Time and Color

Time and Color

This needs more. But it’s nice right now.

When everything is the same color, time is the same color too. Silence renders the asphalt black, the sky black, the air black. Stillness renders the gravel gray, the sky gray, the air gray. Silence and stillness color time, turning what is seen, as it passes in the moment, the same color as the silence and stillness.

When something is not the same color, it stands out of place, out of time. 75-minutes north of the Institute, March 14^th, 2016, the house on US-41 with the lamp on in the living room at 4:43 am CST. Because it was dark and the house was light, you could see inside from out. There was a clock encased in an octagonal oak wooden case hung on the wall. The black hands, almost to the five and halfway to the nine, on a paper-tan background, encased in the dark-stained oak, super-imposed on the egg-shell wall, bathed in incandescent light, shrouded in darkness of what was not yet morning. An alternating series of the same colors, time simultaneously signified and buried. Present time shown from the inside out.

The same clock read the same time on the same morning, in 1987. If the same person stepped out of the same house, started the same truck and drove the same distance north on the same county road – still unpaved – what year would it be? If the clock displays uninterrupted circular time, what year does it show?

In 1965, after Vatican II, the priest turned to face the parish. Hoc est corpus meum became this is my body, and ritual was brought to the modern age. God and the Devil learned English, but did they have anything different to say?

When I was five years old, my grandmother pointed at the names on the stained-glass windows and said, “those are your ancestors”. I didn’t know the word ancestors and I couldn’t pronounce Giradoux, Francois, or Gremaux, but I could see the church windows turn the sun into color. When I was older, I would see them turn black into color on Christmas night. In the year 2000, the dawn of the new millenium, there I sat on Sunday morning watching the windows shine color on what happened in 1965, the English version of what happened a millennium before then, the Latin version of what had happened before time was at all. The Word became flesh just as there was time for the Word to be spoken, spilling color on the world.