This afternoon I embarked on my weekly pilgrimage from my apartment to the Hungarian Pastry Shop. I glided along the northern edge of Central Park on my bike, enjoying how the rough contours of cobblestone beneath my wheels jostled the frame — so much so that I had to loosen my usual chokehold grip on the handlebars, lest my brain rattle violently against my skull. I was pleased by this feeling not because it left any soothing impression on my arms or legs (quite to the contrary), but because it imposed upon me a reminder of how I should try to operate in this world.
For various reasons, I hold a concerning amount of tension in my body: whenever I write with a pencil or pen, I grip the barrel so firmly that my hand begins to cramp far too quickly and a permanent writer’s bump has grown on the left side of my middle finger; I tense my shoulders in any circumstance, even when carrying out a task of as little consequence as lifting a feather; my teeth and jaw are often clenched as if I am bracing for some inevitable impact; and I am in the extremely poor habit of holding my breath when I lie deep — well, if I am honest, even shallow — in thought or action. These and other habits of existential friction often accumulate into piercing headaches, knotted muscles, or other similar psychosomatic afflictions, of which I am unfortunately prone. My theory is that this tension is, above all else, a symptom of a desperate floundering for control: I grasp at everything with such fervor and tightness because of a wretched paranoia of it slipping through my fingers and thus producing an outcome that I can neither predict nor prepare for.
So that the pavement forced me to release my iron grip was not an unwelcome acquiescence, but rather a meditation of sorts. As much as I craved the ability to do so, I could not shape each stone in my path to secure myself a smooth ride, nor could I, in sublime anticipation, trade my machine for another whose wheels lock perfectly into each groove and ridge that I may happen to encounter in the road. When one is faced with such insurmountable turmoil that their very constitution cannot absorb the shock, I mused, the only course of action may be to relinquish the reins of control to the awaiting hands of one’s fate. Amor fati, indeed!
Then all at once, like the crack of dawn emerging victorious over a pestilent night, these thoughts were overwhelmed by a sense of immense satisfaction — I had suddenly noticed above me the emerald brilliance of the sun gently courting the leaves with its blissful light. I was being embraced by these luminous arms of green and gold, seemingly endless as they lengthened in leisure along the path ahead, and as I whisked under each branch, the lush, draping canopy of leaves sheltered my face from the blistering heat, as an avian mother would lay her outstretched plumage over her young to shield it from the throes of the world. With the crooning of birdsong above me, I felt as though I were being cradled in the arms of Nature herself. The radiant splendor of the scene before me and the immeasurable peace and security that I felt in this moment apprehended my mind and for a few seconds, I had no thought of anything but the indescribable essence of it all: if divine beauty could ever flourish in the world, if the heavens could ever come down to meet us here on the humble earth, I wondered if it were not in this.
But this elation did not last for long. As the mind is wont to do, it leapt from this grounded serenity to an ethereal puff of curiosity. I began to contemplate the meaning that is embedded within color: why was I so pacified by this viridescent glow? Was it the physical intersection of wavelengths of light with my retina that was so supremely soothing to my soul, or was it merely the web of relational meaning that I’ve spun around this sight that placated my restlessness? Without a semblance of an answer in my thoughts, I then recalled an oft-repeated phrase in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (which occurs a hefty twenty-two times):
the blue tunnel that leads to the Afterlife.
In some convoluted manner, could blue be the semantic antithesis to green? A chromaticChromatic is a word that I thoroughly enjoy. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I enjoy the Greek root khrōma, meaning color: it is an especially multifaceted root, employed in words related to color (chromatic aberration), music (chromatic scale), and genetics (chromosome). In my mind, these are all related in the form of harmony and chord: wavelengths of light mix to form the vast array of colors, notes in music mix to form the vast array of chords, and genes in chromosomes mix to form the vast array of phenotypes that are displayed in organisms. chaos to chromatic cosmos? To me, green is the color of life, of an abundant Earth teeming with creation and production, capturing the imprint of cosmic order and orchestration in the immaculately delicate veins of a leaf or the fractal budding of a Romanesco. It is the known, the familiar, the containable, the natural — whereas blue… blue is the color of unnature, the color least found on any flora or fauna; it has its greatest presence in the vast unimaginable voids like the sky and the sea; it is the color of the unknown, the latent potential and primordial chaos that drives both our fear and our irresistible curiosities; and now, in the computer age, it is the color of simulation, of death by the digital blue screen.
But all things in balance: from way up in space, from the vantage point of the almost-infinite, we can witness the intertwining of these cosmic and chaotic forces on the surface of the pale blue-green dot that we call home.
Perhaps this whole idea is too far a stretch, but it is, at the very least, a quite satisfying portrait for my mind to paint.