the color

From August 2023 (I think):

I heard the color is going away. I wondered whether this could be to do with the way we had imagined the future back in the fifties—if we had then started edging toward it as directed.

And what if the spaceships were all colorful inside? (Often the enemy ships are—as if somehow “primitive.”) Why shouldn’t they be? Because we need interchangeable parts, for repair?

If we really valued color, we could find so many ways to incorporate it into our imagined space craft.

I don’t know at what point after the outbreak of the pandemic I became aware of the much-remarked-upon loss of color in objects created by humans, but it probably wasn’t at the earliest possible moment. I only became aware of the multitude of findings from the analysis of the collections digitally documented by the Science Museum Group that was so quoted by those interested in the direction of our aesthetic world this year, but I had encountered some of the conclusions others were drawing in the summer of 2022, a summer during which we had no childcare, and all of my thinking was done in an in-between state.

A reconstruction:

Looking at the much-circulated image showing the diminishing spectrum of all colors other than grey, my mind seems to have turned immediately to spaceships. I asked why so many had imagined future environments as grey and metallic, devoid of texture or color. I asked why so often it was only the ships of adversaries that incorporated warm colors or organic shapes (here I imagine that I was primarily thinking of Stark Trek). I started to wonder whether there could be a practical reason for all the sameness and minimalism, whether it could be due to repair-related concerns and constraints. It would certainly speed along repairs and help to keep costs more reasonable if there were a limited number of component shapes required for any given repair.

I was thinking all this when my child saw me writing with a pen in a notebook and immediately wanted to do the same. He had seen me write things, he had heard me spell things, and he knew some letters. So he took the pen and made six or so roughly letter-sized markings, each occupying an adjacent but recognizably discrete space on a line, but none of which resembled any letters. Then he started to explain:

First, that the letters he had written were L, T, and U (they were not).

Second, that he had spelled the word “Babbo,” what he calls his father.

Next, he acknowledged that he hadn’t quite written what he claimed to have written, saying that this was a “broken name,” and asking me to write the “fixed name.”

Finally, he underscored his still-illiterate status by trying to make baby sounds. However, he found himself as unable to convincingly imitate a baby as he had been incapable of producing accurate letters and spelling a word. He explained this by blaming the space we were in, which had apparently transformed him: “This room took my baby sounds.”

I have marked this space in my notes, framing his attempt, marking my notes on the interaction off from my thoughts on space ships with lines on the side, like the text of earlier emails in replies.

The mode of every paragraph not marked in this way is judgmental, culminating in a final judgment after the interruption, that certainly it would be possible to make our imagined space craft more colorful, if that matters to us (as it seemed to matter to everyone reacting to the color analysis at the time). I was thinking about imagining the past and the future, and I maintained distance from the worlding under consideration throughout.

In the interruption, I exercise no judgment. Even the explanations of meaning included above were added now, in retrospect. In the marked-off section, I simply recounted what was happening as a record, as an aide-memoire.

I suppose I believe myself now that I would like spaceships in science fiction to be portrayed in a variety of colors whenever possible, but I remember viscerally how much I loved Cal’s little multi-edged spirals, how I tried to put off the moment when he would learn to write the letters of the Roman alphabet, feeling as if his formal education was creeping in on the innocence of his toddlerhood, preserving examples of this moment I knew to be temporary whenever possible.

Every day, I answer a prompt to “name some things that are temporary,” and I often list a mix of both unpleasant things and precious and ephemeral things. Perhaps the greater variety of colors and natural materials would have felt more precious if they had felt more temporary to those concerned, but on the other hand, the “greying” of the turn of the millennium may be temporary as well.