SEÑORAS, SEÑORES:

En el decurso de mis muchas, de mis demasiadas conferencias, he observado que se prefiere lo personal a lo general, lo concreto a lo abstracto. Por consiguiente, empezaré refiriéndome a mi modesta ceguera personal. Modesta, en primer término, porque es ceguera total de un ojo, parcial del otro. Todavía puedo descifrar algunos colores, todavía puedo descifrar el verde y el azul. Hay un color que no me ha sido infiel, el color amarillo. Recuerdo que de chico (si mi hermana está aquí lo recordará también) me demoraba ante unas jaulas del jardín zoológico de Palermo y eran precisamente la jaula del tigre y la del leopardo. Me demoraba ante el oro y el negro del tigre; aún ahora, el amarillo sigue acompañándome. He escrito un poema que se titula "El oro de los tigres" en que me refiero a esa amistad.

Quiero pasar a un hecho que suele ignorarse y que no sé si es de aplicación general. La gente se imagina al ciego encerrado en un mundo negro. Hay un verso de Shakespeare que justificaría esa opinión: "Looking on darkness, which the blind do see"; "mirando la oscuridad que ven los ciegos". Si entendemos negrura por oscuridad, el verso de Shakespeare es falso.

Uno de los colores que los ciegos (o en todo caso este ciego) extrañan es el negro; otro, el rojo. "Le rouge et le noir" son los colores que nos faltan. A mí, que tenía la costumbre de dormir en plena oscuridad, me molestó durante mucho tiempo tener que dormir en este mundo de neblina, de neblina verdosa o azulada y vagamente luminosa que es el mundo del ciego. Hubiera querido reclinarme en la oscuridad, apoyarme en la oscuridad. Al rojo lo veo como un vago marrón. El mundo del ciego no es la noche que la gente supone. En todo caso estoy hablando en mi nombre y en nombre de mi padre y de mi abuela, que murieron ciegos; ciegos, sonrientes y valerosos, como yo también espero morir. Se heredan muchas cosas (la ceguera, por ejemplo), pero no se hereda el valor. Sé que fueron valientes.

El ciego vive en un mundo bastante incómodo, un mundo indefinido, del cual emerge algún color: para mí, todavía el amarillo, todavía el azul (salvo que el azul puede ser verde), todavía el verde (salvo que el verde puede ser azul). El blanco ha desaparecido o se confunde con el gris. En cuanto al rojo, ha desaparecido del todo, pero espero alguna vez (estoy siguiendo un tratamiento) mejorar y poder ver ese gran color, ese color que resplandece en la poesía y que tiene tan lindos nombres en muchos idiomas. Pensemos en scharlach, en alemán, en scarlet, en inglés, escarlata en español, écarlate, en francés. Palabras que parecen dignas de ese gran color. En cambio, "amarillo" suena débil en español; yellow en inglés, que se parece tanto a amarillo; creo que en español antiguo era amariello.

Yo vivo en ese mundo de colores y quiero contar, ante todo, que si he hablado de mi modesta ceguera personal, lo hice porque no es esa ceguera perfecta en que piensa la gente; y en segundo lugar porque se trata de mí. Mi caso no es especialmente dramático. Es dramático el caso de aquellos que pierden bruscamente la vista: se trata de una fulminación, de un eclipse; pero en el caso mío, ese lento crepúsculo empezó (esa lenta pérdida de la vista) cuando empecé a ver. Se ha extendido desde 1899 sin momentos dramáticos, un lento crepúsculo que duró más de medio siglo.

Texto, "La ceguera" , Jorge Luis Borges

 

Rosa 'Christopher Marlowe'

 Come live with me, and be my love;            

 And we will all the pleasures prove

 That hills and valleys, dales and fields,

 Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks

By shallow rivers, to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies;

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

Fair-lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,

With coral clasps and amber-studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me and be my love.

A Passionate Shepherd to His Love – Christopher Marlowe

I am married to a snob. This is not something abnormal in my life as my mother and my grandmother were both snobs as is my first cousin and godmother Inesita. Polygonums are notorious weeds. It seems that even their leaves look like the leaves of weed. In our garden, over the objections of the Chief Snob I have some tal, over 6 feet, polygonums with creamy white flowers. They grow in deep shade where few other plants manage. I decided to cut the flowers of one and scan. I believe that this "weed" is beautiful and even if it might look like one it keeps to itself and rarely marches forward as some of Rosemary's non weeds!

Emily Dickinson

SHE rose to his requirement, dropped   

The playthings of her life 

To take the honorable work    

Of woman and of wife.      

 

If aught she missed in her new day        

Of amplitude, or awe,

Or first prospective, or the gold     

In using wore away,   

 

It lay unmentioned, as the sea

But only to himself is known   

The fathoms they abide.

Lauren Stewart

On June 7^th Rosemary and I opened our garden to the Vancouver Rose Society from 11am to 5pm. In open garden protocols visitors must never ask to use the facilities but it is expected that those opening the garden will offer some kind of refreshment. I made a very large batch of my special iced tea. The day before I prepared some homemade mayonnaise which is the most important (and good Cayenne pepper, too) ingredient in cucumber sandwiches. Hilary made cookies with apricot jam centres. Best of all Lauren, 11, made some colourful signs so that our garden visitors would know in what direction to circulate. 

Originally we were supposed to open the garden on Sunday the 15^th but our roses looked so good a week before June 7th that advanced the date. Since I am writing this on June 16 I now know it was best we did this as it has poured for quite a few days and not only would visitors have been wet but our roses would have drooped.

Herewith are panoramics of the garden which I took late afternoon after our visitors left. I used my Fuji X-E1 digital camera.  

 When my mother sent me to St. Edward’s High School in 1956 I was a mother’s boy. We lived in a mining town in northern Mexico and my father was in Buenos Aires. I had not seen him for 5 years.

With my pimples beginning to act up I was in a full-blown repressed teenager who had little idea about the birds and the bees.

Fortunately my mother had fomented in me a love of reading and we seemed to read the same books like the historical novels of Samuel Shellarbarger (The Spider King), Frank Yerby (The Saracen King) and the more literate Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I introduced to my mother Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart and Taylor Caldwell’s novel about St. Luke, Dear and Glorious Physician. I was keen on my mother’s favourite author of medical fiction, Frank G. Slaughter (Sword and Scalpel). The reason I was keen on Slaughter and Edison Marshall’s The Viking is that they had good sex scenes. In an age, particularly Austin, Texas, racy stuff was not to be found anywhere except, I soon found out in the bookstores that sold pulp fiction.

To this day I try to forget my foray into Slaughter and Yerby and I can assert that the best sex scenes I ever read where the very subtle, between-the-lines novels of Dorothy Dunning.

I have read all of José Saramago’s novels (mostly in translations from the Portuguese into Spanish. The one that is the most difficult to read (and I read it in English and then in Spanish) is The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. In it Christ, as a young man (suffering from stigmatas) is taken care of and introduced into carnal endeavours by Mary of Magdala. The sex scene in the book makes me blush. And I don’t even have to read it as I remember most of it. For his efforts Saramago was pilloried in Portugal so he left in exile to the Canary island of Lanzarote. When Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later his county beckoned him to return. He did not.

I cannot speak for others but I do believe that from the first time that a little American girl, age 8, came to my house in Buenos Aires (I was 8 or 9) and she asked me, “Do you want to see my…?” I answered, “Yes,” I have thought about women and sex a lot. 

Rhodochiton atrosangunieus

In fact when I was in kindergarten I had the uncommon pleasure of sharing the classroom with the Argentine quintuplets, the Diligentis. They were two boys and three girls. I remember lifting the skirts of my fave, María Fernanda. You could say that my depravity began early in my life.

How else can I explain the fact that I have 85 roses (old roses and David Austin English Roses) and that at least 25 of them are pink and multipetalled? The queen of them all is my (just off white to be pink) multi named Maiden’s Blush. It is also called Cuisse de Nymphe, Incarnata, La Virginale and (yes!) La Séduisante.

I have hinted about this here. But few, as far as I can tell made the connection. The connection is that every time I look at my flesh coloured old roses I think about women and in particular about that which they have that I don’t.

My suspicion, after having lived with my plants since 1986 is that they are far less repressed than most humans.

The idea to write this blog came about when I discovered that 19^th century plant hunter William Lobb had discovered an azure blue Clitoria ternata in Panama.

It was some 10 or 12 years ago that I used to frequent with Rosemary, the Mother’s Day plant sale at the UBC Botanical Garden. We always managed to get a plant list a few days before. On that list was Clitoria ternata.

Clitoria ternata

When a rare plant was offered the technique, besides the one of going early to be ahead of the line, was not to think of the plant you wanted to get. And of course you would never discuss this with anybody near you. The fact is that one of Rosemary’s friends, just two people in front of me, got to Clitoria ternata and that was that.

Since then I have had the consolation prize of what I call the Male Member Plant (it is a lurid purple). It is a non hardy vine called Rhodochiton atrosanguineus. I particularly like to show the plant to the many little old ladies that come to visit our garden.

Now I cannot get a clitoria to scan but this one from Google Images will have to do.

Mary Madgalen (e)

Rosa 'Chapeau de Napoléon'

Every evening I ask Rosemary, “Do we have to do anything tomorrow?” If she answers, “No,” I relax. Going to the theatre (fun); going to a concert (fun); going to the Superstore to shop for groceries but also to look for $3.00 movie DVD gems (fun) is all stressful. I cannot put a finger on the why.

When I worked as a free lance photographer I would not sleep well the night before a job. In bed I would make a mental list (sort of like a pilots check before takeoff) of the equipment I needed, made sure I had the necessary film and lights and those almost forgettable but most necessary items like my Minolta flash meter and an extra flash chord in case the first one failed on the job.

This stress that I experience on the day before Rosemary and I are going to a play worries me. I know that if I simply let go and stay home, we will sell our home, move to White Rock and never drive to Vancouver to go to the dance, or the theatre, to a new music presentation by the Turning Point Ensemble or an Early Music Vancouver concert. In white rock we might end up remembering how to play bridge again and discuss with people our age how we or they “did” Machu Picchu, Palm Springs or Venice. In the end we would be waiting to die (WTD).

In spite of the stress of having to go places I make it a point to go. But I must also point out the pleasures, at this time of the year, to visit our garden, see which roses are open for the first time and smell my many myrrh-scented roses or the wonderful fruit smell of my Gallicas. Deadheading the spent blooms of my remontant roses is relaxing. I reflect. I daydream. It beats crossing the street in downtown Vancouver while checking the iPhone to see if I have any messages.

It is also pleasant to pick a few roses or other flowers and bring them inside to scan. Scanning reveals aspects of my roses that in some cases I was ignorant of.   

That was the case today when I cut a just opened and an older Rosa ‘Cristata’ also called Rosa ‘Chapeau de Napoléon’ and ‘Crested Moss’.

Rosa ‘Chapeau de Napoléon’ is a chance discovery in 1826 by Jean Pierre Vibert (he fought in Napoleon’s army and was present at Waterloo).

Peter Beales writes of this rose:

Fully double, highly scented, cabbage-like, silvery deep pink flowers enhanced by a fascinating moss formation on the calyx [and if you rub it, you get the scent of a pine’s resin] This is shaped like a cocked-hat, hence the name. Apart from that it is a useful shrub of medium size, well dressed with foliage. Probably better with support.

 

And yes I support most this rose and many of my tall roses with bamboo sticks I purchase at Coolite Bamboo on 917 East Hastings.

It was only today that I chose to look at the underside of these fragrant blooms. What a surprise!

White Rock does not beckon.

It may be simply an apocryphal story and it never happened. But one of the employees of an erstwhile photographic lab, G. King once told me that a wedding photographer had left his colour negative rolls of wedding for processing. But let me digress a tad.

One of the advantages of shooting film in that rosy past is that a lab would process your film, produce proofs with pretty good colour and then at more or less reasonable rates provide the photographer with very good custom prints. Today photographers have to sift through hundreds of pictures and somehow must now (because of stiff competition) provide their clients with reasonably fixed proofs. Some photographers send their raw files to fixer-uppers in India who laboriously colour correct and fix bags and wrinkles.

An accidental exposure, Fuji X-E1 at 5500 degrees Kelvin white balance

This present situation was mostly the realm of the then ubiquitous photo lab.

The story, the apocryphal one, was that the folks that processed the wedding photographer’s pictures worked all night without being able to give both the groom and the bride a pleasant skin colour.

The problem with wedding photographs is that grooms usually dress in black and the brides in white. This combination is terrible because of the extreme contrast. 

 

Fuji X-E1

When our wedding photographer returned to pick up his wedding proofs he was met by the somber staff. The photographer looked at the pictures and simply said, “The wedding dress was pink, not white!”

In order to make the pink dress white the colour printer had to subtract yellow and cyan (to cool the pink). By doing so the printer made the bride’s face green/blue/cyan. Had the lab known the dress was pink…

Because we humans see the colours on the red side of the spectrum better that those on the blue towards the UV (of which we are blind, unlike dogs) we like the “warm” colours and more or less dislike the “cold” colours. We dislike the cold/cool colours if they are cast on a portrait. If we take a portrait of a doctor in a hospital in a narrow hospital corridor with green walls, our brain will tell us that his skin is just the way it is, but our cameras, even digital cameras (not properly used) will show a face with a green cast.

If  you take a portrait of Prime Minister Harper and tweak his face to have a green/cyan cast you will look at it and say to yourself, “What a nasty man.” You are being affected not only by your perception of the man on his actions but also the colour of his skin (without you really being all that aware of) is contributing to your negative take on the man.

Fuji X-E1

In the 80s film, colour film, was made to produce healthy skin tones. Healthy skin tones in the 80s had to be sun tanned. These films were sold as warm films. I wrote about that here.

I have always been attracted to accuracy in colour. I know that when I photograph my blue hostas in the garden they will look bluer than they really are. The reason is that blue hostas have a UV coating that protects them from harsh sunlight. The UV coating bounces off UV and the ancillary blue light. Plus since my blue hostas are in the shade, you will suspect that the light in the shade will be bluer, too.

If you think about this you might suspect that since humans are such a jumble of combinations that human skin is a rainbow spectrum all in itself. Besides a person wearing sun block, and his or her brother not, will photograph differently.

To make this very long story short, I am obsessed with the accuracy of human skin colour. The Holy Grail is to be able to photograph a real red head and get skin and hair colour just right. A red head’s skin has blue in it. If you want to make the red of the hair red you must add yellow and red when you attempt to balance your picture. When you do this you warm up the bluish skin and make it pink. And that is not accurate.

For years my Kodak Ektachrome made my neutral gray studio background (particularly when I used a studio flash) have a blue/green cast. If I tried to make that gray remain gray it would affect the skin colour of my subjects.

The reason is that film is stupid and it is principally balanced for 5500 degrees Kelvin which is the colour of sunlight at noon in Washington, D.C. midsummer. If you read the blog linked above you will note that the colour of light varies with latitude. The light in Whistler is bluer. The light at the equator is whiter. 

Fuji X-E1

Digital cameras, even the cheaper ones, have something called automatic white balance. Digital cameras are a lot smarter than film (but I must note here, that some photographers might be smarter than their digital cameras) so they handle most situations better than film. But they have their limits.

Not a few weeks ago I photographed a lovely blonde lawyer standing inside one of the top floors of the Hong Kong Bank, by a large window facing north. It was a dismal and overcast afternoon. I photographed her with my digital Fuji X-E1 and flash. Had I used a film camera with either transparency or colour negative (both films balanced to more or less accurately reproduce that noon sunlight (or a good studio flash) the pictures would have been just fine.

But my pictures were not just fine. The lawyer’s white skin was transformed to skin of someone who likes her claret. This idiot (a photographer not as smart as his digital camera) had set the Fuji for Automatic White Balance. The camera saw the dismal blue background and decided to warm it up with disastrous results.

The next time around I circumvented Auto White Balance and set my camera at 5500 degrees Kelvin. My subject was Caitlin. I photographed her with a new (for me) Fuji colour negative film called Reala. The results were odd and I had to put a lot of effort to get a skin tone that looked right. The Fuji X-E1 pictures were a tad warmish. Next time I photograph Caitlin (soon, I hope) I will see what upping the white balance to 5800 does to render her skin less warm.

But the biggest of all problems is that I do all my balancing on my computer. My monitor is adequately colour corrected, but then who really knows? And there seems to be no universal standard for monitor brightness.

The proof of the pudding, and there is not much of that is to look at a hard copy print. Only then will you and I both be able to assert, what is accurate skin colour.

The Colour of Skin by Ilse T. Hable