Making the extraordinary, ordinary
I got a book today. A most amazing book. A book “arranged as to render it highly useful to the Arts & Sciences particularly Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Minerology, and Morbid Anatomy.”
A book, a copy of which, Charles Darwin took with him on the Beagle to describe the colors of the nature he saw.
A book that pairs obfuscation with ostentation and calls it self-evident. A book akin to a box of Crayola Crayons dressed for the Met Gala.
It’s called Wener’s Nomenclature of Colours and the only member of the Arts & Sciences community I can see finding this book highly useful is a poet who doesn’t really understand the taxonomy or the science but gawks longingly at the catalogue of words.
No. 23. Velvet Black, the most characteristic colour of the blacks; it is the colour of black velvet.
In animals, this color is represented by a mole or the tail feathers of a black cock. In vegetables, the black of red and black West Indian peas. In minerals, compare obsidian.
No. 43. Red Lilac Purple, is campanula purple, with a considerable portion of snow white, and a very little carmine red.
In animals, this color can be found on the light spots of the upper wings of a peacock butterfly. In vegetables, look at dried lavender flowers. In minerals, porcelain jasper.
No. 78. Orpiment Orange, the characteristic colour, is about equal parts of gamboge yellow and arterial blood red.
In animals, this color can be found in the neck ruff of the golden pheasant or the belly of the warty newt. In minerals, you will see it in Indian Cress.
Poetry, in my definition, takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary—poetry takes words and images that we already know and see and use every day and somehow repurposes them into insights we have never experienced before.
Werner’s Nomenclature does just the opposite—it takes words and images I have never experienced before and, through a devilish weave of abstraction and hubris, makes them intimate. And now, somehow, I see the very little and the considerable portion.
I see the velvet black I never recognized before in black velvet.
