A FUNCTION OF THE MIND
It is in ourselves that we must find the key. No-one has seen light and yet every one of us is bathed in light from the moment of his first appearance in the world. These two phenomena, which are the witnesses of light, will be known by us if we know ourselves. The two natures - that of the order of the spectrum and that of the individual colour - correspond to what is particularly characteristic of the nature of our memory and to what is particularly characteristic of the nature of our senses. REASON knows this very well and, as it is she who is in charge, we may conclude that it is because we have senses that an isolated colour is experienced by us (or several colours in a harmonious relationship, which amounts to the same thing though its action is more complicated); and that it is because we have a memory that the order of the spectrum can be retained. If we put observation BEFORE reason, we tend to think of these two phenomena as apprehended, both of them equally, by the senses. This is because, since mere observation is so closely involved with the action of sight, it cannot distinguish the change that takes place in sight between the ways in which the isolated colour and that in which the succession of colours in the prism are experienced. But, when the colour, or the arrangement of colours, strikes the sight, it is the eyes at rest that bring the phenomenon to the attention of the intellect. When they are interwoven with each other in the spectrum, the colours are seized by the eyes in movement, and in this case it is the memory that brings the phenomenon to the attention of the intellect.
The order of the spectrum corresponds to what reason persuades us to call by the name of movement. The colour that is alone, or put into a harmonious arrangement with other colours, corresponds to what reason persuades us to call rest, suspension, stasis, that is to say, immobility. It is only through the action of memory that it is possible for us to conceive of movement; only the phenomenon at rest can be perceived by the senses.
Reason will also inform us that the distinctive characteristic of sensations which gives us this apparent notion of rest can be expressed generally in terms of measurement. What characterises succession, made up as it is of periods of variable duration, is its dependence on numbers. What is at rest can, figuratively, be characterised as rectilinear. What is in movement is, figuratively speaking, curved. In its reality, the spectrum is a circular system which is why it is known as the chromatic circle. The least arbitrary of measures, on the other hand, is that of the straight line. In the realm of our ideas it is expressed in geometry. Succession is of the very nature of the curve - it is expressed concretely in arithmetic, through numeration, which is a continual return of number upon itself. We lack finesse and we never, before making our observations, think of consulting our reason. That is why we are able to look at a square and at a circle as if they are of the same nature, each of them equally capable of being seen at rest. Our reason would be able to inform us better, just as it has informed us on the isolated, immobile, colour, and on the mobile succession that characterises the colour wheel.
The colour wheel. Two movements. From dark to light long a straight line, and the movement round the circle from one colour to another
‘Mural painting’ is a human act which is realised on the wall, starting from colour to finish in light. It is an anticipation of something that is known in mystical experience where it works not on equivalent, substitute materials but directly, on the human subject itself. There is indeed something sacred about the human act of painting a wall. As, not only is it a means of conveying doctrine, but it is a means of helping those who want, themselves, to attempt that great epic journey upwards to the unity of Form and of Light. A religious act, worthy of respect. It is through the rainbow, through the chromatic circle, that the work is undertaken. The chromatic circle, the rainbow, has this astounding property, that it is accessible to all colours, to all arrangements of colours, infinitely variable in their tonalities, their values, the combinations to which they give rise. Colours and arrangements of colours stand for the experience of the senses, for everything in that experience that is differentiated and individualised.
So it is not difficult to see that what, at this level of the senses, is indeterminate can nonetheless pass, sure of being received, to what exists in a determined order at the level of the memory, a level that is circular, in which intensities of colour and durations of growth and of decline - whose origins lie in the impressions that were received at the level of the senses - become like so many milestones, marking the intervals imposed by a cadence that is invariable. For example: every possible variety of red can find an equivalent colour with which it can establish a resonance in the moving path of the chromatic circle. That resonance will enable it to assume its mobile nature. From the unmoving it passes to the moving, which is to say that, from being a spatial extension, it passes into the periodicity of time. It dies to what is experienced by the senses, and to the immobility that is its principle characteristic - it dies to its own individuality - to rise again to the memory, to the movement of succession in which its appearance as a red will be totally transformed. This movement of succession will reveal it in its fullness because everything it had absorbed in order, selfishly, to affirm its lowest level as a colour at the level of the senses, will be revealed. So that, from red it will pass to violet, from violet to indigo, from indigo to blue, from blue to green, from green to yellow, from yellow to orange. And, as it has delivered itself up to something greater, something more complete, so it will have achieved a level of reality that is higher than that level on which, previously, it was isolated and immobilised. And, when the cycle has been completed, when there is nothing now that is lacking, then it will die to this level of memory, to this movement of the rainbow, to be reborn yet again, in light.
What I have indicated in the case of ONE colour can also be realised for a harmonious arrangement of several colours, since colour, by its very nature, is capable of establishing resonances for as many combinations of colours as you like. One more comment: the death to the rainbow and the resurrection in light will take place through a relation of intensity which will bring those themes and harmonies which correspond to the level of the senses together with the fugue or counterpoint which correspond to the memory. This intensity will itself stand outside colour. It is here, between black and white - in grey, consequently - that the luminous intensity of the longed-for realisation will be revealed.