Colours and the huge peak, black and huge

In english literature class at school, we were required to study a selection of poems, including part of Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”. Over the years the “huge peak, black and huge” has gone from a line i considered to be irredeemably ridiculous to one of my favourite lines in any poem.

How does one express unfathomable size in a way that a reader can understand? Adjectives have a half-life: the river of conversation wears them down over the years until they are better suited as a reply to a dinner suggestion than to expressing the feeling that an insurmountable expanse of rock curling around a little human like a toothless, concrete whale imparts. Fancy pizza tonight? Sounds awesome.

And in the reality of that situation would we, with the most advanced linguistic capacities of any species on the planet, look at those jagged cliffs and call them Brobdingnagian to their face? When confronted with superlative, our stacks overflow; words of more than one syllable elude us. When the awesomeness, in the old sense, of nature is revealed to us, all we can think to say is: fuck, that’s big.

Wordsworth has taken that overwhelm and recorded it as it is. In doing so, his description of a mountain doesn’t sound dated. It its simplicity it claws itself onto my brain and it doesn’t let go. A huge peak, black and huge.

When i started university, i wrote a little. I didn’t want to write prose or poetry. I wanted to write things than made my brain feel like an untuned radio, some kind of a metaphor that is no longer understood by half the population. A vast expanse that wraps me in emptiness. I don’t know why this was my desire, but i knew i wanted to be bale to make myself feel the same that i felt when i thought about that huge peak, black and huge. I called it grey prose. Imagine pouring a bottle of black ink into a bathtub and then rinsing out your brain in it. This is an emotion.

Often when people write on the internet, they only use lower-case letters. A stylistic devision which feels out the priorities of these communities. Casual, transient, without beginning or end. Furthermore it frees up the upper case to take on a new role: to symbolise Special Words. The absence of capitals makes their appearance more powerful. And in a poem, the absence of grandiose adjectives forces us to fixate on the mundane.

Personally, i love colours. They are a pure form of expression. They are a power, but one that ought to be used with care. In an ocean, an orange boat claws at you. An entire ocean balanced against one speck. Any more, and the ocean is drowned out, and so is that one boat. A multitude of colour. If everyone is super, no one is.

So it’s not that i don’t like colour. Rather, i want to give colour the space it deserves to fully manifest. I want to drown in one colour, and lots of it, and i don’t want any other colour to affect me while i’m doing so. Perhaps it’s like music. I love to listen to music, but i want to curate that experience, i don’t want two pieces playing at the same time. Space it out. Chew totally, and completely. And swallow.

For these reasons, i am selective about bringing colour into my life. Where and when. I don’t want colours to clash or jar. I don’t want the power to be weakened or the purity to be dirtied. Where possible, i stick to black and white. It turns out this is perfectly possible in most cases. Then, any colour acts as a drop of blue ink in a glass of clear water; it tendrils out in far-reaching ways, filling the space it inhabits, unimpeded.

When the water is saturated with colour, the addition of colour is uninspiring. But when the colour breaks into nothingness, its effect is incomparable.