Purple Prose (12 page)

I rang the president of the Albany Pigeon Racing Association and told him of how I'd first encountered Dante and then Ray.

‘Oh yeah, we lost a lot of birds that day,' said Ed, referring to the club's two hundred pigeons that didn't make it home from the Laverton race.

He was a tough talker and his speech cadence reminded me of the racehorse trainers from my adolescence. But he was also keen to emphasise the humanitarian aspects of pigeon racing. ‘It breaks our hearts to lose so many birds. It really does.' I knew that it only takes a single piece of footage of cruelty or negligence to go viral on the internet, and that he was carefully selecting the information he gave to me.

‘You know when you were camping and found Dante's loft number on the internet?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, sixty years ago you would have been receiving pigeons with messages, Sarah. The thing is, what we are doing looks like a silly old hobby, but when the world goes back to bows and arrows, when everything breaks down … well, we lost a lot of birds that day but we have to press on. We have to maintain the old knowledge and not lose it. We have to press on because one day, you never know, hey? One day pigeons may be the fastest way of communication that we have. Again. It's really important that we continue.'

His dystopian vision both amused and impressed me. It struck me that whenever I started talking pigeons with strangers, some kind of witchery occurred. Stories occurred, retellings that hardened into narratives over the years. Stories about stories even. We harbour stories; they are strapped to us in the same way as pigeon fanciers strap stories to their birds' legs. As soon as people realise you are listening, they will unfurl a tale and hand it to you. It's just the way it is.

‘I will tell the club this story,' said Dante, the day after I'd returned from finding purple feathers floating in a gnamma hole at the peak of Mount Waychinicup. ‘That woman who climb the mountain and find my bird. Is a magnificent story.'

With thanks to Dante Salvadore, Ed Shilling, the tattooist's brother at Bali Bagus Tattoo, and Ray Barrass (dec.) for sharing their stories with me.

The American Modernist artist Ad Reinhardt wrote in his 1957 manifesto that ‘colours are an aspect of appearance, so only of the surface'.
¹
Reinhardt left colour behind from that point, and painted only in shades of black. ‘There is,' he wrote, ‘something wrong, irresponsible and mindless about colour, something impossible to control'.
²

For twenty-odd years I worked as a scientist. Writing scientific papers – responsibly, mindfully – could sometimes feel like painting only in shades of black. Perhaps that's why I turned to fiction: to let control and responsibility slip. I write fiction not only from my own lived experience, but from what I imagine the experience of others – real or invented – might be. Rather than mindlessness, it's a case of putting myself in the mind of another. I listen with their ears, dress in their clothes. But it's not just appearance and surface: I see what they see. And what I see is in sharp focus, and full, blazing technicolour.

My first published fiction was a very short story called ‘The Sound of One Man Dying'. In just five hundred words the main character, Gwen, reviews her own life and struggles to comprehend death after the loss of her husband.

Gwen had been trying for some months to hear the sound of Alan's death. To smell it, to taste it, to see it. She had thought the colour for it was yellow, for a time, early on. His mother
had been disturbed … when Gwen wore the old yellow bridesmaid dress to his funeral … [Gwen] had decided within days after the funeral, though, that Alan's death had deepened to dark purple.
³

That story's clashing flash of yellow deepening to purple (like a bruise unmaking itself) is evidence that among my obsessions in fiction is colour, and its ability not just to signify, but also to disturb. My interest in colour is part of a broader interest in sight and perception, and many of my short stories concern themselves centrally and specifically with sight: with visual arts, with ways of seeing, and with sight's loss.

The nameless first-person narrator of my short story ‘The Blind Astronomer' is not me, although she is like me in some aspects. She works as a scientist, as I did when I wrote the story; her aunt, like mine, is an artist. Her description of herself could be me, describing myself:

I have a love of colour, in clothing, hair and nail colour, favouring bright, clashing colours, choosing them for the ways the juxtaposing colours assault my eyes. Peacock blue with clashing pink, blue and green should never be seen, stripes with florals, hair dyed flame red, fingernails painted the colour of spring grass. Aunt told me I dressed like a blind woman, not meaning it as the compliment for which I took it.
⁴

In the story, the narrator skips out of the astronomy conference she's attending, to go drinking. It's that particular type of drinking and general misbehaving that happens at conferences (the scientific conferences that I went to, at least).

I slipped away early with some like-minded friends, and we headed from the hotel bar to a rib joint downtown to a student bar by the river to I don't know where. I woke up with my
head resting on the toilet seat in my hotel bathroom, and left Minneapolis later that day with a hangover that lasted all the long way home to New Zealand.
⁵

That two-day hangover was mine in real life. But the real-life conference – in the northern hemisphere summer of 1993 – had plant biology, not astronomy, as its subject; and home for me, then, was Vancouver, not the New Zealand of the story. Our boozy real-life night ended up, after that ‘student bar by the river', at First Avenue, the Minneapolis nightclub made famous by Prince – the Purple One – and the setting of much of his 1984 film
Purple Rain
.

Life fuels fiction; fiction holds truths that sit, waiting to resurface – waiting for an invitation to
write about purple
– and to connect.

I take colour – its beauty, what it adds to my view of the world – as a given, a constant, as fundamental. But how constant is it? Does purple for you look the same as purple for me? And when I say
purple
, do I mean the same as you do, when you say
purple
? That's the question that preoccupies me: do you see what I see?

At the heart of that question lies this: what is colour?

For us, now, in the twenty-first century, the physical properties of colour are well documented; hue, saturation, and brightness are objective, quantifiable, measurable. But still, our interaction with colour is essentially psychological: colour is an attribute of experience, ‘a construction of mind'.
⁶

Isaac Newton recognised that colour is not a property of things but is generated by the eye and mind: ‘Rays … have no Colour. In them, there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that'.
⁷
Newton sought to understand colour by measuring light, by separating the objective, quantifiable, mechanical behaviour of light from the subjective experience of it. He split light through a prism, shone it onto a wall
and observed the colour spectrum it made. Then he remade white light by bringing the colours together.

By Newton's reckoning, the spectrum held seven colours, all in a line from red through orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo to purple/violet. In his
Opticks
, Newton took that line of seven colours and curved it around to form a colour circle.
⁸
To form that circle he had, in a sense, to disregard the physics: in Newton's colour circle, short–wavelength–purple was no longer
distant from
long–wavelength–red; it became, instead,
adjacent to
it. Continuity and contiguity were created – beyond quantifiable, mechanical, objective sense – because the colour circle made perfect, intuitive, aesthetic and perceptual sense. It makes sense to us still, for purple to nestle between red and blue, to connect them.

I learned the rainbow's colours by the science-class mnemonic (‘Think of it as a name, Roy G. Biv.') and so I see those seven colours when I look at a rainbow; the mnemonic itself forces their seeing, even if I cannot tell quite where to draw the line between orange and red, or blue and indigo. The Ancient Greeks saw only three colours in a rainbow: purple, yellow and red. Newton devised a seven-colour circle, while other theorists proposed stars, rays, spheres, tables and wheels as colour systems, with or without names, numbers or other codes to define each colour. Different colour systems have proposed (or enforced) symmetry, or emphasised asymmetry. All these models aimed to control or quantify colour objectively, to ‘articulate a coherent colour system',
⁹
but their differences only serve to indicate just how subjective colour is. Colour is not
within
a thing itself, but is in our perception of it: in eye, and mind; and, particularly, in language.

Colour is only ever crudely mapped by words. A common theory of language evolution describes the simplest state, the most isolated societies, as using just two terms to encompass all colours: some version of ‘black' and ‘white' (or dark and light, or cool and warm). Red is added as the first ‘true' colour; only over time are other colours named. It's not, of course, that we don't see or distinguish those colours we have no names for, but simply that ‘the colours we can name are lodged in our memory in a way that others are not. Nameable colours are the beacons by which we navigate colour space'.
¹⁰

Writer and critic A. S. Byatt has described the names of colours as being ‘at the edge between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful'. Referring to historical, regional and linguistic differences and specificities of colour words (‘
green
and
yellow
in Ancient Rome probably meant
blue
'; ‘
purple
in French always means
red
'), she concludes that the interest to a writer is in knowing that: