Going Beyond Greyville.

Andrea picked up on my phrase ‘trying to re-locate to a world that only poets, artists and mystics understand.’ And when she did, even I began to wonder what I’d meant by a phrase that had tripped instinctively off my fingers. It isn’t easy to explain, but it goes something like this.

The culture we are trained to inhabit in the developed world seems drab to me. It’s all about cars and soaps and careers and stylish clothes and football matches and exotic holidays; it’s about the preoccupation with politics, economics and formal education. What’s more, we’re directed to the view that this is all there is; these are the only colours that exist in the spectrum of the modern, sophisticated, developed world. So these are the things that the vast majority of people focus on to the exclusion of everything else, simply because they don’t believe there is anything else.

To me, the colours in this kind of world are merely shades of grey. A certain amount of grey is fine, but I also want the rest. A wholly grey world is wholly unsatisfying to me. And that’s why my greatest thrills have always come from finding the chinks in the wall of the grey world and seeing the colour beyond.

I wrote in a post once about the thrill of standing on the deck of a small ship in the middle of the Atlantic while a force 11 storm was tossing us about like a piece of flotsam. It wasn’t the statistics that were impressive – the measurement of the power of this volume of water in lbs per sq ft, or the height of a wave in metres. It was the sense of something bigger than that; a sense, I suppose, of the very meaning of nature’s power. That’s a principle that goes beyond the measuring instruments of the grey world; that’s a colour – if you’re able to see it.

The same is true of the feeling I get these days when I sit outside at dusk. What I sense is something beyond nature’s physical manifestation; it’s a sense of the energy that drives it all, and maybe of what it’s composed. Perhaps it’s chi, I don’t know. Why give it a name anyway? It’s another colour, that’s all I care about.

And perhaps the most prolific provider of colour is the phenomenon of romance, or at least the way in which romance can be experienced. The problem is that romance for a colour seeker like me isn’t what it’s supposed to be. It isn’t the start of a process that continues with getting married, settling down and living happily ever after. It isn’t about meeting a woman my own age and settling into a comfortable situation for the purpose of mutual, material benefit - being a help meet to one another for the last few decades of our lives. It’s a self-contained, intensely vibrant experience that exists in and of itself. And it contains the most incredible colours.

But there are risks involved with being a colour seeker. To get a sense of the meaning inherent in the power of nature you have to get close up to it, and the power can kill you with a flick of its tail. To feel the subtle energy that drives nature you have to lay yourself open to the physical pain that can strike you when something shatters the peace. That’s happened to me several times. And the intensity of a colour seeker’s experience of romance applies as much to the spills as the thrills. When that happens it leads to a form of madness that can be very dangerous indeed. It has led people to commit murder and suicide. I have personal experience of that one, too.

But I suppose the most obvious risk is the risk of being misunderstood. In fact, it isn’t even a risk; it’s a certainty. The kind of thing that can drive a colour seeker to despair is usually incomprehensible to a denizen of Greyville, and so you can’t look to them for help. They’ll tell you to ‘grow up’ or ‘pull yourself together.’ They can’t see the fire that’s burning you up from the inside because fire isn’t grey.

And I haven’t even begun to consider the colours further out, those to be found in the worlds of magic and mysticism. I wonder what sort of risks they carry. I have no experience of them yet, but I’ll bet there are some.