(There's No Such Thing As) The Color Purple

Unless you know what they look like, colors are impossible to describe. A blind person cannot be told—with any degree of accuracy—what the color green looks like. Color is one of those immaterial, “all in our heads” kind of thing. Light strikes an object and bounces off. This light hits our eye and our brain takes this light and interprets color—in a way I so complicated that I may as well call it “magic.” The surfaces of objects determine their color. Simply: whatever color an object is—that’s the wavelength of light the object absorbs the most of, the rest of the colors trapped inside a beam of light is “scattered.” If a surface scatters all wavelengths we see it as white, likewise, if all the wavelengths are absorbed we see black.

There are some people who are blind and see nothing and then there the “color blind.” These people have trouble seeing some colors because of a genetic defect in their eyes. All of this is remarkable and hard to grasp at the same time—in reality an object’s color has more to do with the light that is shining on it AND the person viewing it. For some reason this always reminds me of the classic “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it” question. I realize that all of this is very Zen, and probably bores most people to tears so I’ll get on with it.
Purple.

The word “purple” is a very strange word to me. Besides the numerous connotations to the color (royalty, homosexuality, Easter), there are a number of ideas…concepts or feelings that purple instantly brings to mind. Swollen, vulgar, unlikely, comical, and unhealthy. I think about flowers, of course, and I think about a bruise. Then there’s Barney the Dinosaur and Grimace the…whatever the hell he is over in McDonald’s. Of course, no matter how old I get, I’ll never forget my crazy 4th grade Art Teacher, Miss Whatshername.

In my experience, 99% of all Art Teachers are insane. I’m not talking a “bit-barmy-he-enjoys-opening-umbrellas-indoors”…I’m talking “fucking-nuts-he enjoys-opening-umbrellas-indoors…umbrellas-made-of human-flesh.” My cousin’s wife is an Art Teacher in Kansas, and while she’s a nice, normal sort, I assure you she is the exception to the rule. Art Teachers seem to be living in another world. One where clay speaks (if you know how to listen) and colored pencils should all have names—real names, like Larry or Steve.

After spending five hours mindlessly toiling on worksheets, my 4th grade class would gather our supplies and head to the basement of our school to the “art room.” This room consisted of several long wooden tables, and a few thousand dollars work of Prang watercolors. Oh, and there were drying racks—whole endless rows of drying racks.

Our Art Teacher, Miss Whatshername, would cackle as we entered her domain, like a witch. She usually wore something “Earthy” (think neutral browns, and material made of reeds and burlap sacks). Miss Whatshername had long, grayish hair that was freakishly straight and always wrapped in a do-rag. With her long, bony fingers she’d point us to our seats as we filed into the room.

Miss Whatshername had many peculiarities, but the most startling one was her abject hatred for Purple. This became apparent during our very first meeting when my class sat down to talk about colors. We learned that there are three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. These colors, when mixed in various ways, make all the other colors of the rainbow.

“What are all the colors?” Miss Whatshername asked us from her perch near the chalkboard.

“Orange,” someone said.

“Good!” Miss Whatshername said. “Orange is red and yellow mixed together!”

“Green!” another one of my classmates shouted.

“Ah yes, Green!” Miss Whatshername exclaimed. “Green is yellow and blue mixed together!”

“Purple.”

There was an icy silence as the smile faded from Miss Whatshername’s lips. She stood up slowly, like a dazed car-crash victim.

“What? What was that?”

No one said a word. You could hear a…crayon drop.

Miss Whatshername shuffled over to the chalkboard and picked up a hunk of white, furiously she began to scribble on the dusty white surface. I can still hear the shrill squeak of her chalk as she wrote. I can close my eyes and still see her flabby, middle-aged arm wobble as she angrily wrote one word, then another.

The two words were PURPLE and VIOLET.

“This,” Miss Whatshername said pointing at the word VIOLET. “Is a color, whereas this word…Purple…this is not a color.”

She looked at both the world Purple on the blackboard and us with a look of disgust. We were dirty and unrefined, and so was Purple. We began to murmur amongst ourselves, the venom in Miss Whatshername’s voice had both frightened and excited us. Was this woman serious? We’d been calling it Purple for years and no one had ever said a word about it not being a color.

And anyway, wasn't Violet a flower?

Someone got the idea to check the Crayon box—the good people at Crayola had our backs: the paper wrapper said “Purple.” When this fact was pointed out to Miss Whatshername, she became even more agitated.

“There is no such color as Purple and in my class, no one will use that term!” she shouted above the giggling din.

Was this woman insane?

“Purple…”

“No!” Miss Whatshername exclaimed. “No Purple!”

This was the first time I ever truly disagreed with a teacher. This instance was the first time a person in authority seemed completely stupid. It wasn’t just that I disagreed with what she was saying (she was correct in a way, “Purple” is a general, Old-English term…whereas “Violet” is the correct term for the color achieved by mixing red with blue), it was the manner in which she carried herself as she said it. What she was saying blew our little 4th grade minds. We’d been taught by both our parents and other teachers to call Violet “Purple.” The terms are essentially interchangeable in the everyday (read: non-art class) world.

This woman, this Miss Whatshername, was just being an intellectual snob.

Of course I didn’t know this at the time, but that’s what she was. Miss Whatshername was too good for the common “Purple.” Instead, the only word she’d “hear” in her class was Violet. Over the course of the year few of us would test her (those brave souls). They’d ask her for a Purple colored pencil, to see if she’d unthinkingly hand them a “Violet” one…thus establishing that the two were, in fact, one and the same. Or they’d ask her if they’d used too much Purple paint in their surrealistic lunchroom painting.

But Miss Whatshername never fell for it. She never took the bait; instead she’s just stare at them dumbly. Most of the time the question was asked twice, then it would be either abandoned or amended (“Violet” instead of “Purple”).

What scares me more than almost anything are people like Miss Whatshername. They’re infinitely more dangerous than people might think. Trapped alone with our children, they take impressionable minds and try to mold them, to bend them into their own specific worldview. Not by reason or explanation, but by the imposition of their dominance and authority.

There is no more reality to the word “Violet” than there is to the word “Purple.” Colors, after all, are really abstract concepts. They’re so abstract that one can’t adequately describe them to a blind person. The colors as we see them might not even exist were we not there to see them. That is how terribly tenuous these words (all words) are. My classmates and I weren’t saying “Apple” for “Rhinoceros,” we were using a less specific word to describe red and blue mixed together. One that was taught and accepted by most of the world—our teacher’s reaction was insane. Teachers should teach, not merely impose their knowledge upon their students.

There is no Purple. There is no Violet.