The Black Mood of the Moment

(To the tune of the Stones’s song, the one about painting the rainbow black:)

I’ll buy a house to flip, so I shall paint it black;

Soon I will sell the house, and get my money back..

Back in the black, are we? All over my town, the houses are turning black. Sometimes you see two or three in a row. Whole apartment complexes are going dark. What inspires this hideous trend?

With all of the forests being blackened by the wildfires of climate catastrophe, and the ubiquitous darkened smoke filled skies of the fire seasons, you would think we might find this new trend a little depressing. It is as if they are pre charring their houses. Giant house shaped lumps of charcoal now line our streets; do these house painters anticipate that the surrounding forest will match this un color scheme soon?

Don’t they know black makes the house look smaller? With the higher quality pigments we are developing today, one can hope that these houses may shrink, so much, that they disappear altogether!

Touch a black car on a hot day, you feel the heat radiation; touch a white car, it’s not hot, but light is bouncing off. The black lowers the vibration of the sunlight to infrared. I just don’t get why people are painting their house black when the world is already overheating. 

It is hard to manufacture a good lasting black. It is rare in nature. The sun bleaches everything white eventually, stones and bones.

In truth, if you can see it, it is not truly black. But lately there has been a run on, and then a shortage, of black housepaint.  I am curious how these black houses will fare in the elements of rain and wind and sun as the next few years go by.

At least these houses will go with the Halloween season. They will look appropriate with ghosts and skeletons dangling around their windows.

Black is not an evil color, per se. Lately I brush my teeth with pure charcoal, emptied out from the capsules that food grade charcoal comes in. 

Charcoal is used in filters. It works really well to filter out pathogenic microbes. Charcoal pulls and binds toxic chemicals and pathogens into itself, kind of like a magnet, so they can be washed out of your body.

Makes my teeth feel like they were just cleaned and polished at the dentist’s clinic. My tongue is shockingly black for the next few minutes. Then the sink needs scrubbing.

If you can even call black a color, as a fashion, it has surely withstood the test of time. Called “basic” black, it has returned again and again to the garments of the humans. Since black is at variance with the natural grays, tans, and whites seen in nature, it is perhaps a statement of defiance, as wielded in the built environment, or worn as a garment. But back away from a black object, and you see it fading to grey. 

But black is forever aspirational; at its highest expression it is simply a concept, for as a color, it does not actually exist. It symbolizes therefore, the idea of non existence, lack of light, light being needed to see color.

The symbolism of black is fundamentally negative. That is one reason I have always felt uncomfortable with the labeling of particular colors of peoples skin as black. I think the term “black people” was introduced to have a kind of shock value, as part of a general movement to embrace and accept the power of self acceptance; taking ownership of who and how we are.  We are, more accurately, each some kind of brownish. We are all together a beautiful rainbow of nature colors.

Black is always hiding something. Why the secrecy, the obfuscation? Blacks ops, black projects, black budget, black helicopters, black clad secret agents, why? What is all of this trying to keep from the daylight of our attention? Why do we need things to be blacked out, censored from our knowledge, forbidden? Who and what does it serve?

In some realms where wimmin are oppressed and considered to be the property of men, wimmin are kept in wearable black bags, if they are allowed out of the walls of their compound at all. Nuns have historically worn black to make the statement that they are cancelling themselves out as separate individuals so as to be completely devoted to a higher ideal of oneness with the divine. Conversely, black is worn by anarchists, as a statement of freedom from the constraints of the rules they do not agree with. Black is worn by the self important and by those who want to disappear notice. By those with over sized egos, and those who are depressed and feel they have no value. Black is a color of those at the pinnacle of earthly power, the high priests of money and political power. Or black is worn to cover “naughty” or forbidden pleasures. Or to keep you down, as in “don’t get too happy, life is harsh, then you die!” 

Black is used to keep out others who might seek to allow light into the matter. I would suggest that black is an idea inspired by fear.

For those who might hold that darkness is good, darkness is restful, consider that even in the darkest night, the infinite sky twinkles with light from an eternally luminous universe. At higher levels of consciousness, there is no black, only a spectrum of frequencies of light. Consider that even as we rest, we dream, we glow with life force even in our deepest sleep. Truly, there is no darkness anywhere, only silly constructions and obstructions contrived of our delusions and fears.

But someday black will go out of fashion.

As we rise higher in our evolution and development as individuals and as a civilization, we move from light into light, into light. People respect each other’s autonomy and individuality, but there are no secrets and no need for secrets, for there is no fear, only love and more love. People have intimate moments, people give each other space, but everyone knows everything about you, for everyone  is telepathic, and you have nothing to hide and no need for shame. The world grows more transparent. Everyone accepts you as you are and loves you, even as you learn and grow even more beautiful on forward, without limit. People shrug off their tired and ragged black garments of shame and fear, and trample them on the ground, indifferent, like toddlers gleefully dancing naked in the morning sunlight.