How to Set Aside the Unwanted: Foreground the Diversions

[Photograph, more or less untitled, by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) These yellow rubberized mats are visible at many street corners and elsewhere on curbs around the United States, and make curbs less of an obstacle for, e.g., users of wheelchairs. Those little nubs or bumps protruding from the surface? They’re called truncated domes. That term, as well as the color (see below), suggests that the photo’s title should incorporate the words “aureolin,” or perhaps “gamboge,” and “truncation”… and, maybe the concept of, uh, domeness.]

I’ve been trying, with mixed success, to cultivate a frame of mind with which to face my diminishing allotment of years with something like equanimity. The phrase I keep returning to: “No regrets; no resentments.” I have to fight the urge to sample both of those bitter fruits of earlier years, and suspect I’m not alone (although many people seem to linger in the produce aisle over one or the other, squeezing them, sniffing them, and putting them back — over and over). One of the most useful tools for distracting me from these temptations is indulging in my curiosity. As whiskey river offered a few days ago:

I have a friend who speaks of knowledge as an island in a sea of mystery… We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring.

(Chet Raymo [source])

Having caught this at one of the river‘s posts, I glanced at the next day’s, too — to whit:

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours.
The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea,
the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro,
the rods of the yawning branches trolling the breeze,
the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass,
the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road,
the echo of benediction on a house—
its rooms of pain, its verandah of remorse
when joy lanced through its open-hearted doors
like a hummingbird out to the garden and pool
in which the sky has fallen. These are all yours,
and pain has made them brighter as absence does
after a death, as the light heals the grass.
And the twig-brown lizard scuttles up its branch
like fingers on the struts of a guitar.

(Derek Walcott [source])

What the hell, I wondered, was “gamboge”? It looked like a typo. It wasn’t italicized — so, all things being equal, I guessed it to be a legitimate English-language word…

And so it is. Gamboge, Wikipedia tells me, is the name of a pigment — “partially transparent deep saffron to mustard yellow… It is the traditional colour used to dye Buddhist monks’ robes.” (The same source, on the word’s etymology: “[it] derives from Gambogia, the Latin word for Cambodia.” Color (haha) me skeptical, but I have a hard time imagining the Romans knew enough of that land to give it a name.) The hue (also called “cobalt yellow”) is popular among artists in either oil or watercolor paints. The problem with the substance traditionally used to produce this color is that it’s not particularly durable; it fades over time. (It’s also somewhat toxic.) So in more recent decades, artists instead turned to an artificial substitute, with a more melodious name: aureolin. Alas, it too is far from perfect — a “defective” paint.

…which led me to a whole string of books by the artist and author named Hilary Page, at whose site I encountered that defective-paint assertion — and further jargon like “PY175, a lemon Benzimidazolone,” and so on. See for example this “web update” of a page in one of her books, including the image shown at right. (Caption: “I had boards of these paint samples in every sunny window in my house to test each paint for lightfastness.”)

And having encountered Ms. Page’s particular expertise, I inadvertently found myself reading about the precursor of Lego building blocks. Some of these are of course a sort of golden color… and — at least in their Lego form, especially the so-called baseplates — also rather suggestive of truncated domes:

Funny how that all works out, eh?

Not really funny, but also worthy of comment: any regrets and resentments I might’ve been harboring when I woke up today are, well, gone.