There is another world, but it is in this one.
—Paul luard
In a phantasmagoric way, I've often imagined life to be naked before the light fell upon its skin, giving birth to a myriad of shades, and at the end, when the world is drawn of all life, it goes back to where it came from. It goes back to being as bare as white. Birth to death, the primer to everything remains white. The color of our skin varies, while the bone remains the same for all.
When numerous colors come together, it forms white, yet white remains colorless for many. However, this profound realization remained obscured when I was studying fine arts. My white poster color bottle was the least used. It silently dried out, waiting to be touched by the bristles of my brush. I realized we never pay attention to what's omnipresent. The ubiquitous is the least noticed. Perhaps the innate ability to absorb the everydayness of all tints, tones, silence, and sounds makes white the unheeded shade of love—an emotion that's all-encompassing, limitless, unbound and intrinsic. Everything that we do as an act of love might be tinged in various colors, but the base note is imbued in white.
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Love is paper, canvas, muslin, waiting to be touched by an expression. How terrifying is this blankness yet, filled with innumerable possibilities! But what do we make of it? How little do we play and how timid is our dance? How will we ever know how to love if we are constantly afraid of what we pour into it? Like the color white, love is primordial to life and inevitable as death. We are born smeared in love and die, devoid of it. I wonder when Leonard Cohen wrote Famous Blue Raincoat , what color was he drenched within.
Last December, Maa passed away, leaving behind broken shards of her life, unfinished stories, things tucked away inside cluttered drawers, memories hanging on shelves within musty cupboards. And all I remember of her is green lines upon a dry river bed, her gnarled profusion of varicose veins growing like unruly foliage upon her pale white skin. Maa loved and gave abundantly despite her pride and shame, even when she had nothing. Perhaps she had a colourless heart that loved without differentiating the honest from the conniving. Rebecca Solnit, in her essay, wrote, “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost." For me, my love for Maa is white. The white that's never been seen but is felt in the air as the lingering fragrance when the shiulidies upon the breast of dawn.
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Nitish Mohanty is a visual artist
