Black Alexander Theroux BLACK 1S THE STYGIAN well. As a color, truculent, scary, deep and inaccessible, it appears as a kind of abstract unindividualized defi- ciency, a bullying blot with a dangerous genius to it. There is no ingress, It absorbs and efficiently negates all color—in spite of the fact that Claude Monet once pronounced it of all colors the most beautiful—and with the negative aura of nothing more than itself suggests the sinister, dissolution and the permanence of disease, destruction and death. As Jan Morris says in [and of| Fisher's Face, reminding me of black, “One does not like that queer withdrawal into the expressionless.” It is a color rightly described in the words of Henry James as portentously “the fate that waits for one, that dark doom that rides.” It shocks us in the saccade of its sudden, inky pro- hibition but becomes as well in the inscrutable deepness of sleep the backdrop of all our dreams, and is sometimes even a comfort. {Dickens wrote, “Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”) With its syntax of hidden and unverifiable dimension, black has no index- icality but remains for the fat prohibitive hachuring of its drawn drapes a distinct code above all colors that, like espionage, legislates no place signs or particularity. In its relentless boldness, black is both atcociously present and atrabiliously absent. No one would deny that the color black in its solid vagabondage, forgive the paradox, barges into things, and how its bigness booms. ‘There is nevertheless relief, arguably, in seeing the ultimate value of “yeality,” and it is here, perhaps, that black allows for any continu- ing comfort. Is that why Henri Matisse declared, “Black is the color of light,’" in spite of the fact that in color theory black is the absence of light? No pure colors in fact exist. Black and white, which are banished from chroma, at least in the minds of many if not most people, in the same way 0 and 1 were once denied the status of numbers—solid ‘Aristotle long ago defined number as an accumulation or “heap"— are each other's complements just as they remain each other's oppo- sites. It this too paradoxical? W. H. Auden wrote, 115Alexander Theroux ‘Where are the brigands ‘most commonly to be found? Where boundaries converge. Weirdly, black is: darkness truly is our destiny at both ends of life. And yet it is not: “And those wonderful people out there in the dark,” declares creepy, decaying, old, seli-deluded Norma Desmond, when there is nothing out there at all. If an object absorbs all the wavelengths. We call it black, in the same way, for example, that a leaf that absorbs red light looks grecn to us or a stained-glass window that absorbs blue looks orange. And yet how can we legitimately call what is so full of other colors, whether white or black, one color? There is beyond its almost muscular intensity an irreconcilable force to the sheen of its light and shape of its lutulence, ut tensio sic wis: “as the tension, so the power.” Black both is and it is not: disguises appear, we use aliases, and silently stand before that unabsorbing wall. The color black is the extreme, high-gravity, bombed-out, cave- blot color of Nox, Rahu, Quashee, Hela, Erebus, Sambo, Maevis and, deader than Dead Sea fruit with black ashes inside, it is the dark side of the Manichean alternative More often than not, it is with black as with Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which in its deep complexity, in Bruno Walter's phrase, “utters a decided ‘No.’ It is a color specifically inimical to white, including its thousand shades and tints and tones, along with what is in between. (Techni- cally speaking, tints are colors that also contain white; shades, colors that contain black, and tones are those colors containing gray.] We call an object black if it has absorbed all wavelengths. Ordinary sunlight (or white light) is a mixture of light at all wavelengths—or all colors. A material that we perceive to be colored, of whatever color, has absorbed certain visible wavelengths and not others. Black and white, however, as polar extremes most significantly both em- body what Paul Fussell, discussing the nature of enemies, refers to as “the versus habit,” one thing opposed to another, not, as he explains, “with some Hegelian hope of synthesis involving a dissolution of both extremes (that would suggest a ‘negotiated peace,’ which is anathemal, but with a sense that one of the poles embodies so wicked a deficiency or flaw or perversion that its total submission is called for.” In this sharp dichotorny along the lines of “us” versus “them,” black is—legendarily, has always been—precisely that 116Alexander Theroux wickedness. If white is known, safe, open and visible; black, un- known, hostile, closed and opaque, is the masked and unmediated alternative. Is it not clear in the confrontation of chess? ‘The board detains them until dawn in its hard compass: the hatred of two colors writes Jorge Luis Borges in “Chess.” Ithas an unholiness all about it, does black. “Your blood is rotten! Black as your sins!” cries Bela Lugosi in the film Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). Doesn't the devout Moslem pray for the Kaaba's return to whiteness, which has turned black by the sins of men? Is nat black the color of chaos, witchcraft, black magic, mad alchemy and the black arts? “Some negroes who believe in the Resurrection, think that they shall rise white,” writes Sir Thomas Browne in Christian Morals (1716). And what of the darkness of bondage? The descent into hell? Evil? The word black is, more often than not, con- sidered somewhat of a rude and insulting adjective, especially in English, serving as a dark, maledroit, prefixal name or term like “Dutch” and “psycho” and “gypsy.” What puzzle can ever be worked of the spasmodic record of all it portends? Who in the es- sence of its ultimate reduction does not disappear? No animal or bird can see in total darkness. What is the color of the Congo? Boom- black! Jew’s pitch! Nightmare! The bituminous side of life. Coal- black trolls. Demons. Bats. Moles. Fish alone can live in the unravel- lable inscrutableness of darkness. Coclacanths, blind as stones! ing to the song “Think Pink” in Funny Face (1957) what should be done with black, blue and beige, remember? Banish the black, burn the blue and bury the beige! In Saint-Saéns's Danse Macabre, the white skeleton may terrifyingly dance in the darkness, but it is Death playing the violin. After the ominous scriptural caveat “Whoever touches pitch will be defiled” (Sirach 12), the color black has never stood a chance. The rule was writ. Watch, for the night is coming. Why speak of Cimmeria and unearthly mythologies? Darkness is right above us. Space itself is perpetual night, an atmosphere as black and haunted as the Apocalypse, totipalmate, hovering, suifoblanket- ing our entire and endless universe in which, crouching in total enigma, we lost inchlings squat in fear with headfuls of questions. How caught we are by its vastnesses. Midnight, according to Henry 7Alexander Theroux David Thoreau, is as unexplored as the depths of central Africa. “Tt is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose,” he wrote in his diary at Walden Pond. "I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn.” Old-timers in New Hampshire used to say of a winter's blackness, “This is a gripper of a night.’ But don’t we know, by what we fear, what blackness is by the state of our natu- ral condition? Black intimidates us. As the line from the old song “Lovin’ Sam (The Sheik of Alabam|,” tells us, “That's what it don’t do nothin’ else, ‘cep.” On the other hand, what with any clarity defines whiteness? No, W. B. Yeats is correct: nothing can live at the poles (”... there's no human life at the full or the dark”). No activity can be discovered there, no incarnations. They are gloomy waste places in the extreme, noncerebral and brainless and uninhabited, recalling for me the phrase by which Laurel and Hardy were once described: “two minds without a single thought.” Orthochromatics shock us, before any- thing else, not only in the insolence of their extremes, but in the way they are part of the same destitution. Schiller asserted, “Verwandt sind sich alle starke Seele”—" All strong spirits are related.” Black suggests grief, loss, melancholy and chic. It also connotes uniformity, impersonality, discipline and, often as the symbol of im- perial order, jackbooted force and Prussian dominance. It is the color of Captain Mephisto and the dark lunar half of the Zoroastrian puzzle, with the kind of legendarily subtcrrancan and inscrutable, praealtic malignity apposite to it that conjures up the sort of words on which writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft constantly selied, like “unutterable,” “hideous,” “loath- some” and “appalling.” It is the color of the contrarian, the critic and the crepe-hanger. It is airless, above all, hermeneutically closed, a larcenous color which in its many morphs of mourning and con. comitant glumness is wholly subject, like André Gide’s brooding immoralist, to “evasive and unaccountable moods.” What could be ‘worse than to be destitute of light and at the same time incapable of reflecting it? Blackness tends to envelop and overwhelm a person by dint of the largeness of volume in which it appears or is presented to one, in the very same way that the faster you wall the more your peripheral vision narrows. The Japanese adjective usui means not only thin as to wideh but light as to color. What other color in the spectrum comes at you point-blank and so directly yet without 118Alexander Theroux access? It is immoderate and almost autoerotic in what subrationally but somehow inexorably it suggests of possibility in the theatrical, untiring and even violent depth of its inscrutable vastness. The dark- ness of black is the part of its brooding deepness inviting dreams. The soul of the color harbors in its holophrastic enigma all sorts of moods, including deliberation and delay. Didn't Rodin tell us, “Slow- ness is beauty’? There is gravity in the batwing-black of its weight, pull and shocking hue. It is the very medium of stark, rigorous nega- tivity, a storm in Zanzibar, the black cataracts of Stygia, Kanchen- junga and its ferocious clouds, black maelstroms, black goat tents, catafalques, of defeaturing and helmeting shadows, rebellion and revolt, the unforgiving, spectral grimace fetched up in beetling frowns—the color of Spartacus, Robespicrrc, Luther, Marat, Sam Adams, Marx and Lenin and Mao, intractable Prometheus and defi- ant Manfred. From thy own heart I then did wring ‘The black blood in its blackest spring Mystery doesn't so much surround the color black as it defines it If color symbolizes the differentiated, the manifest, the affirmation of light—and is not God, as light, ultimately the source of color!— black in turn indicates primordial darkness, the non-manifest, renunciation, dissolution, gravity. Isn't it sadly apposite to the sur- reptitious ways of man himself? Didn’t André Malraux write perspi- caciously in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg “Essentially a man is what he hides”? Don't we placate by our reliance on black the very color with which we most identify? A wife in Africa to be fertile often wears a black hen on her back. In Algeria, black hens are sac- rificed. A black fowl in certain folklores, if buried where caught, is alleged to cure epilepsy. In medieval France, the limbs of black ani- mals when applied warm to the limbs of the body supposedly relieved cheumatism. Chimney sweeps wear black as a totem with the same credulity that bandits in Thailand and Myanmar adorn themselves with protective tattoos. In Ireland, England—even Ver- mont—black wool to many people provides a cure for earache, just as in Russia it cures jaundice. Who can explain why for Rimbaud in his Vowels the letter A was black? Or why Beethoven thought that the key of B minor was black? No, enigma is only another word for black. We spend half our lives in curved shadows and in the sleep of dark, occlusive nights that arc as “slocblack, slow, black, 19Alexander Theroux crow black,” as Dylan Thomas said of his own Welsh |‘‘fishing- boat-bobbing”) sea, and that are every bit as vast and profoundly mysterious. Wet is black. On a gray day, in neutral light, with a faint drizzle, stones of almost any stripe quite vividly take on colors. As Adrian Stokes writes, the passing of water on stone gives a sense of organic formation and erosion, so that the stone seems “alive.” Robert Frost in “The Black Cottage” notes, “A front with just a door between two windows/Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black.” Cactus spines shine strangely red or gold in deserts during wet weather, just as creo- sote bushes become olive after rain. Most things darken when wet. ‘And brighten when dark. And glisten when bright. Even swimmers. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures even said of his swimming star, Esther Williams, “Dry, she ain’t much. Wet, she’s a star.” Darkness is also depth. The depth of black is determined by the penetration of light, which equals color when light is translated to pigment. A color with great tinting power allows in a lot of light. The stronger a tint is, the more transparent it may seem. The darker the wampum, the more valuable it was in trade. Native Americans sought dark clam shells from the English colonists who were compelled to use wampum in tading with them. Fr. Joseph Frangois Lafitau, the French Jesuit, wrote in Manners of the American Savages in 1724 that in his time the uswal strand of a wampum belt was eleven strands of 180 beads or about 1,980 beads. Three dark (or six whitc| beads were roughly the equivalent of an English penny. Black water in its stillness goes deeper than the ramparts of Dis. Clouds loom high above us, ominous, profoundly dark, yet shifting. There is a “black wind,” the beshabar, a dry melancholy wind that blows northeaster- ly out of the Caucasus. “Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper time and place,”’ declares Robert Louis Stevenson on the chiaroscuro wrought by wind, observing how “pleasant [it is] to see them [the clouds] brandish great masses of shadow.” Black is a maelstrom oddly inviting, winding about, ever beckon- ing us. It is a veiled temple, emptiness, the Balzacian abyss, “the mystery for which we are all greedy.” Just as darkness is depth, cor- ners are hidden and dark and inaccessible. Black is not only recessed but even in its most noble aspects never far from surreption and stealth, Is that not why silos are round? (Silage spoils in corners.) Black can be sullen as distant thunder, heavy as lead, here starkly blunt, there preternaturally atraluminous. It is also unlived-in, too authentic, embowered, conspiratorial, rarely tender-hearted, cruelly 120Alexander Theroux cold, uninviting, casket-heavy, thick, explosive, mur and uncata- logably dead. 1 think of Peggy Lee, singing the heartbreaking “Yesterday I Heard the Rain.” ut of doorways black umbrellas come to pursue me Faceless people as they passed vere looking through me No one knew me Gene Lees, who wrote it, around 1962, told me it was a song about the loss of faith. Black is the color without light, curtain dark, the portcullis-drop- ping color of loss, humility, grief and shame. Although to the human eye everything visible has a color, where color exists as an optical phenomenon, with a place already constructed for it in the human imagination, what can be said of the color black? Js black visible? Is it even a color? Or in some kind of grim, ruinous thunderclap and with a sort of infernal and ghastly force does it somehow smother color? Wholly destitute of color, is it the result of the absence of—or the total absorption of—light? It is patently not included among Andrew Lang's color fairy books. It is, oddly, not the color of blind. ness. “I can still make out certain colors. I can still see blue and green,” said Jorge Luis Borges, who added, ironically, that the one color he did not see in his blindness was black, the color of night. He said, “I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was both- ered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind.” Achromatopsy can involve partial or complete loss of calor vision, where shades of gray are seen. (Robert Boyle spoke of this phenomenon as early as 1688.) To sufferers of such color deficiency, most foods appear disgusting—things like tomatoes appear black, for example. A patient of Dr. Oliver Sacks in 1987 became a victim of such dislocating misperception: "His wife's skin seemed to him to be rat-colored,” Sacks observed, “and he could not bear to make love to her. His vision at night was so acute that he could read license plates for four blocks away. He became, in his words, ‘a night person” ‘Many World War II pilots had the singular experience of actually seeing black, when, during “blackouts,” pulling out of a dive—they could often hear but not see—blood quickly drained out of their 1Alexander Theroux heads and flowed into their abdomen and legs, whereupon immedi- ately they “sticked” high to gain altitude and usually came fully alert. There are no commercial airplanes painted black. It is far too inkily deathful and crepuscular a hue. Mast modern aircraft, in fact, have bright white fuselage tops largely to reflect sunlight and reduce rising cabin temperatures. Flight data recorders, introduced in 1965 and dubbed “black boxes” by the media, in spite of the fact that they are invariably orange, traditionally share that nickname with any electronic “box of tricks,” as I leamed when, teaching at MIT, I found twenty examples so named. Black, unlike white, has comparatively far less of what Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis calls “pop-out." Crick speaks of the “spotlight” of visual attention regarding the matter of human perception. “Outside the spotlight, information is processed less, or differently or not at all.” In relation to what the Hungarian psychol- ogist Bela Julesz calls “preattentive processing,” boundaried objects—and colors—are targets, as it were. According to Monet, Cezanne habitually kept a black hat and white handkerchief next to a model in order to ascertain, to fix, to examine the two poles between which to establish his “values.” Although white can be considered a highly “salient” color, black with its remorseless absorption, assimilating all wavelengths, utterly engorging light, lacks such definition. Any radiation that strikes a “black hole,” for example, is utterly absorbed, never to reappear. “A material that absorhs all light that falls on it is black, which is how this particular beast received its ominous name,” write Robert Hazen and James Trefil in Science Matters. You could say that the color black is an “unattended” event, as it were, with no “fixation point.” It detargets a visual place by its very nature, blots things out, becomes the ulti- mate camouflage. It is, as a distractor, the color of grimness and goodnight. The high dark fog in San Dicgo is called El velo de Ja luz, the veil that hides the light. FD.R. had the metal parts of his leg braces |“ten pounds of steel,” he once pointed out) painted deep black at the ankles, so as to escape detection against his black socks and shoes. ““Gobos” jor “flats,” “niggers” or “flags”) are those large black cloth shades used on Hollywood sets to block out unwanted light from the camera lens in order to avoid halation and other unde- sirable effects. Black by definition scumbles objects. Where is it half the time when we can discem it? Isn't rude, unfor- giving black, impossibly covert like midnight and airport macadam and prelapsarian ooze, merely a spreading brainless giant without 122Alexander Theroux shape or contour? Contour, remember, almost always changes a color’s tone. A square centimeter of blue, Matisse argued, is not the same as a square meter of the same blue. Beyond that even, the extent of the area changes the tone, as well. And isn’t black in its fat merciless gravitation almost by definition arealess? Without boundaries, at least without easily perceptible boundaries, black can be comfortless for that. If it doesn't threaten us, it can make us feel uneasy. Purple, which comes between blue and ultraviolet, resem- bles black in this. Although we accept that ultraviolet exists, there is little evidence of it in our daily lives. (The best evidence we have is sunburns and cataracts, neither of which are close to purple.) Black is bottomless, autogyromotive and indirigible. Given Spinaza’s ob- servation that everything longs to endure in its being, doesn't black, more than any other struggling tinct, show an unpardoning tendency to be its own archetype, traveling, not like night, but with a kind of deep and unspellable horror reaching, stretching out, gathering, by ‘way of everything from the monstrositous depth of children's form- Jess nightmares to the gruesome hood-black anonymity of an execu- tioner's reality, very like bony Death's harvesting hand? 1 wonder, does black invoke what might be called “enemy-mem- ory”? Or is black itself the enemy-memory? The witches on the back fence? The wreck into which we dive? Didn’t Italo Calvino warn us, “The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things”? We tend to go wild in lunar light, in dark light, in the grip of the “night mysterious,” as the song lyric goes. As Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando} tells Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons} in the film of the Broadway musical Guys @ Dolls, "Sarah, 1 know the nighttime, I live in it. It does funny things to you.” The question we pose of night, when we do not recoil from it, recalls for me certain lines from “Night Voices,” a passionately personal poem which the young German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1943, two years before he was hanged by the Nazis in the Flossenburg concentration camp: Isink myself into the depths of the dark. ‘You night, full of outrage and evil, ‘Make yourself knawn to me! ‘Why and for how long will you try our patience? A deep and long silence; Then I hear the night bend down to me: “Tam not dark; only guilt is dark!” —tronslaced by Keith R. Crim 123Alexander Theroux ‘As a color, black goes in more than several directions. It is the color of Saturn; the number 8—if for Pythagoras numbers have designs, why can’t they have colors?—and symbolizes in China the North, yin, winter, water, as well as the tortaise among the Four Spiritually Endowed Animals, Ek Xib Chac, the western spirit of the Mayan rain-god, Chac, was black. In the Kabbala, black carries a value of understanding, while black in heraldry stands for prudence and wisdom. In the world of alchemy it is the color of fermentation. To ancient Egyptians, black symbolized rebirth and resurrection. Many Native American tribes who held the color black to be a powerful talisman wore it as war paint in battle and for feathers, because it made the warrior invulnerable. It is the fathomless color of everything from Nazi parachutes to Hernando’s Hideaway, “where all you see are silhouettes,” to the famous lunar eclipse on August 27, 413 B.c., which contributed to the terrible defeat of the Athenians (soothsayers, seeing the portent, advised delay) at the hands of the Spartans under Gylippus. What metaphor of need or hope or aspiration cannot be constructed of the ongoing paradox that black attracts the sun? The whole idea recapitulates the entire his- torical phenomenon of opposites: of the Beauty and the Beast, of ‘Venus and Vulcan, of Plus and Minus, of Innocence and Guilt, of Death and Transfiguration. Noctiluca, “she who shines by night,” ‘wonderful paradox, is a classical synonym for Diana. Among some of the wilder, more extravagant and overingenious schemes presented over time to deal with the threat of dangerous, destructive glaciers, such as blowing them up, towing them, ete., someone once seriously suggested painting them solid black so that they would melt under the hot sun! Although no two color blacks are alike—some would argue that one can almost always find a subtle and misleading gradualness of tone in whatever two examples are set side by side—as a basic color black seems, more often than not, invariable, solid, like no other, la verita effetuale della cosa, the nature of fact, truc, although it has as many adjectives as it has hues—jet, inky, ebony, coal, swart, pitch, smudge, livid, sloe, raven, sombre, charcoal, sooty, sable and crow, among others. Things get smutched, darkened, scorched, besmirched in a thousand ways. (Common black pigments like ivory, bone, lamp, vine and drop black all basically consist of carbon obtained by burning various materials,} It is a color that reminds me in its many odd morphs of what photographer Diane Arbus chose to call freaks, “the quiet minorities,” for its hues seem never the same, seem never 124Alexander Theroux alike, and in their enigmatic sombreness, like freaks, having passed their trials by fire—black is the end—are, as Arbus once said of her odd subjects, often ogled by people pleading for their own to be post- poned, Isn't it strange that if you're “in the black,” you are doing well, but if your “future looks black,” things are bad? Its profundity is its mystery. The way of what the depth of black in going beyond deepness hides of, as well as defines in, the color reminds me of what Martin Heidegger once said of Carl Orff's musical language, “Die Sprache der Sprache zur Sprache zu bringen,” that it gives voice to the language of language. The color is an irrational and complicated achromatic, a tetrical, heat-eating, merciless, unforgiving and ob- durate color, jayhawking you in a hundred ways, and in certain riddling guises it often reminds me of Frank Sinatra’s “Tt Never Entered My Mind,” a song Ol’ Blue Eyes sings quite brilliantly but which, filled with sharps and flats and atonal glissandi, con- stantly strikes me, an amateur, mind you, as almost impossible to sing. There are many shades and faded grades in the parade of black, very like the turbid and half-turbid sounds found in Japanese writing and pronunciation. It is not commonly compared to song, however. The spoken word sounds like a gunshot. Blak! As a pronounced word it has the sudden. finality of a beheading. Blak! What a convinced declaration is made, for example, in Rouault’s black line! Or Beckmann’s! Or de Koon- ing’s! Henri Rousseau did not want lines. He sought to make a line happen, as in nature, by arranging the delicate contrast between con- tingent colors. Art, it may be argued, like personality, like character, like human behavior, is fractal—its contours cannot be mapped. Who first conjured the color black, however, sharing with Robert Frost, who frequently wrote of the dark, the stormy “inner weather” within us, surely insisted fences made good neighbors. What is of particular interest is that Frost, a poet often highly pessimistic and more than well acquainted with the night, also believed that blackness had to be faced. Remember in his poem “The ‘Night Light” how he chides a woman who while she sleeps bums a lamp to drive back darkness, declaring, “Good gloom on her was thrown away”? The origins of the word black (ME blak, OE blaee, ON blakkr| go back to flamma (flame), and flagrare (L, to blaze up), words having to do with fire, flame, things that have been bumed—compare blush, bleak, blind, flare and flicker—and is ultimately formed from the Indo-European bhleg, to burn with black soot or to burn black with 125Alexander Theroux soot, There are several Anglo-Saxon and Early English words for black or darkness: piesternesse (darkness), biaéqimm (jet) and blakaz (black). We find “blake” in The Ancren Riwle, or "Rule of Nuns,” ca. 1210, and in King Horn, before a.D. 1210 (“He wipede bat blake of his swere”). A couplet from The Story of Havelock the Dane, an Anglo-Saxon tale, before A.D. 1300, goes as follows: Ina poke, ful and blac, Sone he caste him on his bac But do we in fact get our English word from sound symbolism or mispronunciation? Different meanings, amazingly enough, have derived from the very same original word by way of a sequence of semantic shifts and in the process ironically have moved in the oppo- site direction, as is evident in Old English in which blaéc is “black.” But the word blac, with no other phonetic difference than that of a vowel, actually once denoted, according to Anglo-Saxon scholars W. W. Skeat, Rev. Richard Morris and T. Wedgwood, what we now think of as its opposite. The original meaning of black is “pale,” “colorless,” “blank” or “white.” Is this not astonishing? The word black (Anglo-Saxon blac, bla@c\, which is fundamentally the same as the old German blach—a word now only to be found in two or three compounds, eg, Blachfeld, a level ficld—originally meant level, bare and by extension bare of color. According to William S, Walsh's Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, the nasalized form of black is blank, a word which originally signified bare, and was used in the sense of white specifically and logically because white is (apparently) bare of color. In Anglo-Saxon we read, “Se mona mid his blacan leohte"—the moon with her pale light. An old poet praises the beauty of “blac hleor ides"—the pale-cheeked girl or woman. Blac in Beowulf means “bright,” “brilliant.” In the great hall, Beowulf sees Grendel’s mére for the first time by the bright fire. light—“fyr-Ieéoht zeseah, blacne Iéoman'" (1. 1516). The Old English infinitive blaécan means not “to blacken” but rather “to bleach.” Our words bleak and bleach—is this not passing strange?—are from the same root. In the north of England, the word blake, as applied to butter or cheese, means “yellow.” So now you know the essential difference between black and white. Theze is none! Weirdly, in the etymological sense, black means white. Black is white! 126