The Blackberry Walk

I'm going to wring articles to make up for the recent drought. I've started working and haven't got as much time as I once did Have you ever wondered why all website are black, white, and blue? It's isn't an Estonian psy-op - it's merely the colours of the age. Somewhat recently, a friend informed me of the changing winds in fashion from a black-based colour scheme to a brown one, and ever since the idea keeps resurfacing in my mind like a dolphin for air. Fashion is one of those thing which is so intangible, yet also organic; fashion has a natural path and progression, whilst also populating the air like the distinct yet hard to place scent of each season. From my my teen years on-wards, the colour palette of clothing has appeared to be black-based, to the point at which I took it for granted; yet now I have some kind of deep yearning for brown. One could argue the urge came about by the suggestion from my friend, but it feels quite organic, as if the suggestion only brought to consciousness the rising sense of brown. Black and white is a classic dichotomy - but what is dichotomy? Is a dichotomy to compare one thing against its opposite, or one thing against its alternative; an older brother against a younger brother, or a brother against a sister? In a sense, black and white live within the same ecosystem, upon the same suppositions, whilst brown and, I suppose, beige occupy their own paradigm. The true alternative to black is not it's antagonist white: it's brown. There is a kind of sterility to black. Black is the colour of nothingness, of death, of blank empty space. Where once man worshipped white, the colour of truth, hope, and purity, the colour black - that dismal shade purported to be that of the universe - is what is now worshipped. Pure vacuums centred not on man, the healthy anthropocentric, geocentric, outlook, but rather on the man-as-automata material-centric worldview. On the other hand brown is an organic colour. The dirt beneath our feet, the trees which hold up the sky: brown is the colour of that which grows, changes, and decays, that which is living. I see the move in the collective consciousness towards brown as a wholly positive one. Until now I had taken the black/white world we live in for granted, without acknowledging the possibility of brown. Somewhat recently, I've acquired a pretty dark brown writing desk, along with a brown '70s record player and receiver - my room is decked out in brown. No coincidence then that both of these styles - that of the '70s and that of the late-Victorian/Edwardian - are two of my favourite eras. When I was looking for record players, the only brown ones (wooden ones) I could find were from the '70s - by the time you get to the '80s and on-wards, the only style to be found is black plastic and sliver metal. In a flurry of excitement last night, I changed my desktop to brown. I found a print from the late-Victorian era for my new laptop wallpaper, and had a deep feeling that it was too out of place with the current black window manager toolbar. So I dived into the lua config of awesomewm - a place I've spent much wasted time - changing all system colours to shades of brown; then, I changed my browser theme to match those shades of brown; and then into the config of LibreOffice, and so forth. The problem is that websites do not match brown. The internet was born into and remain a black and white domain, with every website being made in the black colour scheme of the era. Hopefully given modern fashions that will change, but it's hard to say. My final point is this: colour does matter. It's easy to become obsessed with ideas, in a kind of Calvinism where only what's on the inside counts, and where the mind shouldn't be affected by matter. This kind of world-denial or at times Stoicism is a kind of withdrawal from the world and from beautifying it. As Roger Scruton points out, who would want to live in an ugly house? Ugly houses are abandoned and left to gather dust only to later be knocked down. The world must be beautiful in colour, pattern, and texture, lest we won't care for it. We care for the world in part because we adore it; and we adore the world not merely because of the benefits conferred or the inherent value, but because it's beautiful. Beauty is the flint and tinder to agape, to charity, to selfless love, the king of the virtues.