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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Falls The Shadow

For this weeks "Forbidden Knowledge" theme, Garce invited us to "Write about a time you discovered something you weren't supposed to know."

I decided to take myself out of the equation and retreated into fiction.

I hope what follows is neither too dark nor too obscure for this blog.

If it needs to be explained then I didn't do it right.

Normal service will be resumed next week



"Falls The Shadow"
(c) Mike Kimera 2011


Knowledge has a name.

Speaking the name makes the knowledge real and grants it power over your life.

The name cannot be unsaid. The knowledge cannot be un-known.

Knowledge is irrevocable.

Knowledge is dangerous.

My family understood that.

Knowledge makes you culpable.

Knowledge makes you choose.

Knowledge is the source of all guilt.

In my family, we chose not to know; we refused to name the things that were most important to us.

We were masters of inference, innuendo and unnoticed silences. If those failed us we fell back upon evasion, deflection and denial.

By this means we remained a happy family.

We did not know that my father's fits of impotent anger would be followed by long silent drinking sessions that must never be interuppted.

We did not know that the bruises on my mother's thighs were made by my father's belt.

We did not know that my older sister was afraid not of the dark but of the deeds that darkness cloaked and which could not be named in the daylight.

We were a happy family. Happy families are all the same. Aren't they?

I knew my father taught English at the Grammar School.

I knew he was a kind and gentle man, much loved by his students. You could ask anybody. They would all tell you that.

I knew that his favorite poet was Eliot. I even knew his favorite verses from "The Hollow Men".

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

And.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I knew that my mother was beautiful and that my sister was brave.

I knew that one day soon I would be as tall as my father

I knew where my father kept his gun.

My father's suicide opened a sluice-gate that brought knowledge flooding into our family with such force that it was all we could do to avoid drowning in it

The police knew that my father and I were alone in the house because my sister had broken her arm in a clumsy fall and my mother had taken her to the hospital.

Our family Doctor knew that I had been so distraught at finding my father dead in his study, his gun still in his hand, a half-empty bottle of whiskey on his desk and a blood-spattered copy of "The Hollow Men" open in front of him, that I had had to be sedated.

The Coroner knew that my father was being treated for depression and should not have mixed whisky, Temazepam and a loaded gun.

My mother, my sister and I knew that things would never be the same.

I knew that sometimes knowledge falls like a shadow and fills the world with darkness.

I knew that a world can end with a bang that starts with a young girl's whimper.