy, maybe, and how it combines passion as well as compassion. Such a colour congregates the two-opposite feeling, right?
I can make endless references relating to colours, but let me change the question a bit.
“What is the meaning of your life?”
Meaning. You now see. The meaning of life. (If there is any.) Some people would say that they don’t have a meaning in their life. We may very simply consider this in two different ways. First goes for the one who is devoting oneself to a goal or purpose and choosing a lifestyle according to this. The second one is not exactly having an absolute goal, but live like in an idiosyncratic sense, which is somehow becoming his or her goal. (This is ironic.)
“Life has no meaning. Each of has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myths
This is bloody brilliant and indeed quite existentialist, you know, the fact that we are the answers. Yet, we sometimes even don’t know this. I think Campbell would explain this better than I do, so he continues:
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” The Power of Myths
Have you ever stopped for a moment to think about how the weather feels like? Or how the blue butterflies flit in each of your nerves? Yes, this is what I am trying to come through. Love, as the meaning of life. Not just loving someone or something else, but yourself.
Mostly, yourself, in fact. Since I also believe that we cannot give something if it does not exist in ourselves. I think it is better to stop here and leave you alone with all those messes I just made up with my bizarre thoughts. But before, let me also quote again from Campbell about meaning and love, to an extent.
“Dante is taking the Church’s attitude that this is hell, and that they’re suffering there. Remember, he sees the two young lovers from the Italy of his day, Paolo and Francesca. Francesca had a love affair with Paolo, the brother of her husband. And Dante, like a social scientist, says, “Darling, how did this happen? What brought this about?” And then come the most famous lines in Dante.
Francesca says that Paolo and she were sitting under a tree in the garden reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. “And when we read of their first kiss, we looked at each other and read no more in the book that day.” And that was the beginning of their fall. That this wonderful experience should be condemned as a sin is the thing the troubadour just says no to. Love is the meaning of life — it is the high point of life.” The Power of Myths
I shall utter a bit of more sentences in terms of love, colour and meaning, maybe. One of my beloved ones reminded me of the “broken white” and how it stands for hope but broken as well, just like us. Even though there are ambiguities and uncertainties, there is this white under the skin. You see. Hope is the key, maybe, even if we agonize ourselves with it. It keeps us alive within life, which means there may be hope for some of us.
meaningthe idea that is intendedMore (Definitions, Synonyms, Translation)
