Colors / Blond

“Colors” is a column in which a writer responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet.

The color assigned to me was blond. I expected navy blue. I love navy blue. I love most blues, but especially proud, night-warm navy blue. But I have blond. I am not blond, though I was briefly, on the cusp of memory, when I was very small. I don’t think the onset of episodic memory caused my hair to darken, though it would be interesting if it turns out that this is what happened. Interesting and weird. If this happened to everyone, it would explain the stereotype that blonds both have more fun and are not so bright. As we frequently associate intelligence with memory, then the period in our lives when we were utterly carefree and remembered next to nothing but bright images—of the cool water of Lake Superior, the hot breath of a dog, the strong arms of my father, the smell of my mother—would be the blond one. When I was little I was blond, and from that Eden I was expelled, and given in parting a gift—memory. Not of it, not of Eden, but of everything to come.

When a friend of the family (we had a somewhat strange family) explained, or tried to explain, Plato’s theory of ideas to me when I was a child, I remember not understanding most of it, and that the part I did understand seemed really silly. Maybe because I lacked the philosophical temperament, because I lacked a sense of the noumenal. I was actually very interested in philosophy, and one day I came across a passage where Dr. Johnson—a commonsensical fellow—ended, to his satisfaction, a debate with someone who had been presenting reasons for doubting the substantial existence of the material world by kicking a stone and saying, “Sir, I refute you thus!” I may be misremembering, but that is not the point.

Elsewhere, Dr. Johnson spoke of a young man who had been endeavoring to study philosophy, “but cheerfulness kept breaking through.” This was something of my problem; this and the fact that I used to think all wrong about the noumenal. I kept trying to raise the glass ceiling above which I was to locate the ideas, to put them in some remote place in my material world, instead of embracing the idea that ideas are out of this world, that they dwell elsewhere, and are revealed everywhere. Which is also to say: instead of taking seriously the seriously strange and wondrous fact that we can know anything at all, which is all Plato was trying to understand in the first place. I have lots of respect for Plato today, not that he needs it from me, but I wonder if the idea that we used to live in a place of pure experience, of unmediated experience of the essence of all things, but that we left that place and we have, every last one of us, forgotten it, and yet we have, every last one of us, retained a glimmer of it, and that glimmer guides us to seek truth, allows us to recognize the resonance between the many and various and changing things of this world and the true, immutable, unchanging, and inexpressibly beautiful essence of everything. I wonder whether that idea didn’t come from when he was very small and blond and everything was just what it was, and then memory started, and he grew, and he loved Socrates, and he loved Athens, and Athens killed Socrates. And so forth. But that is not the point either.

Blond is for hair. We say yellow if it is something else. And if we say someone has yellow hair, that feels strange. I think that I can safely say that I do not have a thing for blonds. Since Tara (not her name) and I started playing a variant of truth or dare called “soap opera kissing” (she had to explain to me what this was, and what it was was turning your head to the side when you kiss, which was not necessary at the time because of our small noses, but, well, that was the game), I have spent most of my time with, or chasing, or pining for girls who are non-blond. But the first girl, even before Tara (who had black hair), was Hannah (not her name either), and she had blond hair, blond like the sun, like gold.

The first time I saw Hannah was different, different from anything. I was six. It was like everyone was in black and white and she was in color, everyone at rest and she in motion, everyone in motion and she at rest. It was like a heat shimmer was coming off her as she moved. She walked across woodchips, humming. As I remember it, we all stopped everything to watch, and not just everyone, boys and girls, children and adults, but the entire natural world—trees bending, flowers turning, all attending the event. That night in my bed, I repeated the name Hannah (not the name) over and over to myself as though it were a spell, or a creed, or something much better.

Left to my own devices, I would have needed many lifetimes to talk to Hannah. I was not left to my own devices. My mother, who was (and is) loving and observant and had been a hippie, saw what had happened to me, or saw that something had happened to me, and somehow got out of me what. She took a terrifyingly pragmatic approach. She managed to identify Hannah’s mother, whom I had assumed to be a duchess or a sorceress, and in secret they plotted. The next thing I knew we were in the car and were going to another world. My mother made it seem that she needed me to accompany her on an errand that involved Hannah’s mother. This was not the case. We drove. We parked on a leafy street. We got out of our (yellow) car. The doors made loud noises. A root had pushed up the sidewalk into a sharp slope (we—a different we—would later use it as a mini skate ramp). We crossed the sidewalk, walked up to a house. I couldn’t see the house. I climbed the steps like a scaffold.

We went inside. We sat down. Hannah in a chair. Her mother in another. My mother on the couch. Me next to my mother. I can recall everything down to the smallest detail in the room, provided it was within three feet of the ground, which was all I could see, as I had pulled my Tigers hat as low as I could. Which made a sort of sense, because hats are for when the sun is shining so brightly you can’t see, and looking directly at Hannah, blond and bright, at that range seemed about as safe and smart as staring at the sun. And also like the sun in other respects, such as light, heat, and the essence of life on earth. To deal with the Hannah Problem, in later years I turned to the ancient world. And learned that Greeks like Plato thought of their gods as very bright, as too bright for our mortal eyes. So unless the gods dimmed their glory when they came down, we would be blinded. So were things with Hannah on that summer morning. I raised my hat a micrometer. My mother and Hannah’s mother were talking. I knew Hannah was looking at me. I don’t know how I knew. And then I saw feet. Not mine. Small. Magical. Hers. She was standing very close to me. She was lifting the brim of my hat. And then the brightness began.