Purple Prose

by Liz Byrski

  Colour sequence and transformation also characterised alchemy, which sought to transmute unstable substances into stable substances (lead to gold, say) in a process marked by colour change in a particular sequence, perhaps black to white to yellow to violet.17 Isaac Newton’s own alchemical notebook referred to the ‘peacock’s tail’ stage of the alchemical process – the shimmering iridescent surface of heating metal.18 The peacock was frequently depicted in early Christian textiles and mosaics as a symbol of immortality, shedding and renewing its tail-feathers each year, but in alchemy, the peacock came to symbolise the notion of everything in one, the one containing many: the whole array of peacock colours emerges from a single white egg.19 More specifically than that general symbolism of all in one, though, it’s an embodiment of the presence of all colours in white, the peacock-tail spectrum of light fanning out, via the prism, from egg-white light. When Newton – scientist, philosopher, alchemist – named the colour spectrum in seven steps, he not only made it in the likeness of the musical scale,20 he also drew alchemical connections. His conception of the presence of all colours in white light owes much to the peacock.

  There are peacocks in that story of mine, ‘The Blind Astronomer’. The narrator – the astronomer – dresses in ‘peacock blue with clashing pink’.21 Later, she sees a peacock’s tail feather on a railway track, odd and out of context, disturbing:

  The sun’s dying light hit the track, showing a milky streak curved across four of the railway ties, like the spine of a big fish picked clean by eager teeth … it was a peacock’s straggly tail feather, its eye eaten away, or maybe just tucked … out of sight … Aunt once told me that peacock feathers are bad luck. But I’ve always and only seen their beauty … a universe unfolding into colour and movement … how could those hundred shimmering eyes be anything but lucky?22

  That story is full of eyes. There’s the ‘artist’s eye’ that the narrator employs, seeing the beauty in her science: ‘I’ve seen the planets with an artist’s eye, charted their courses with a sense of … beauty … It is a gift Aunt has given me’. But many more of the story’s eyes are flawed: the peacock’s feather with ‘its eye eaten away’; the childhood operation to correct vision; a mark on a photograph that ‘scratched out’ eyes; even the disembodiment implied when the narrator remarks on resemblance, ‘She had my Aunt’s eyes’.23

  Flawed eyes and different ways of seeing provide insights about colour and vision, the brain and perception, light and physics. The effects of eye-defects (including temporary abnormalities, ageing, and drugs) can be seen or surmised in art. Rembrandt greatly reduced the number of pigments he used in old age, restricting his palette. The shape of a long-beaked bird appears in the later works of Edvard Munch, painted while he was suffering from vitreous opacities that disrupted his field of vision. J. M. W. Turner’s eyesight was failing with age and illness when he painted the glorious hazy light and steam of ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, the purple–orange sky of ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. The question remains whether the changing palettes and techniques of artists suffering from vision defects resulted from that blunted vision, or from artistic intent.24

  Recording of visual phenomena was often first made by artists. Painter Philippe de La Hire reported from his studio in 1685, ‘The light which illuminates hues changes them considerably; blue appears green by candlelight and yellow appears white; blue appears white by weak daylight, as at the beginning of the night’.25 It was not until 1866 that the mechanisms for this phenomenon, whereby changes in light level affect how we see colours, were distinguished and described by scientists: rod cells were adapted for seeing in poor light, while cone cells operated in daylight.26 The physical properties of objects do not change as the light illuminating them changes, but our perception of their colour does.

  Colour, in the end, comes back to our perception of it; in synaesthesia, perception is complex. Margaret Visser describes synaesthesia as ‘the mixing of senses so that taste (say) gives rise to geometrical images, hearing is coloured, shapes sing’.27 The two most common types of synaesthesia are colour-hearing (audition colorée), particularly musical colour-hearing; and the association of verbal sounds, particularly vowel sounds, with colours.28 The artist and synaesthete Wassily Kandinsky, reviewing synaesthetic experiments in his 1912 book On the Spiritual in Art, wrote:

  [their effects] would seem to be a sort of echo of resonance, as in the case of musical instruments, which without themselves being touched, vibrate in sympathy with another instrument being played. Such highly sensitive people are like good, much played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibres at every touch of the bow.29

  Synaesthesia circles us back to that first short story of mine. That story starts with synaesthesia, with colour and sense: ‘Synaesthetes smell music, know numbers by their distinctive colours, letters by music’. Like Gwen, the widow in the story, I can’t ‘claim that degree of sensitivity, that consistency of sensory overlap’,30 but synaesthesia has always fascinated me. Margaret Visser, herself a synaesthete, notes that ‘synaesthesia shares a few characteristics with the phenomenon of perfect pitch’. 31

  With my own far-from-perfect pitch, I’ve found myself singing two songs while I’ve been thinking about, researching, and writing this essay. They’ve come to me, these songs, for their textual connections, and they’ve stuck around, in that odd, earwormy way, the whole time I’ve been writing. One song I’ve sung for its title, that titles this piece. In Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Do You See What I See?’ 32 the chorus repeats its title in a call and echoed response – ‘Do you see what I see?/do you see what i see?’ – the response insistent, demanding, shouted, as if with caps lock engaged. I hear it in its broadest sense, encompassing the ideas I had in mind to write about here: colour, light, perception, different ways of seeing.

  The second phrase I’ve been singing, over and over, is the chorus from a Paul Kelly song, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’,33 and this is more specific in its relevance. Paul Kelly might prefer blindness to heartbreak, but I can imagine few things worse than losing my sight.

  It’s twenty years since my mother lost her sight. She was in her early fifties then, the same age that I am now. My mother still has some peripheral vision, but has lost her central vision. In ‘The Blind Astronomer’ I used an analogy my mother uses to describe her sight loss:

  Like having a clenched fist held in front of each eye is the way they like to describe the vision I’ll retain. Why bother just holding those fists there, I want to tell them, why not just punch my lights out and be damned. The horror of it.34

  As I type this, I can see my mother do the movements to demonstrate: clenching her fists, holding them in front of her eyes, as if to mime exaggerated crying, boohoo.

  My mother’s condition has a similar effect, but with different cause, to macular degeneration, ‘robbing … sight entirely, from the centre out’. 35 The artist Georgia O’Keeffe was eighty-four years old when she lost her central vision to macular degeneration. O’Keeffe is in ‘The Blind Astronomer’, too; the story’s epigraph quotes her: ‘My first memory is of the brightness of light, light all around’. 36 I used my own experience for the story’s O’Keeffe elements: I saw the O’Keeffe exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art that the story’s narrator sees, and I posted to my husband the postcard photo of O’Keeffe that the story’s narrator posts to her aunt:

  The photograph showed O’Keeffe in the desert, the hot sky white around her, O’Keeffe glaring directly at the camera. Her trousers were black, her shirt white. She surrounded a bleached cow’s skull, stark against the black of her trousers. Georgia’s eyes stared out at me from the image, wide and unblinking, black as uncooked beans.37

  My postcard was delivered, as was the narrator’s, with a scratch across Georgia O’Keeffe’s eyes.

  A solid patch on the picture side was scratched out, perhaps by some sharp-edged sorting machine. There was a perfect, even rectangle where the thin laminate of printed paper had b
een etched from the photograph, leaving the blank, rough, white card exposed. The scratch covered – obscured, exactly – her eyes. They’d scratched out Georgia’s eyes.38

  My real-life scratched black-and-white postcard prompted the astronomer’s fictional one, as my real-life hangover prompted hers. Georgia O’Keeffe never fails to trigger in me memories of summery Minneapolis and drunken nights, to a soundtrack of Purple Rain. Black and white and purple all over, life fuels fiction, the connections impossible to control.

  Just recently I discovered a delightful – if dead wrong – citation of ‘The Blind Astronomer’ as an essay, in a 2010 paper, ‘E-Accessible Astronomy Resources’, about making databases and other online resources more accessible for ‘physically challenged’ astronomers. The paper discusses results from a study carried out at the University of Helsinki (2005–2009), and concludes with this paragraph, quoting my fiction as fact:

  Practically everyone who lives long enough has to face physical challenges at some point. An astronomer who is able-bodied today could have accessibility issues tomorrow. We cannot expect that she or he is willing to give up practicing science. In her essay The Blind Astronomer (Farr 2002), the New Zealand astronomer Tracy Farr eloquently describes the changes brought by the gradual loss of her vision. With a different approach to looking at the research data, she can continue to access the universe:

  ‘I am freeing myself from the fixedness of the seen. With my mind open to the universe, I hear the heavens’ ebb and flow as music. It is the incomprehensibly wonderful revelation of music first heard after only ever having seen black spots and lines on a white page. As my ears open and my eyes close, I hear the planets dance.’ 39

  What strikes me most when I re-read ‘The Blind Astronomer’ now, though, comes immediately before those four sentences that Isaksson quotes:

  … in comparison to the fixed film of seen memory, the image not seen is loose at the edges, its elements mobile and interchangeable. It holds the promise of universality.40

  I know that my mother no longer sees what I see. She has lost precision and detail from her vision, with images ‘loose at the edges’. When she reads, now, she must read audio books (‘ears open … eyes close’). She can no longer see faces. She’s had the guts (the centre, the heart, the eyes) punched out of her sight. I imagine this dark centre as unknowable, painted in shades of black. She is left with peripheral vision, though, and, because I can’t bear not to, I romanticise – I invent and imagine (I fictionalise) – what she sees. I conjure a corona of glorious colour, its elements mobile, ever-changing: egg-white light split through a prism, a peacock-tail all-in-one shimmer, sea-green, Murex lustre, bridesmaid-dress– yellow, a bruise unpurpling. With those rose-coloured glasses firmly in place, life unfocused holds the promise of universality; it is blurred, but bright and beautiful.

  Mary – Lucy Dougan

  for Larry, and for Sophie

  Lovely as they are, things lose infinitely from being preserved not used.

  Virginia Woolf, Diaries1

  It’s not a failure of imagination: think of Helpston as a village in a wooden box, thatched cottages, church, public house, cows, sheep, and enough figures to dress the set … Johns and Marys, all of them. The chain stretches back …

  Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison2

  Distaff (n.) a tool used in spinning; the female branch or side of a family; a woman’s work or domain

  Faces

  At the hinge of spring and summer, the suburbs of Perth are a purple carpet. As barefoot kids we were always warned about the bees that might be hiding in this fallen profusion. Between those small bells, and the pavement lines, and the prickles, there was a lot of hopping about, a lot of staccato skipping. Our first child was born at jacaranda time. I remember the profundity of crossing the border from a single state to owning a body that had made another. The nurses came and drew a face on my chart – happy – sad – in-between? Mine always smiled. I understood that they were busy and had their systems, their checks, but at times I wanted to howl I am not fucking happy. This life-changing thing has happened to me and I am feeling any combination of bliss, pride, fear, sadness, awe, etc., all rolled into one. But happiness, no. In the early evenings I would walk our baby to a big bank of windows at old St John’s and we would both look out to the jacarandas as far as the eye could see. I’d tell him this would always be his time of year, his estate, this purple slide to summer.

  We think, perhaps, that it is the ones to be born who are waiting, but it is our ancestors too. They reside now in the digital sea. Some are surprised to find themselves recycled in merchandise or in museums. On the radio a commentator says we are not close to them anymore, that we are living in a long, continuous hiccupping present of compressed, homogenised culture, but I think that is not always true. It has taken me years to walk back to Mary or for her to walk forwards to me, but at a two generation’s remove on my maternal side she does not feel distant in the least. Once, with old photos splayed about everywhere, a friend snatched up one and said oh my god that’s scary, she has your serious face on, the one you use when you talk about art. I think I shrugged – normal, why not, to look like an ancestor, surely? But now I would say what is the matter with that, with looking serious … even at the risk of an imposed smiley face.

  Perhaps sometimes Mary’s expressions do inhabit mine and I am happy to think that they do. But she gave me much more than that too.

  In the house into which I was born there was an under-the-house. My childhood room, a long narrow sleep-out, perched above this underground. One summer, my mother dragged an old brown trunk from the darkness. Then, I knew nothing about the house, how it had come into the family, who owned it and so forth. It was simply home, named Cathay, with its large wild garden, shingled roof and strange room configurations that had been modelled on a sea-captain’s ship. It lay in a line of houses that I thought of as my mother’s, my grandmother’s, my aunt’s. Or rather, they were the figures that I most associated with those houses even though my father and my uncle were around.

  When I asked my mother what was in the trunk she said maybe the other life of the house. We found tatty papers, abandoned knitting, infant shoes and then the mask that my mother snatched up quickly. It was a face made of linen with eye-holes and a mouth. We took turns in it, running crazily around the garden, but there was already something about the mask that made me wary, some itch or inexplicable periphery that it announced. Breathless, I asked my mother who had made it. Probably my nanna, was all she said.

  Oh, I replied.

  That night I thought about the countless times I had fallen asleep, unaware of the mask in the trunk in the under-the-house in the room beneath my bed. Was there another room again beneath the under-the-house? How deep did things go down? And how many faces had been left there by how many old mothers for me to try on?

  In the crypt there are not only people’s things. And what is added to the store is endlessly unfinished, overlapping, changeable.3

  Cloth

  As the baby, the youngest on both sides (all sides), I have always lived with a strong salvation narrative. Keep the family together – no matter – at what cost, yes, all of those platitudes. Contrarily, my sense of family is strong; my sense of family is fragile. I imagine this is not unusual. We try to stay close. We try to hold it together. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I am a half to my five brothers and sisters. I am no blood relation at all to my oldest first cousin, Axel. I can still picture his wry expression over the kitchen bench from me on his last visit. Look at us – the oldest and youngest – and neither of us really Dougans. It’s only later that I remember the napkin with the cursive ‘A’ embroidered on the corner. A is for …? I cannot locate an ‘A’. Is it a stray from my husband’s side with its Anthonys? And then in flash I know it is ‘A’ for Axel. It is an inclusive ‘A’ stitched by someone in the family for a German child arriving by postwar boat to a strange country, to a whole future he is yet to own.
Old linen can spark off a detective bent. Who, who, I ask my mother, in all this family, can have got this napkin ready for Axel? She thinks for a bit. If she’d been alive then, I would say Mary.

  She was a great sewer. More than that, a professional seamstress. She sewed for society women in Melbourne in the last decades of the nineteenth century. She sewed matching outfits for my mother and my aunt when they were children: for the Royal Show, pale blue dresses with Peter Pan collars and flared skirts, for the opening of the family-owned Regal Cinema, crushed velvet evening coats. When my mother was older, Mary copied Vivien Leigh’s dress from Waterloo Bridge for her, soft crepe, rose-pink with a taffeta slip.

  In old photos young Mary is a figure of great elegance with her wasp waist and piled up curls. The clothes she wore she would have made herself: high-collared blouses with puffed sleeves, long tailored skirts in taffeta and other cloth depending on the season.

  And she came down to us through the words for cloth that are now unused – serge, cambric, sateen, twill – words that are folded and packed away these days in special glossaries, words that are folded and packed away like the material she left in the houses of my grandmother and my mother. A great floating dowry of cloth for now unmade garments. A box, a chest, above/below ground, an endowment, an estate.

  Somewhere in our present house is something that Mary had begun and set aside. It is indeterminate. Maybe the lining of a dressing gown, maybe the beginnings of an evening dress? It’s a mid-purple silk with Chinese embroidery of a slightly darker colour, a kind of silky damask. I try to know where things are, to hold onto them, but often I lose track. On some days, in this Age of Curation, I am happy that things slide out of my grasp. On other days I am appalled.

  Purple is also the colour of bruises (life holding on too hard), the wet violets at Mundijong, the sheen on dark feathers, an eye-shadow compact I owned called Wuthering Heights, decomposition.