Bucklow - Red: the art and science of a colour

T HE EVERYDAY language we all share is generously sprinkled with references to red, and with good reason. We lay out the red carpet to greet celebrities because for over a thousand years, red cloth was the most expensive that money could buy. A red letter day is out of the ordinary for us but has its origins in the use of red, rather than black, ink for some letters and words in medieval illuminated manuscripts. Hitting red lights is a way of saying we have met a series of obstacles, while being tied up in red tape suggests we are struggling with the continuous obstruction of bureaucracy. Wrongdoers are caught red-handed if they bear evidence of their crimes (in which case they may be embarrassed, blushing and red faced). Such phrases allude to blood on (or close to) the surface of the skin. TV documentaries revel in Nature when she is to use Tennysons phrase red in tooth and claw and they tug at the heartstrings with the fate of individual animals, especially endangered ones on the red list. Painting the town red is a celebratory activity that might make a more sober and sedate townsperson see red or even become helplessly engulfed in an angry red mist. Seeing red and the related red rag to a bull are expressions of irritation, provocation or threat and official responses to those posed by foreign powers or homegrown terrorists or, if really unlucky, by the weather include putting armed forces or the whole population on red alert. A red sky at night, shepherds delight and red sky in the morning, shepherds warning is weather-lore that has some validity in Western Europe where clouds often come in from the Atlantic. When the sky is red in the morning the East is red, but this phrase has more significant political connotations due to the adoption of red as the colour of socialism and communism. This association spawned the red menace, red peril and red revolution together with Western fears of reds under the beds and the alternate responses of being either better dead than red or better red than dead. Then, no sooner had the threat or opportunity for change from without receded, but threats or opportunities for change arose within, with the likes of the Italian red brigade and the feminist Redstockings. Of course, these political colour codes have limited shelf lives but they reflect much older social distinctions, such as the difference between red-blooded working men and others, like the effeminate and the aristocratic or blue-blooded.

Sometimes red is understood relative to another colour. In twenty-first-century economics, the debt-averse try to avoid being in the red and prefer being in the black, but in nineteenth-century literature, Stendhals The Red and the Black referred to the Church and State. Red was juxtaposed with white in revolutionary Russia (Bolshevik and Tsarist) and these two colours often seem to be in conflict. Before the Bolsheviks and Tsarists there were, for example, the Houses of Lancaster and York (red and white roses) and before them, the Britons and Saxons (red and white dragons, according to Merlin). Red is paired with blue in class-war or two-party politics (left and right), and with green in traffic lights (stop and go) and on power tools (off and on). At other times, reds meaning is an absolute. Sometimes red phrases have very literal meanings among other things, red eye can refer to conjunctivitis, a badly timed long-haul flight or a consequence of flash-photography. Yet again they dont have literal meanings but can refer to things that are not red, like the Red Sea (unless it is suffering a bloodbath or an algal bloom). Some reds dont even exist, like the red line that must not be crossed.

One cannot generalize about the red in red phrases. And just as the quality of redness seems hard to pin down in language, so red also resists psychological generalizations. Red triggers different things in us at different times, but wherever it is, red often has shock-value. Red is associated with anger, shame, fear, attraction and an extraordinary range of emotions. Given reds apparently mercurial character, can there be a common thread that runs through the colour? Is there, in fact, a red thread?

1 Alphonse Allais, Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea (Aurora borealis Effect), 1897, monochrome on paper. This contemporary parody of Impressionism significantly pre-dates the Abstract Expressionists colour field paintings of the 1940s, 50s and 60s so it would seem churlish to insist that, usually, the Red Sea is not in fact red.

The English Navy has a certain arrangement by which every rope in the Royal Fleet, from the stoutest to the finest, is spun in such a fashion that a red thread runs through it which cannot be extracted without unravelling the whole rope, so that even the smallest piece of this rope can be recognised as belonging to the Crown.

Goethe made this observation, before the age of steel hawsers, in a novel he wrote around 1809 when in his late fifties. The book has an autobiographical element and unfolds the story of a relationship between a young girl and an older married man,

For two centuries, Goethes red thread has been a motif for recurrent themes, half-hidden harmless details and anecdotes that seem to pop up sporadically to ornament or decorate the whole, but which are actually inseparable from, and define, the bigger picture. This book hopes to find a unifying thread that runs through the story of red.

A much older red thread can be found in the Eastern tradition and it refers to what drew Ottilie and Eduard, Romeo and Juliet, and indeed all lovers, together in the first place. This invisible elastic red thread joins soulmates and, depending on the individuals life choices, it may stretch to breaking point or bind them inseparably. The European tradition doesnt share this particular red thread, although it does recognize the effects on our relationships of the threads of fate spun by the Greek goddess Clotho, then measured and cut by her sisters Lachesis and Atropos. Apollodorus, Ovid and other classical authorities do not tell us the colour of these life-threads, yet the thread that first gives us life, the umbilical cord, is, or at least carries, red.