Polar bears, snowflakes, sexual purity and peace.
What to write about at Christmas?
The brilliant white oblong angled before us had an hypnotic silent allure, just seconds ago, even when all around was noise, we became consumed by it and have been countless times before. It's a comfortable and removed place of light and dissolved horizon where thought and expression are permitted to flash and crackle freely, anything is possible when staring into that bold and barren void, where in some lost second, much like the first creaking footprints upon virgin snow, the depression of a key, or the stroke of a pencil or brush can break the spell, the first physical manifestations of ideas are born, the surface no longer pure, the adventure can now begin.
The blank page is something that invariably excites us, a fresh sketch pad was always the best gift as a child, the first crisp white leaf much like the rabbit (which was white) hole that Alice fell down whilst adventuring in wonderland, it can open the door to an alternative universe where all sorts of magic, beauty and darkness can occur. This page, or at the present moment, this screen, was only moments ago unoccupied while we stared into it waited for that thing to arrive, that spark of something to reveal itself, neither of us know where we went, but we returned with pockets filled with questions that we felt we should know the answers to, questions like, how is this laptop screen making white? How does it produce a none colour? Is white a colour at all? What are we seeing when we see white?
White was one of the first colours to be used creatively along with charcoal, the Lascaux caves in France contain chalk graffiti depicting various animals dating back to between 17,000 and 18,000 years ago. In more recent times Titanium dioxide, an absorbent, odourless and naturally occurring mineral, is most commonly used to create white pigment for art materials. Kassia St Clair, in her stunning book ‘The secret lives of colour’, describes how white paint is such a challenge to make, ‘You can't reach it by mixing together other coloured paints, you have to begin with a special white pigment. And anything you add to that pigment will only take it in one direction: towards black.’ The bottomless abyss-like qualities of white, with all of its uncanny purity and eerie concealed darkness has inspired artists and writers since the conception of expression. For all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an illusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood’.
Herman Melville, referring to the chalky hue (officially white has no hue) in his leviathan tome Moby-Dick, a dark oily tale telling of the hunting of a white sperm whale, the text marbled throughout with whiteness to a disturbing degree, mirroring Ahab’s (the protagonist hunter) obsessive madness, chapter forty-two, ‘The whiteness of the whale’, is completely dedicated to the colour’s ‘blank tinge’, manically listing the pallid horrors of nature and the beckoning spectres of super-nature. In one passage, Ishmael, the saga’s raconteur, declares ‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all appalled me’. This white in Melville’s book is a shadowless terror, an appalling void that hunts him down and slowly consumes him.
Along with sharks and Albatrosses, another creature to be feared that Melville refers to in this chapter is the ‘transcendent horror’ that is ‘the white bear of the poles’, which interestingly isn't white at all, beneath that blonde shag pile the bear has completely black skin. A polar bear's fur is made up of hollow transparent guard hairs, inside these hairs are microscopic light scattering particles, so when light trapped inside the hollow hair bounces off these particles it shatters into a discotheque of multiple beams, firing them off in random directions. These light beams continue to glitter-ball and splinter through salt crystals trapped between hairs creating even more fractured light, ultimately causing the whole bear to luminesce, yes polar bears glow, they actually emit light! An incredible evolutionary adaptation that allows them to become camouflaged against snow, which curiously also appears white for a similar reason.
Snowflakes are a combination of air and ice particles which are translucent, meaning that when light enters one, it cannot pass through on a straight trajectory, so like the particles in polar bear fur, particles in the ice, pinball the light in every conceivable direction, in a snowball, for example, the light is then also fired from crystal to crystal until eventually it bounces out of the snow pile. When this light (the spectrum of all visible frequencies of colour combined equally) is finally received by our eyes, we see white.
So does white really exist? In physical terms, no, because it doesn't appear on the visible spectrum of light waves, white is what we witness when all wavelengths of light (colours) are reflected from an object. The white on a TV or laptop is simply red, green and blue light (the RGB model) at full intensity.
For the rest of the year white is simply pedestrian, most would hardly notice if it wasn't there, it’s salt and Mr Whippy, the coat of a unicorn (more candy pink these days) and the dove of peace, it symbolises sexual purity when worn by a bride, washing powder and milk, its clouds, ghosts, bones and bog roll. Along with green and red we have become obsessed with white during the festive season, the generic pine tree on that glittery card is just a tree until it is dusted with snow, we don't know what Santas job title is but he would definitely be more of a pirate were he to sport a black beard, his outfit preposterous without the white trim?!
So we will be keeping an ear on the weather man waiting for a mention of ‘the white stuff’ from the north, keeping an eye on the light cast beneath the street lamp for that single flake to feather down from the cities rusty heavens, signalling that it is time to wax the runners and blow the cobwebs from old Rosebud.
Without wanting to sound too humbug (half white), our infatuation with seasonal cheer, in connection with this colour, in these most anthropocentric of times, when each year we watch the mercury nudge its way a little higher up the thermometer, we probably are dreaming when we hope that all our Christmas’ will be white.
