Friday, May 4, 2012

Their Mysterious Thrill... By Purple Mark


Chiming, ringing, peeling, bonging, The vibrations set up by Bells have always made them Objects of Awe. When their sound was analyzed in the Late Nineteenth Century, it was discovered to indeed be peculiar: Three notes in Octave, One, a perfect Fifth and the other note the one that gives Bells their mysterious thrill, a minor Third above the Middle Octave.


In Ancient China, certain Bells of State or Temple would require a requisite Soul to perish and so be part of the casting of the Bronze Bells so that it would ring with a human voice into the gulfs of Eternity. Those in charge of ringing the Bells would do so at certain times and thus the Watches became associated with the wearable Time-Keeping devices whose time has mostly come and gone,


Much like the Comers and Goers of the park today of which I was but one of a number of its colorful Characters: there was the group of brightly colored and costumed Anima or Manga-inspired youths doing a Photo Shoot. When they saw my Pinkness one girl shouted out “You’re the most Masculine Man ever!” I laughed because it was true though not in the way she may’ve thought.


Pink used to be the Male color after the redness of the men who worked outside and were reddened by the rays of Ra during the days and Blue was the Female color after the pallor which caused their veins to give their skin a bluish tinge from being kept inside all day. Then somewhere in there, the inversion happened in different places, at different times. During the downfall of the French Aristocracy Blue became the color of the Common Man and thus babies swapped their traditional palettes.


Here in America, it changed over around the time of the Civil War, but there were holdouts up until the Forties and Fifties. After that time Pink had become associated with being less than desirable and has suffered an increasingly downgraded status as the color of little girls and Gay men. Then comes the Scientific evidence that Pink doesn’t exist as we see it. Instead it is a color that the mind makes up in order to fill-in a perceived gap in the Color Wheel.


Thus I was the most Masculine Man ever by both wearing very bright shades of Pink, traditionally a girl’s color and asserting my Masculinity by my comfort in doing so, something that some confuse with being Gay. For me it is simply the love of Color, Pink being one of many colors that I wear like the previous week when I had been Yellow which a man on a bike had to show me on his phone of my saffron self behind a Pink flowering bush.


Then there was the little brown dog who came by and left his urinary message to the other Park dogs on the near corner of the cement curve where I sat at North of the Volcano while trying to write out my poem. Carla came by then and got settled into selecting her prompts. My next interruption was an inebriated man with a bottle of wine in each hand who came by and sat down full of talk of the Hunger Games, though due to his description of it I would avoid at all costs and his confused talk of his band and Arrowsmith.


At last he left and I made yet another attempt, but I had simply had too many interruptions and I gave up trying to construct my poem whose threads had gone astray. The relative warmth of the Spring day had brought out all manner of Characters to be activated by the lack of rain, the occasional moments of sunshine and a breeze which brought the random droplets of water from the Volcano flying, as well the beacon of my Pinkness which brought these Characters wending our way to deal with as we tried to put thought to page.


---Purple Mark, 04/28/2012




Purple Prompts:                                                                         

  1. The vibration set up by bells has always made them objects of awe.... In the late Nineteenth Century the sound was analysed (sic) and discovered indeed to be peculiar,... There are five principal partial tones to a bell’s ring: three notes in octave, one a perfect fifth and the the other )the one that gives bells their mysterious thrill) a minor third above the middle octave.” Margaret Visser. The Way we Are: Bells. (Faber & Faber 1994), Page 109.






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