Beautiful, beautiful colors
I love words. I love how many there are in the English language, how many gestated in art (chiaroscuro, filigree) and architecture (tracery, stucco), were meant for the specific use of a narrow band of specialists (exuviate, bathyal), how some of them emerge from observations of wildlife, their movements. (Murmuration. How can one read that word and not think of wingbeats rising in the air? The soft thunder of them.)
I adore too their etymologies, how much you can learn of the world from them. Words feel like reliquaries, sometimes: cupping a wealth of history in their hearts. They’re transformative too. With every word you acquire, you develop new ways of processing your environment. This excerpt from Katy Kelleher beautifully explains it:
Once you start knowing the names of plants, your landscape changes entirely. Trees are no longer just trees—they’re maples and aspens and silver birches. Meadows aren’t filled with blue, yellow, and red wildflowers—they’re home to chicory and buttercups and fireweed. Knowing the names of things also allows you to see and name patterns. You start to realize that those thin-stemmed flowers with feathered, three-lobed leaves that you saw at the florist look an awful lot like the skinny little weeds that bolt up from the sidewalk near your house. You start to see how blossoms with swirls of intricately layered petals can be the sisters of flowers with just five lemon-yellow petals. When you begin to learn their various names, you begin to understand how their roots intertwine, how their histories align, how their mythology has been built, layer by layer, over the centuries. A rose by another name may still be a rose, but a buttercup, when called by another name, tells an entirely new story.
If you’re delighted by similar things, I thoroughly recommend hunting down Kelleher’s work on colors because my god, you’re in for a treat. Her writing is incisive and honeyed, dense with research, filled with asides that can spur the reader down any number of rabbit holes. And pretty, just so very pretty.
Russet is the color of November in Maine. The color that emerges when all the more spectacular leaves have fallen: the yellow coins of the white birch, the big, hand-shaped crimson leaves of the red maple, the papery pumpkin-hued spears of the beech trees. The oaks are always the last to shed their plumage, and their leaves are the dullest color. They’re the darkest, the closest to brown. But if you pay attention, you’ll see that they’re actually quite pretty. Russet is a subtle color, complicated by undertones of orange and purple.
Seriously, just look at that.
Anyway, the point of this whole newsletter entry is to say that Kelleher has a nascent substack and you should absolutely subscribe to it because I hope that a great quantity of subscribers will mean more writing about color.