Читать книгу Color - Karen Speerstra - Страница 9

“Darkness, become a light-possessing darkness.”

A Maori chant

He was born shortly after four on a Sunday morning—matins hour, the darkest time of the night. My doctor plunked all eight- and- a-half pounds of our younger son onto my stomach and I gasped at the heft of this precious being. He looked up at me and squinted his big blue eyes as if to say, “What’s all this light?” I looked back down at him and mumbled, “What’s all this gray-greenish-whitish stuff covering your body?” It was the first time I’d ever seen a newborn. I had squeamishly vacated my body during the birth of our first son, but for this one, I was determined to be awake.

I learned later this was normal. Vernix caseosa wraps most full-term babies at birth. It means “cheesy” and it helped him to slip out, kept him warm, and may have provided a little antibacterial barrier.

As an embryo he had only experienced a deep blue. “This color is not even and dull, it is full of the radii and patterns of the veins, nerves and tissue density. It is subject also to changes of external light, day and night, and is affected further by electric light and the colors which are worn by the mother during pregnancy.”¹

So our “cheesy” son, Nate, left the soft watery upside-down darkness of my womb in order to explore a new world of creation. He came forth, as all good Scandinavian children do, from “Ginnungagap, The Mighty Yawning Gap” where all life begins. Heaviness hardened but, as the early poets tell us, that “Yawning Void was lighted by sparks and glowing masses.”²

At some point he must have begun to ask: What is this light? And how did it get here? He studied English in college and no doubt ran across Milton’s description of light as “the prime work of God.” And Shelley’s “the white radiance of eternity.”