ellen meloy the anthropology of turquoise

The chromatic boundlessness of the spectrum therefore has a peculiar relationship to language, exposing the limitations of our primary sensemaking instrument against the limitless vistas of nature. There is no more fertile a region of subjectivity than language - the human effort to contain the uncontainable, the fluid, the nuanced into vessels of concept and category. Two centuries after Goethe wrote in his poetically beguiling, philosophically promising, but scientifically incorrect theory of color and emotion that “colors are the deeds and sufferings of light” and two generations after Frida Kahlo considered the meaning of the colors, Meloy bridges the metaphysical and the scientific across the undercurrent of the poetic:Ĭolors are not possessions they are the intimate revelations of an energy field… They are light waves with mathematically precise lengths, and they are deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity. That color - its chromatic science and its cultural symbology - is what Ellen Meloy (June 21, 1946–November 4, 2004) explores in The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky ( public library).

But the color of that dot “suspended in a sunbeam” is rather between blue and green: a pixel of turquoise.

The color of life, the actual chromatic hue that makes our rocky planet a living world, is somewhere between the blue of water and the green of land - when Carl Sagan looked at the grainy Voyager photograph of Earth seen from the far reaches of the Solar System for the very first time, he famously eulogized our Pale Blue Dot. “The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness the green water of the coastal areas, with all its varying hues, is the color of life,” Rachel Carson wrote as she illuminated the science and splendor of the marine spectrum, enriching the literary canon of history’s most beautiful meditations on the color blue.

Ellen meloy the anthropology of turquoise