Hidden Colours

I have written already about my synesthesia in an earlier post so I won't go into detail about it here.  For those unfamiliar with the condition it is a kind of unique neurological wiring that allows a privileged minority of which I am a member to see numbers or letters or days or months as distinct colours, etc.  I believe that having synesthesia makes me more aware of and profoundly appreciative of colour.
     Colour is all around us.  It is simply light seen or perceived at varying wavelengths.  But what a gift.  Who would ever want to live stranded for life in a black and white movie?  It is even a mercy that in cases of colour blindness even two or three colours can still be perceived.  Colour does not seem to have a distinct evolutionary advantage, though the colour red signals to hummingbirds flowers full of nectar.  But the appreciation of colour as being in itself beautiful, wonderful, a divine and holy gift, a perpetual miracle?  This has nothing to do with Darwin, and nothing to do with the survival of the fittest.  Perhaps the survival of the most beautiful?
     Don't get me wrong, by the way.  I am not a strict creationist.  There is so much circumstantial evidence out there about evolution that only the most obstinate biblical literalist would even think of challenging the facts.  I do take issue with Charles Darwin.  I do not believe in the survival of the fittest, at least not as an inerrant dogma.  The absolute presence of beauty that surrounds and envelops us, nature, the earth itself as seen from space is such that it can never be properly described or defined, only absorbed, or absorbed into.  I think Darwin would have learned much from Oscar Wilde had they been contemporaries.
     At the end of the day it isn't an argument that interests me since really I wasn't there.  Neither were you.
     Now, back to colour.  I have already mentioned that colour has always had a huge meaning and significance to me.  When I was as young as four I knew that yellow was my favourite colour and that blue and yellow was my favourite combination of colours.  I remember the plastic blocks I used to play with, not Lego, but cube shaped plastic blocks that I would build towers and palaces of blue and yellow squares with while the red and the green blocks languished ignored and unwanted in the box.  I eventually grew to appreciate other colours.
     One day, during the summer holidays when I was perhaps six or seven years old I sat in the living room on a bright afternoon as the sun streamed into the room through the window.  I squinted, just so, and then was almost dazzled by the burst of rainbow colours and kaleidoscopic patterns that formed in my eyelashes where the sun touched them and the entire room was filled with these colours.  All my life this has remained a secret delight.
     When I was seventeen, while having lunch with my parents as they were negotiating my handover so that Mom could go off to another town and live with her new fat studly Romeo I noticed the light shining at an angle through the lenses of my father's eye-glasses and felt entranced by the spectrums of colour I saw there.  This still didn't redeem our relationship I am afraid to divulge.  When I was eighteen and living with Mom and her fat studly Romeo there was a crystal ashtray in the living room, shaped rather like a small pyramid.  In the afternoons the sun would come streaming in through the crystal and cast vibrant prisms all over the room.  Sad that such lovely glass was wasted on a lethal vice.
     At twenty-one I was sitting on a rock and a strand of spider's silk suspended between branches shone with brilliant topaz and magenta in the morning sun.  Then I began to notice rainbows in the morning dew.  Years later, when I was thirty-one there was a cypress tree growing by my window and I would intentionally recline there to gaze at the shimmering water droplets on the tree.  After it rained and the sun came out the water drops would shine like sapphires, zircons, emeralds, beryls, topazes, rubies, garnets and amethysts.  The magic released in the water by the light left me feeling indescribably wealthy and by then I was always chasing rainbows and spectrums.
     When I was forty-two and functionally homeless, I would often wander into the Chapters Bookstore downtown to browse and read in the comfy chairs.  While riding up the escalator I would see the bevelled glass on the floor above me and look always for that brief second when the colours of the spectrum would slide across it like a sacred and coloured serpent.  Always I would look for this vision of colour which somehow helped me forget my troubles and fill me anew with hope.
     Even now, in my late fifties, when I am on the escalator going up in the Yaletown Roundhouse station of the Canada Line Skytrain/Subway I still notice the spectrum briefly in the bevelled glass and I always make myself notice it and inwardly rejoice and celebrate the hidden sacred made manifest.
     Knowing or not, liking it or not, we are all living in a hidden Paradise.