I like yellow, and I truly do. Perhaps one that is less direct. Perhaps one that is generated by the street light that vanishes in day but lives at night. Last spring, I passed by a huge tree with lush foliage in Upper West Side, New York. I knew it was green, a variety of different green and even a little bit of white, but primarily green. However, when I walked by it at night, it turned out to be convoluted. It was an indescribable kind of yellow, too hard to say if it was a yellow-ish green or a green-ish yellow, or perhaps both. It felt that the colors were carefully planned and mixed, applied and erased, covered and remixed between the lights and the tree. It was delicate and specific, in a natural way, that even a little breeze would break the combination and balance. I wanted to take a picture of the color on my phone, but how hilarious, the yellow light turned to be a gigantic flare in camera that was not even yellow. It was more of white, as if a white paint unconsciously dropped on a rough, grainy canvas and by accident, covered the most of it. And when I looked further, the white wall of a nearby building also seemed to be a warm, yellow-ish one. I even questioned whether the yellow-ishness inherently existed in the material or was a pure reflection, but it was never easy to tell. And again, all the yellow lights tuned into white paint in the camera. Drip, drip, drip.
I realized that it was the color that could not be captured but only to be perceived. But how do I know if my perception is the same as yours? Perhaps the radiance and reflection of yellow light is not a color but an idea of color. One that is so dependent on individual’s perception yet has the power to turn everything into a wide variety and richness of yellow. Indeed, it is a world of yellow, like the world of color we live in day or the world of black-and-white we sketch.
Now I say yellow, for there is a transient moment that the world is not pursuing differences but finds similarities, for some time in a day that everything is not bustling and competing, but silently merging into an inseparable whole.
In it I feel true peace and joy, even just for a moment, even it is unnamed, nor recordable.