Dr. Albertus Boli informs us that "the so-called 'prayer plant' (Maranta sp.) is, technically speaking, chanting rather than praying."

"There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue in the comprehensive Porrua Spanish-Maya Dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth."

—Earl Shorris, "The last word: Can the world’s small languages be saved?", Harper’s Magazine, August 2000.

Via DJMisc.

by Raymond

Beyond the Rainbow with the Mantis Shrimp

Imagine distinguishing a dozen primary colors, seeing ultraviolet and infrared, and perceiving six different types of polarized light. For the giant Mantis shrimp of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world is colorful beyond human imagination. Reuters reports a new study by Swiss and Australian marine biologists, suggesting that Mantis shrimps need to detect minute changes in color and polarization to detect nearly invisible prey in murky seawater. They probably also use color to send sexual signals during mating. The scientific report is available online at the Public Library of Science Journal.

by CybersamX.

The typical mantis shrimp has emerald green eyes and a pale green or orange body, with bright yellow outlines.

FUN FACTS:

• Mantis shrimp have the fastest kick in the animal kingdom: 75 feet per second. They can punch a hole through aquarium glass.
• Mantis shrimp are named for their resemblance to the praying mantis insect.
• Their coloration varies to match their habitats. The golden mantis is green when it dwells in sea grasses but tan in sandy areas. The crevice-dwelling rock mantis varies from dark green to black.
• Mantis shrimp tend to be active hunters at night.

by sandstep

Here are some color palettes inspired by the Mantis shrimps:

by Jelantique

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

The soul is "that delicate essence that constitutes who we really are and retreats every time an academic enters the room." —Anthony Marais, The Cure

"The dignity of intelligence lies in recognizing that it is limited and that the universe exists outside it." —Fernando Pessoa

As Marcel Bénabou writes in Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, "Above all, dear reader, do not believe that the books I have not written are pure nothingness.  On the contrary (let it be clear once and for all), they are held in suspension in universal literature."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.

Loïe Fuller, Illusionist of Light and Color

One of the most spellbinding color illusionists of the last century left her spectators dazzled to near-mystical proportions. Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) was pioneer of choreography and an innovator of theatrical lighting, holding patents for creating color gels and using chemical salts for luminescence. When she took to the stage dressed in flowing silk costumes specially lit according to her own schemes, she transformed into a full-fledged magician. When modern dance founder Isadora Duncan first witnessed Fuller's shape-shifting wizardry, she was bewitched by an alchemy of color and movement that left the impression of a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. Employing only voluminous colored silks illuminated by beams of light, Fuller performed what amounted to a shamanic ritual, convincing her spectators that a sacred metamorphosis was unfolding. Fuller evoked the primal power of the bonfire, depicted the wonder of new life, and enacted the elevation of the soul into boundless essence. Though the experience left Duncan in a state of wordless awe, she couldn't help attempting to account for the sheer magnitude of what she beheld:

"Before our very eyes she turned to many-coloured, shiny orchids, to a wavering, flowering sea-flower, and at length to a spiral-like lily, all the magic of Merlin, the sorcery of light, colour, flowing form. What an extraordinary genius! No imitator of Loïe Fuller has ever been able even to hint at her genius! I was entranced, but I realized that this was a sudden ebullition of nature which could never be repeated. She transformed herself into a thousand colourful images before the eyes of her audience. Unbelievable. Not to be repeated or described. Loïe Fuller originated all the changing colours and floating Liberty scarves. She was one of the first original inspirations of light and changing colour. I returned to the hotel dazzled and carried away by this marvelous artist. . . . I was more and more enthusiastic about her marvellous ephemeral art. That wonderful creature—she became fluid; she became light; she became every colour and flame, and finally she resolved into miraculous spirals of flames wafted toward the Infinite." (My Life, pp. 71-72)

The significance of Loïe Fuller's performance can hardly be exaggerated. She embodied the Goddess of Light and the Rainbow, whether under the guise of the Greek Artemis or Iris, the Hindu Uma, the Mayan Ix Chel, the Celtic Brigid, or the Roman Diana. Biographers Richard and Marcia Current called Fuller a "magician of light." Befitting a goddess, Fuller had a paradoxical nature, and she created her own mythology. Her biographers explain:

"A tall and lovely sylph in posters and sculptures, she was in reality a rather chubby woman with a fairly plain face. A dance innovator, she possessed no formal training in choreography. Eventually a cofounder of art museums, she had never even seen an art exhibit before going to Paris at the age of thirty. A close and respected associate of some of the most learned men and women in the world, she could claim no institutional education beyond that offered by the common schools of Illinois in the 1860s and 1870s. What she did have, in addition to her winning ways, was a dauntless will to get ahead, together with enough intelligence, resourcefulness, and ingenuity to give effect to that will. . . . She rose to extraordinary heights from a quite modest background. Her accomplishments were such that she might well have been satisfied with an unadorned account of her beginnings. She was not. Once she had achieved celebrity, she knocked several years off her age and made up fantastic tales about what was left of her early years. She created her own myth." (Loïe Fuller: Goddess of Light, 1997.)

What can we learn from Fuller's color magic?

• Physicality is a limitation only if we allow it to be. Fuller used her earth-mother physique to communicate a sylph-like spirit of the air. Her secrets? Natural, freeform movement and the power of intention.
• Personal history is a limitation only if we allow it to be. One is only as interesting as one makes oneself, so Fuller invented her own legend. Her secret? Reframing the truth to reveal the fascination.
• Formal training is less important than resourcefulness and ingenuity. Fuller's secrets? Banishing doubts and asking "What if?"
• A single silk and a beam of light can unfold a miracle. Fuller created something from nothing. Her secrets? Focusing on simplicity and following her inner guidance.

Before succumbing to breast cancer in 1928, Fuller found herself immortalized on canvas by Toulouse-Lautrec, in verse by Yeats, and on film by Lumiére. Not bad for a girl from a Chicago suburb who marched to her own drummer and followed her own spotlight.

by permanently scatterbrained

The Girl with the Multicolored Hair

Text by Jeff at Omegaword, palettes by COLOURlovers

The last time I saw the girl with the multicolored hair, she was following sunbeams through the kitchen door and ran, laughing, out into the world to find another bright friend. The last time I saw the girl with the multicolored hair, she flew above the treetops where the wind blows warm, and clouds were not allowed to interfere with such a perfect sky. The last time I saw the girl with the multicolored hair, she sang to the sparrows and the green, green grass, and rain was always welcome, but only after noon.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

"For pygmies, if you don't fall down laughing, your laughter is incomplete."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady

We're gobsmacked by all sorts of praise this week:

The Serif of Nottingblog covers our eccentric illustration of the "punctuational theory of evolution," whimsically saying, "[T]he Abecedaring lexiconleyjurer and abcderial visualist, Craig Conley ... is an astonishingly inabecedefatiguable creator and investigator of the world of language: written, visual, and conceptual."

Anima Tarot covers our short talk on magician Jeff McBride's secret of mastering time: "[A] presentation given by magic scholar and linguist extraordinaire, Craig Conley ... greatly increased my admiration for the artistry of this gifted magician [McBride]."

Speaking of that short talk, Martha delightfully tells us we remind her of her favorite professor from college, who could find Greek gods in butter ads!  And Ferdinando suggests that our soft-spoken yet confident style recalls someone "channeling a 'higher entity.'"

The ever-intriguing Social Fiction kindly covers our diagram of all history contained in a single note of music.

And belated thanks to Steve Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon for calling our Magic Words: A Dictionary "a very impressive collection of magic words from all over the world."

"For pygmies, if you don't fall down laughing, your laughter is incomplete."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady

"To know oneself well is a bore and leads nowhere."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady

by Nina H

Seeing Colors Through Rose-Tinted Glasses

Thine is the heritage of the world, thine the task of moulding destinies, thine the privilege of seeing all things through rose-coloured glasses.
—Charles W. Wood, The Argosy

"To see the world through rose-colored glasses" is an idiom referring to a positive outlook colored by naivety or sentimentality. As feminist commentator Pamela Varkony puts it, "Looking at the world through rose colored glasses makes for a pretty picture, but not an accurate one." To be sure, one famous drawback of rose-colored glasses is that not everything that appears red is objectively red. Hence, the lovelorn are cautioned against wearing them: "When we are in love, or when we want to be in love, we sometimes see the world through rose-colored glasses and don't spot the red flags" (Christine Hassler, 20 Something, 20 Everything, p. 224). Sightseers are also advised against wearing rose-colored glasses while on holiday: in Alaska, you'll miss seeing the Northern Lights; in Australia, Mount Uluru will be invisible; in Bermuda, you could sunburn and not know it; in Switzerland, the Matterhorn will appear bright pink. Rose-colored glasses are likely rarely abused at the Grand Canyon, where at close of day the sky turns purple, the sun glows orange, and the clouds blush pink.

Whimsy aside, although the exact origin of the idiom has been lost in the "rose-coloured mist" of time (Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1856), we can speculate that it may reference the sanguine light of sunset, when the world is momentarily bathed in rosy radiance. That healthy glow is soon followed by twilight blindness and then impenetrable darkness—hence the air of suspicion. Ironically, though, private investigators and varmint hunters assure us that red lenses help the eyes adjust to low lighting and improve one's night vision. That's because red lenses filter out lower wavelengths and reveal a brighter panorama. So the poetic caution against rose-colored glasses would appear to be ill-conceived.

by Malingering.

Indeed, Dr. John Izzo suggests that figurative rose-colored glasses can be a practical tool enabling starry-eyed romantics to pinpoint their ideals and pursue them with focus. He explains: "Usually meant as an insult, [seeing the world through rose-colored glasses] is a way of saying that someone is a bit too innocent, that he or she sees the world with too much optimism. The intimation is straightforward: Wake up and smell the coffee. Some people see the world through other kinds of glasses—cynical glasses—and surely the lenses they choose color their experiences. When it comes to rediscovering wonder and innocence . . . few decisions are more critical than choosing your glasses" (Second Innocence: Rediscovering Joy and Wonder, p. 73). Dr. Izzo seems to be suggesting that in the absence of adopting some sort of rosy focal point, one is likely to see a world limited to depressing shades of grey. It's true that "the particular glasses we wear reflect how we analyze and interpret what we see" (John Peter Rothe, Undertaking Qualitative Research, p. 137), just as the microscopic lens unlocks a richness of detail. These glasses symbolize what Prof. Jerry Griswold calls "forcible shifts in perspective, techniques for seeing things differently." Prof. Griswold cites The Wizard of Oz, "in which Dorothy and her companions put on green glasses before entering Emerald City, and then marvel at how green everything looks. In Pollyanna, however, the equivalent image is, significantly, not rose-colored glasses, but the prism. When the girl hangs dozens of these in the windows of Mr. Pendleton's house, we see something more than her transformation of his gloomy room into a rainbow-spangled place. We see how she has changed him in her prismatic shifts of perspectives. It is her pointing to a spectrum of possibilities, her reminding him of his freedom to choose, which leads Mr. Pendleton to conclude that Pollyanna is 'the very prism of all'" (Audacious Kids, p. 235).

In her book Scraps of Life, the poet Carol Loy Miller offers an intriguing perspective on rose-colored glasses which helps to illuminate Dr. Izzo's point. Miller invites us to imagine the world looking back at us through our rose-colored glasses, reflecting back scenery that has been painted "with the themes and colours we seek" (p. 68). Miller intimates that rose-colored glasses bring definition to the constraints of our world so that we can find our own room for expansion.

Rose-colored glasses invite us to make a distinction between illusion and idealism, between nostalgia for a lost Eden and inspiration for a new Utopia. As Prof. Griswold notes, "it is possible to remain innocent without being ignorant." While critics fear donning blinders of false optimism, proponents embrace filtering out defeatist views. People like Carol Loy Miller see rose-colored glasses as a means for new levels of self-awareness and new avenues for transformation. The glasses could be likened to virtual reality goggles, allowing the user to preview a bright world of possibility. Along those lines, one might consider rose-colored glasses the perfect accessory to a set of blueprints. For at the end of the day, the "real world" is only as colorful as we decide to make it—the glow of sunset notwithstanding.

by Malingering

by Wonderlane

by Ms Oddgers

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

"See far enough inside yourself for your style not to be able to follow you." —Henri Michaux

"But the world of theatre had changed.  Rough Theatre was out."
—Simon Callow, Being an Actor

From our outpost at Blogger:

We're delighted to announce that imagery we curated for the book Magic Archetypes: The Art Behind the Science of Conjuring appears (in animated form) in the new Eugene Burger documentary A Magical Vision by filmmaker Michael Caplan.  See a preview of the film on YouTube.

"These are not coincidences; somewhere there is a relation that from time to time sparkles through a worn fabric." —W.G. Sebald

The delightful Serif of Nottingblog offers this diagram of a raw book:

by same same

The Controversy of Naked Colors

"It was color as such, naked color, unabashedly itself, and assertively dominant."—Elizabeth Frank, Esteban Vicente

So-called "naked colors" expose a stark naturalness that many viewers would consider titillating or indiscreet. Naked colors invite the viewer to peek into an intimate range of wavelengths that yield a profoundly sensual impression and uncover a hidden truth. Naked colors embody what the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls "interpenetration," wherein the fine line between a public arena and a private one starts "gaping open" (qtd. in Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, by Merle A. Williams, 1993). In other words, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that a naked color on a visible surface can serve to lead the imagination toward something typically not visible.

Naked colors appear in the art world and the natural world. The red and gold Santa Rita mountains and the violet Catalina mountains of Arizona display a "wild bright beauty" of "naked color" (Glenn Hughes, Broken Lights: A Book of Verse, 1920). In the springtime in London's city parks, flower bulbs "break against the renewing grass in naked colour" (David Piper, The Companion Guide to London, 1983). In the Dutch painter Pieter Mondrian's later work, he focused his attention to "'naked' color dynamics: patches of pure red, yellow and blue held in place by a grid of black lines (Jon Thompson, How to Read a Modern Painting, 2006). In the world of fashion, "naked color turns into decorationism" (Marc Chagall, Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 2003). However, quantum physicists tell us that "naked colour is never to be seen" in quarks (Nigel Calder, Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science, 2003).

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]