O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
song on the same radio station. With all those people screaming at
once, the beautiful melodies were all gradually contributing to an
increasingly louder mess of sonic distortion. Now everybody really
was
crazy because not only was the noise driving them mad, but they
couldn’t even remember their own songs anymore.
Months before, she had shared these feelings with her best-
friend-and-fortune-teller, Madame Jewel. Current events had
stressed her out and she needed to procure some perspective.
“The world is at a turning point, honey,” Madame Jewel responded
in agreement with Victoria’s distress, “Since all the world’s colors are
starting to bleed into one, it’s understandable that we’re looking at
quite an ugly canvas right now.”
Victoria’s psychic and best friend, Madame Jewel, often
employed painterly metaphors when describing the world, just as
Victoria used musical ones. She had been a failed artist until hanging
up her brushes to become a full-time medium. The last thing people
needed, she felt, was more beauty on their walls. What they needed
was more beauty in their souls.
“Since all the world’s colors are starting to bleed into one, it’s
understandable that we’re looking at quite an ugly canvas right now.
But the mess will only be temporary,” the psychic said with great
pomp, waving her hands around as if swatting the flies buzzing
around inside her dusty trailer. “When we mix all the colors of the
rainbow together, we eventually end up with either absolute black or
absolute white.”
Victoria looked perplexed. She explained: “With subtractive
colors—ones that absorb light, like with paints or inks, mixing all the
colors together creates a perfect black. All the light energy gets
trapped, and then released as common heat. That’s why your short
black dress is hotter than your white one. But when we’re talking
additive color—like the light from the red, green and blue lamps in
your TV set, all the colors together add up to white. You can set them
free again by using a prism, but who wants to? Perfect white light is
the merciful light of salvation. It’s what everyone sees when they die.
And when the final curtain comes down, man is gonna be judged by
the type of color he’s been using to paint his life story. Has he been
using additive color or subtractive color? This is what God’s gonna
want to know. But until the answer gets distilled out, we’ll have to
witness depressing globs of muck and tacky day-glo rainbows.”
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