On Seeing Red

by Arinn Dembo

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived at the edge of the Wild Wood. She had a name, of course, but it has been forgotten, and nowadays we remember her by the cloak that her mother made for her, which was warm and woolen and red as blood.

All human languages have a word for “black” and “white”. In the beginning, quite literally, the Word divides the day from the night, the bright from the dark. But when those two words have been spoken, the first born child of creation and the first true color that will be named by humankind...is always Red.

Red is the color that blossoms at the moment that heat evolves into light. It is the color of the eldest stars in the universe, suns that linger for billions of years, wreathed in a corona of fitful flame. Red dwarves are the most frequently occurring stars in the universe, over seventy percent of all the solar masses that exist. Glowing softly in the void, the vast majority are invisible to the human eye and cannot be detected by any but the most advanced telescopes. Millions of them are scattered in the heavens above us, hidden like rubies in the room without light.

The human eye has evolved to see red. It is a gift of our lineage, a trick that lets us find the bright flush of the one ripe fruit in a cluster of unripe green, and distinguish the tender newly sprouted red leaves from their less nutritious elders. In the same stroke, the enhanced primate eye unmasks the tiger and the leopard, and every other creature that depends on mere patterns of light and shadow to conceal itself from view.

Seeing red is an ancient and very useful trick--but not all of us can do it. 7-8% of all human males are unable to distinguish red from green. Without help they are doomed to bite into the bitter fruit and miserably chew the leathery green leaves of life. Perhaps this is one of many reasons that women are the dominant gatherers, in cultures all over the world; carrying two copies of the X chromosome, they are less likely to carry the chromosomal defect that makes every berry bush and cluster of leaves a potentially fatal guessing game.

You cannot give red to a person who lacks the equipment to perceive it. I have often compared the knowledge of red to other types of perception that cannot be shared, explained or gifted to another. You cannot put the taste of the food you are chewing into another human being’s mouth. You can only say “I love cherries”, even when your friend demands to know how you can bear to eat something that looks like so many dark clots of blood. In much the same way, you can only say “I love women” when someone demands to know how you can stand making love to them.

You cannot give another person your sensual joys and desires; you also cannot give them your pain and your rage. You can try, of course. You can describe that shocking splash of pain across your face that comes when hard knuckles crash into tender lips. You can try to convey the explosion of salt and copper that follows when your own flesh splits on the unyielding stone of your teeth. But no matter what you say and how well you say it, the pain and the rage will still be yours. And some people will never understand the way you feel.

They cannot grok violence. They cannot see red.

Red is the herald of new life and the harbinger of mortality. She is the handmaiden of fire and the high priestess of passion. Red is what we are inside, and quite rightly afraid to let out. Red is the secret that serial killers search for, bent over the ruptured bodies of their victims and peering into the carnage like the ancient haruspex trying to read the liver of his sacrificial lamb.

They are looking for a truth that they’ve just chased away. The living blood goes cold and black, loses its red and thus its magic. They penetrate with the wrong instrument, and the mystery of life flees from them screaming. In the end they are none the wiser; they cannot see red for what it is. And above them the heavens are filled with invisible stars, hiding their red hearts like rubies in the black night of eternity.
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About the Author, Arinn Dembo:

Arinn Dembo has been a professional writer since 1991. Hundreds of her articles, interviews, essays and reviews of all popular media have appeared in print, web and broadcast formats over the past twenty years, in venues including The New York Review of Science Fiction, Cnet, Video Picks, On-line Music Review, Computer Gaming World, and Entertainment Tomorrow. Her award-winning short fiction and poetry have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Vancouver Courier, The Manitoba Humanist, H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, and many anthologies. She is currently the Lead Writer of Kerberos Productions, a video game development studio in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Dembo's full-length science fiction novel The Deacon's Tale was published by Kthonia Press in october 2011. Kthonia will also publish Monsoon, a collection of short fiction and poetry, in May 2012. Seeing Red, a collection of critical essays and fiction, will be released in June of the same year.

blazing orange

The first song I ever learned to sing was “Greensleeves.” This was my party trick, the one that never failed to please my parents’ grownup friends. I didn’t know at the time that they were probably tickled to hear a three-year-old sing “Alas, my love, you do me wrong,” even though I probably missed some of the notes.

Like Kathleen here at the Grip, I always loved the colour green, and for similar reasons. I grew up in the mountainous desert of southern Idaho, where green was precious and rare. I loved visiting relatives in Oregon, on the West Coast, where the rainforest reminded me of stories I had read about Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, in a legendary England that never existed. I didn’t realize until later that the foliage of the Pacific Coast was completely different from that of a medieval English greenwood. Green was green.

But green has already been brilliantly described this week. Another young and juicy colour offers itself for consideration: orange.

In a workshop on auras in an outdoor retreat for lesbians that I attended in the 1980s, I was told that orange is the colour of a prostitute’s aura. I was mystified, then offended, then amused. All the women discreetly looked around as if to say, “I know that’s not in my aura. I wonder if anyone here --?” As if lesbians in general are considered vastly more respectable than those unfortunate girls in skimpy clothes in rundown neighbourhoods, the teenagers with tight bodies whose mere presence screams sex.

If I’m still exuding orange for those who can see it, I thought, I might as well be proud. It’s full of life, a combination of sun-yellow and the red of fire or blood.

Orange is one of the colours I’ve been advised not to wear: too bright against my pale skin, too loud, usually in bad taste. I don’t care. One of my favourite summer tops was a cotton print with butterfly sleeves, all bright orange with a design of black, white, green and yellow around the edges.

Vulgarity and danger go together. Orange is the colour of jack-o-lanterns, innocent little pumpkins carved with leering faces that allow the light of a candle to shine through. Placed in windows on Halloween, they alert the children in costumes that here is a welcoming house, a place where you will be given more treats than your parents would let you eat at any other time of year.

Even the youngest of trick-or-treaters, shuffling through orange, red or yellow piles of fallen leaves, understand the message: have fun but beware. Some candy is poisoned. Some houses are haunted. Be alert and don’t wander off on your own. Not only disembodied spirits are abroad on this night.

As a fall colour, orange signals transition: childhood into puberty into sexual ripeness. In muted or smoky shades, orange is the colour of a second puberty: the end of fertility, the beginning of contemplative old age.

In Canada, orange is full of contradictory political significance. At one time, every village had an Orange Hall, named in honour of King William of Orange, signalling loyalty to the British Crown. In Ireland, Northern or southern, orange clashes with green and can trigger bloody conflict, even now.

Canadian orange, displayed for that reason, has been the colour of nostalgia and tradition. Let’s preserve the Orange Hall as a heritage property as well as grandmother’s tea set and Uncle Fred’s pipe. We could even drive in to the capital city when the Queen comes to visit. They actually clear Albert Street for a few hours so she can be taken to the Legislature in a horse-drawn carriage. How quaint. How far removed from real politics.

While Orange Halls are crumbling to dust, the bright orange of the New Democratic Party is hard to ignore. It’s an unmistakable symbol of the populist party that stands farthest to the left (for what it’s worth) in mainstream Canadian politics. Invented in the Dirty Thirties as a socialist party, it has reinvented itself several times since then.

The colour of the Conservatives is blue, of course: true-blue, Tory blue. The Liberals are presented by red, which they aren’t at all. The colour of the Green Party is self-evident.

Spring 2011 was the season of the Orange Crush: the amazing rise of the NDP in a federal election.

As my spouse and I helped count votes, we were amazed. Not only did the NDP (our party of choice, usually the third most popular) win in several ridings where they hadn’t before, the tidal wave of NDP votes in Quebec (touchy French-speaking province that regularly threatens to separate from the rest of Canada) offered the almost-unthinkable: that the NDP might be voted in as the next federal government.

It wasn’t. The Conservatives were returned to power and the Liberals were almost destroyed. The NDP, as the party with the second-most votes, became the Official Opposition for the first time. Jack Layton, the party leader whose moustached charisma helped fuel the Orange Crush, died of cancer at the height of his popularity. He was buried like a head of state. His widow, Olivia Chow (a politician in her own right), looked as iconic as Jacqueline Kennedy in 1963.

For once, no one had the gall to suggest that orange was in bad taste.
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