LIKE A ZEBRA: BLACK AND WHITE

Today I was going to tackle the subject of "dark" as in "black" as a metaphor that creeps around in our mental systems with sly reverals.  And here it is, "doin' it", because out every window and clogging the southside screens (which is unusual) is white.  If you've ever been caught on an unfamiliar road in a whiteout, you'll know that it's just as blinding as total darkness.

One terrifying instance was a little group of UU's returning from some event in Butte, returning to Helena.  We were caught on a mountain road.  The driver was Suzanne Dougherty who only had one eye. I was in the back righthand seat where the drop-off down the cliff was feet away.  My job was to give a report, something like Mark Twain, about how far from the edge of the pavement the car was traveling.  The person on the other side had the door open and was looking down, trying to keep track of the yellow center line.  

When it got worse, the only man -- not necessarily the most robust of us -- carried a flashlight and walked ahead of us, using his feet to sense was was underfoot, hoping it wouldn't be slick black ice.  We were all calm.  We were all focused.  We were all together.  I guess that's my homily for the day.

This storm is as bad as forecasted and I no longer feel like a ninny for going into a food panic and filling my storage with food.  I'll eat the frozen stuff first, in case the storm brings down the powerlines.  The gas is working now, but not quite warm enough with wind sucking the heat out of every weak spot and window crack.  I'm wearing only three shirts but one has a quilted lining and one is fleece.  The bottom one is a thin turtleneck from a company called "Heattech" which claims it "makes heat."  This seems to be as true as the weather forecast.  It IS warm.  The not-so-little kittens were watching on their elbows from next to the electric heater, so I fixed a nice box with a soft lap robe next to the heat.  They wrestled in it for a while, then went back to their former curl next to it.

The most interesting metaphors and tropes are always the ones that are outside the box because they are reversible -- dark black can mean evil or it can mean sophistication or it can mean both at once like a little dress at a Manhattan cocktail party.  Same with white.  

A good oxymoron is black and white and red all over, like an embarrassed zebra.  The people who study early languages claim that the first three colors are always black, white and red.  ln fact, the Browning school colors are red and black.  White is a non-color.  Is there any school with white as one of their colors?  Some groups consider blue and green to be the same color.  

There is so much wind that some roofs are blowing clear and it is cold enough that leaks are sealed by ice.  I'm grateful for this.  The roads are closed, if not by authorities then by vehicles slid sideways across the lanes.  I'm grateful I'm not driving in this.  For the exciting story of my heroic trip delivering bronzes to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, you will need to get my book, "Bronze Inside and Out."  If your library doesn't have it on the shelves, you can ask about Interlibrary Loan.  Or just buy it online.

I have inches of downloaded articles to read.  I'm going to stop writing and go read them.  Maybe I'll come back in a while.  I need more black coffee.  

PRAIRIE COLORS (or colours)

It’s a still gray day, not even the skritching of dead leaves killed by cold before they could change colors and drop from the tree. If you were to paint the landscapes I saw when I drove to Cut Bank (thirty miles north), you would only need a few tubes of paint: Payne’s Gray, Yellow Ochre, and maybe a little Cadmium Yellow for highway centerlines and traffic signs. Some black for cows. But the colors are all muted, not exactly pastel, but a little grayed out. Thin colors in values that are close together, not very light and not very dark. Shapes are long and reclining, except that the edges of mountains and what we call “reefs” or buttes, make a kind of handwriting along the horizon, way far out there.

In the town the colors were Crayola, primary and color wheel stuff, meant to suggest enamel, plastic, flags, toys. . . commerce. I grew up in Oregon where the only crayons you needed were green. Did you know there are twenty kinds of green in the Crayola full set? Not counting the specialty crayons: Changeables (like Tangee lipstick, they go on one color and become another), Magic Scent (they had to stop using food smells like “berry” because the kids ate the crayons), Gem Tones and Silver Swirls. I’ve neither seen nor tasted any “specialty crayons.”

I went to Dick Blick’s website for art supplies to kick up some action in my brain and was pleased. It appears that in this context there are not only new colors but new “media” beyond pastels, oil paints, watercolor, or even craypas, which are a personal favorite -- though I never know quite how to use them -- because of their brilliant colors, highly “saturated” in the lingo. One Easter I wrote and drew on hard-boiled eggs with craypas, then dipped them in black ink. Looked great.

There are things called “color sticks” described as instantly drying oil paint. I’ve never seen one. It makes me think of animal markers (http://www.livestockmarkers.com), which are (yes) for writing numbers or symbols on cows, horses, pigs, sheep. Here’s something I never knew about before: “SHEEP MARKING CRAYON - Designed for marking sheep in varying climates. 4”x 2” (10cm x 5cm) The Ram Crayon is to be used in conjunction with a Ram marking harness. The harness is to be placed upon the Ram. The crayon (which should be on the animal's chest) is fastened to the harness with a split pin. When the ram mounts the ewe the crayon will leave a mark that sticks well. The color of the mark on the back of the ewe allows the breeder to track the correct Ram. Consists of top grade waxes, and pigments which mark in intermittent weather conditions which sticks well to animals.” It makes me think of a naughty story about a woman who was intimately entered without her permission just after a doctor had painted her entrance with purple gentian to treat a fungal infection. The culprit, in his private part, had clearly “voted” for her, though it was not his finger that was inky. It strikes me that putting a crayon harness on a ram might be a little like belling a cat.

More properly, there was a Montana artist (I think a woman in Bozeman) who drew big gorgeous prairie scenes of runaway grass fires and flaming sunsets, using animal markers for their broad strokes and vivid colors. I’m told that over the years the colors, like the auto paints used by Jackson Pollock, lost their punch. I hope that’s not true.

The descriptions and instructions for this animal crayon website are in French. French animals? Cat Urbikit at http://www.stephenbodio.blogspot.com, who ranches sheep in Wyoming, uses Nepalese ranch hands. Her guard dogs are big Eurasian breeds, but the dogs who work with the herders are more likely to be Australian heelers or black-and-white border collies. When they mark the sheep, what language do they use? Is there an international language of sheep marking symbols?

But I’m getting off the point again, which is colors. I discovered that the computer codes for colors are called “hex” colors because they are coded in 16 bits or pixels or whatever. They started to call the system “sexameter” instead of “hexameter” but the designers got all embarrassed. Clearly not French. I suppose the people who are really into it don’t say “blue” or “green” anymore, but rather refer to the sixteen number code. Talk about a foreign language. Usually the choices are presented as a table that automatically translates into “hex.”

I guess we can’t talk about color without talking about language. On the prairie, when speaking of color, it is also necessary to talk about the season. The green hazes of spring, the yellow and blue flowers that follow, the sheets of lupine lavender, then the tawny burn-off of late summer and the red-orange of Indian paintbrush in the mountains. When the day is winter and clear, it shimmers with the Monet iridescence of gold wheat stubble among snow reflecting sky blue.

When the land is wet in winter, which doesn’t happen for very many days, the colors are saturated, the russets and siennas and burnt ochres of old masters’ oil paintings of interiors. I’m always interested that some mud is greenish and other mud is reddish, depending on whether the sea life pulverized into it aeons ago accumulated copper or iron.

I tried to Google around to find out about what makes DayGlo colors so bright, but no luck. One gets lost in phosphorescence, flourescence, until the nuances are too hard to figure out. No one seems to really know.

Some people do not like the taupe, dun, beige, ecru, sorts of colors and their reaction to the color scheme of the late fall Montana prairie is that there is nothing to look at. But to my eye, that’s when things get interesting. There is only one color I really hate to see: the gray of a chemical fallow field, which has been sprayed to kill everything, creating vegetable ash. In theory, the killer chemical will be gone by the time a new crop is planted. In actuality? I don’t think so.