The Indeterminacy of Life: and of Colour

If you were to ask for my opinion on the color green before that day (a Thursday I think it was) then I would be significantly hard-pressed to give an answer that would, in any company, appear to be anything other than banal. I would have said, I speculate, that it was the color of nature, the color of health, the color that sits between yellow and blue on the rainbow. That is all that I could have mustered as an answer and that, I imagine, is all that I would have cared to give; as I suspect that I would have laughed away any seriousness that was evoked in the asking of the question.

Were you to ask me this question now - a question conceived, in this instance, for the purpose of distinguishing the before from the after, the determinate from the indeterminate and the banal from the beautiful - I believe, if my words did not fail me, that I could arrive at some level of profundity.

The experience upon which this story rests was unfortunate to a degree (although some laurels were seriously rested upon) as myself, two good friends and a dog were involved in a car accident as we drove peacefully out of the Yosemite National Park in Northern California. I had fallen asleep to a beautiful and somewhat promiscuous landscape, and had been awoken in a daze of immediate fear, stifled barks and cries of what must have been terror (for what else could it have been). Sam, the driver, had been able to bring the car to a stop a meter or so (if I remember correctly) from the cliff edge - a cliff edge that is just as you would imagine it - and that was, as they say, that. We had, by all accounts, been very stupid and very lucky and at the time we knew this to be so. We had not quite teetered on the edge of life, but I remember thinking that we had crashed on a road that ran closely parallel to the edge of life and, for just a moment, we had screeched closer than we ever thought possible.

In that Moment, looking out on the peripheries of Yosemite Valley, what I saw was not the greens of trees and the reds of the sky listlessly bound, but instead I saw the living world around me as perhaps a child would: unrestrained, uncontaminated, and full of psychedelic wonder. In the state I was in (to which I can occasionally return) the sensory input was no longer subordinate to the concept; the green, as it were, was no longer 'green'; the determinate world that had become something of a distant obstacle had given way, replaced by an indeterminate awe.