Mind Moves Marie MurrayColour plays an important role in our lives. Whether we pay conscious or unconscious attention to it, colour influences our emotional, behavioural, cognitive and social worlds. It exerts an influence on our identities, our affiliations, our daily attire, our social message, our emotional mood and our memories. It is also our first gender marker.
From birth, the child is gender-defined by traditional pink or blue and the wrapped gifts, cards and flowers that greet his or her arrival. Children's own engagement with colour is intense. They love it, which is why they choose bright, bold, primary colours when depicting their world and every advertiser knows that the child-targeted television programme or product would be ineffectual without rainbow combinations of the brightest hues.
Women have also, perhaps, been more socially constructed by colour than men. Consider the symbolic polarities of white and red. The social commentary contained in "and the bride wore white" that conveys more than her choice of garment colour, while the scarlet woman, would, particularly in past times, have been condemned to a life outside agreeable society and all the social exclusions embodied in that term.
Social exclusion was also contained in the notion of those of noble birth with blue blood coursing through their veins, as distinguished from us lesser mortals who had to contend with common red.
Adjectives abound for colour choices in clothes, with positive or negative ascriptions contained therein. For example, depending on culture, fashion and traditions, the presence or absence of colour will be designated garish or discreet, loud or understated with the traditional view that less is more unless it be devastatingly daring so that a woman's choice of vivid colours may include brassy, gaudy and tasteless or they may be interpreted as vibrant and innovative.
More achromatic business choices acquire the terms modest, tasteful, classic and reserved unless they be regarded dull, dreary or monotonous: a double-bind that women have to negotiate for each occasion in their lives.
Men have traditionally been dismissed as colour blind, a designation they now challenge in colour combinations that brighten their own and women's lives.
The architectural, decorator/designer terms that now invade almost every living space provide a staggering number of differentiations along the colour continuum so that you need to know your chartreuse from your fuchsia, your khaki from your ochre, annatto from ecru, and your crimson from your cochineal, lest you be left in that vivid shade with mortification at your ignorance.
Physiologically and emotionally, we equate feeling unwell with being off colour, the onset of nausea as turning green and who does not remember yellow submarine, purple haze and whiter shade of pale?
Being of light-hearted, lucky disposition is in the pink, low mood is a real case of feeling blue, anger makes us see red, in the throes of foul feelings we experience a black mood while the Dublin expression for acute embarrassment brings forth the phrase "I was scarla" - a wonderful description of that awful suffusion of colour that we all occasionally experience when we have made some mortifying social gaffe.
Morally, good and evil are polarised with lights of dazzling whiteness around benign visitations while dark apparitions are clad in the black cloak of night.
Yet, at a cognitive level, we acknowledge that few situations are entirely black or white, nor should we polarise ourselves at those perspectival extremes and while grey is hardly associated with cheerfulness, it does at least suggest compromise. However, some would suggest that it is simply a dilution of everyone's point of view.
And when people look back through Ireland's history, it is not just in historical or economic terms that dark times are referenced but may also be due to the fact that the photographs and footage of the times past were dreary in their achromatic dullness. For many of us, all records of our early lives are in that monotone of memory and in our memory of monotone.
Nationality is primarily visualised through colour; the flag is not a coloured cloth. To insult a nation's colours is to insult its people. Nationally, the county colours and the sports team colours affirm the degree to which we appropriate identities and defend our colours to the death.
And while we may occasionally grin at our exploitation of stereotypical imagery of Ireland, our appropriation of green, the wearing of it, its forty shades, its good luck potential with green velvet suited leprechauns, we are, ironically, lagging in our efforts to be that other green of environmental respect.
While we have surpassed the primitive imagery of those other little green men through whom we once conceptualised alien life descending from circular ships, we still conceptualise and demonise what we do not understand through colour. Has not atavistic antagonism towards colour of skin not been among our most tragic misunderstanding of colour and the rich diversity and hue of life that we each bring to life's spectrum?
mmurray@irish-times
Author and clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of student counselling UCD.