Earth Tones

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

Up until now we have pondered the relationships between the six colors of the visible spectrum that correspond to the six emotive powers of the soul. We have also addressed the special status of the seventh. Just as the house acted as the all inclusive unit that held together the six rooms, so too the seventh emotive sphere serves as a container for the other six. Ditto for our colors.

On the one hand, the house is nothing but the rooms that make it up; its character is to reflect the combined states of all the rooms. On the other hand, the house as a whole is more than the sum of its parts (rooms). Something new emerges when we put it all together. This same phenomenon can be transposed into the structure of the emotions. The three primary and three secondary emotions pour into malchut (kingdom). But what do we get when we mix blue, red, yellow, violet, orange and green?

The answer is: brown (chum)

The sphere of malchut or kingdom represents the communication of self to the outside world. At times we pump out one color or the next but the cumulative effect of our polychromatic discharge makes mud. This brown is the color of the earth.  Chum (brown) when vocalized in a slightly different way turns into chom which means ‘heat’ or ‘warmth.’ On the face of it, brown, corresponding to the earth, could be understood as the origin of ‘earth’ tones. Any color that undergoes ‘browning’ would become an ‘earth’ tone in this kabbalistic color code.

Earth is really nothing more than a macrocosmic home, the stage that we perform upon, the place where we show ourselves. All of the colors of our lives dance upon this earth which contextualizes all of them. The emotional energy that colors my inner experience needs to be ‘grounded.’ If emotions were always produced in isolation and remained self-contained layers upon the earth, our outlet of self-expression might behave like a palimpsest with clear cut layers of sentiment or sediment. In practice this is not the case. We are emotional mix masters. Deciphering our true feelings is often so difficult because one emotion commingles with another. While there are some color combinations that work better together, most of the time its just mud. Rarely do we encounter pure emotional colors in the real world.

With everything colored in our external environment disclosing something colored within our psycho-dynamics on the inside and vice-versa, we can begin to contemplate other color configurations. While we only have time for the preliminaries of ‘Color 101’ there is one amazing set of relationships that stand out when the ‘colors as emotions’ are arranged into three lines as they would be in the sefirotic tree in Kabbalah. The sefirotic tree refers to the channels of Divinity as well as their reflection in the powers of the soul when they are arranged along a triple axis called the left, right and middle lines:

The brown earth has green vegetation that grows directly out of it as the yellow sun shines down. The light angles to the right and left to reveal a silver-blue sky with sunsets and sunrises of red, orange and violet. With the sun temporarily out of the picture, the night sky can be seen as a myriad of points of white light poking through the black canopy of outer space.

Post-modern theory has addressed the unstable nature of speech (the yesod or ‘foundation’ that externalizes that which I experience on the inside) as a form of ‘language without soil.’ In our model, this would be like green plants without brown earth to receive them. My words if they miss, if they cannot be received by an other or by outside reality, remain ‘uprooted’ or ‘groundless.’

Likewise, the soil will remain barren if no seed is planted in it. Yesod or ‘foundation’ as the procreative organs extends the metaphor. We have to disseminate meaning by inseminating the earth. The message that we communicate (in communion with the land) will grow beyond us and our intentions once we pull out and withdraw. Thus, one of the fundamental yichudim or unifications in Kabbalah is between yesod (foundation) and malchut (kingdom/earth). They co-anchor each other as words transmitted and words received. They both are necessary to complete the circuit of communication.

If we examine the union of the sun and the earth, we can find instances where it is too hot, too intense, too bright for anything to grow. The earth dries out and cracks from unmediated solar exposure. Emotively, this would be a situation where my intensity of feeling burns out or incinerates any words that I might want to communicate. Language itself becomes woefully inadequate.  Not to mention that the world and the ‘others’ in it cannot handle or relate to such a revelation. Having the right amount of sun exposure adds just enough empathetic feeling to warm the heart of the listener (one’s earth) causing the growth of the relationship with lush green bursting forth all over.

The state of consciousness (da’at) of me as a speaker is normally completely eclipsed by my emotional sun. When the emotions calm down and are placed to the side, the stars or constellations of my thoughts can emerge against the backdrop of my unconscious or superconscious experience. When my overall emotional state (sun) is viewed obliquely, the sky transforms into a marvelous tapestry of color. A person feels more emotionally ‘inclined’ under these conditions. My feelings, when taken to the extreme, put on a fresh face. My sky becomes an emotive atmosphere enveloping my concrete expressions of self (earth).

As a result, the small union of green and brown, of foundation and earth, pales by comparison to this grand yichud or unification in Kabbalah. Letting the skies or heavens kiss the earth extols the virtues of integrating the effervescent and ephemeral abstraction of one’s inner being into the palpability of terra firma.

Clear coats and non-spectral colors are up next as our series continues in Part Twenty.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/inspiring-interior-design-part-20/

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