IS LIFE REALLY ALL ABOUT BLACK AND WHITE?

THE ORIGINS OF BLACK AND WHITE AND THE CHANGING MEANINGS OF THOSE TWO MAN-MADE COLOURS! POST NO.19/IN (A 10 minute read) 

Beginning today with an apt quote from my second book ON THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT, chapter fifteen titled It Is All Black and White! I quote myself:

Well, you know, I am sat here with a full head of steam. I really have been looking forward to exploring black and white. Like I said, I get so far ahead of myself on my trains of thought, I have another bout of depression, having realized the significance of my recent findings in the greater scheme of things.

So, I am then having to try and catch up with my own thoughts and get them out of my head and explored on paper (for me). That way I can follow all along the run until eventually, inevitably it seems, that I wind up somewhere near where I started!

Although I have this overwhelming sensation that that is exactly what not many of us are doing ever! By the time I have come full circle, I can see better than before why it is like it is, how it came to be and of course, the reasons for changing it to something better.

Learning off the back of accumulated happenings. But does one wind in a positive direction or a negative direction. Up or down, side to side or should I say, North to South, East to West!! The Planet Earth is currently tilted away from what is its optimum rotational axis.

The point of healthy balance in the Earth´s rotations, has been completely destroyed. Rather like a spinning top, which starts with neat spins and ends up careering out of control. The Earth´s rotational pattern has lost its own control of itself. End of quote.

I really FEEL the planet Earth and I really FEEL very similar in current condition to our planet Earth. I have been pushed off my optimum point of rotation. I have been careering in mad circles for almost three decades. This is all about positive and negative energies. Neutralizing the negatives which hold us all back from our possible good, future outlook.

In this chapter I explore the origins of the two man-made colours that do not exist in nature. How did these two colours come about if they did not actually exist as real colours? Human-kind have always been exploring and experimenting with all the natural plants that they had to hand. Our human story of evolution has all been about trial and error, which has led us to try again and again and yet again. 

Until finally achieving what we had intended to achieve. Do not forget that at this very moment in time, we have a group of human beings working up in outer space on a permanent basis! Taking it in turns to spend time in space and then drop back to Earth to re-establish physical contact with it!

Black and white were two of the first colours created by human-kind, as the earliest cave/rock drawings/paintings show us. The colours of course, vary by regions and the black and white themes are more prevalent on some continents than others. The white was made with chalk and the black with burnt wood. So, maybe the abundance of trees and chalk deposits was definitive.

As I was able to discover for myself when travelling in south-east Algeria around the Tassili n´Ajjer Plateau. There are many thousands of known rock paintings/drawings spread around quite a large area. Those paintings were made in more recent times though, just some 6,000 years ago.

It was our Paleolithic cave painting ancestors who discovered chalk and calcite and they were using a white pigment in their work between 17 and 18,000 years ago. White, black, red and ochre yellow were the predominantly used colours at that time. So, they have been in use for many centuries. I explore who may have been the artists and how they made their colours black and white.

Why might they have done all of these drawings? I give a few ideas of mine in that respect and of course, loving origins as I do, where did the english words BLACK and WHITE come from? English being the youngest language of all, the bastard language as I think of it. It is made up of a fusion of all the older European languages.

I follow the route of the nouns black and white, coming through the languages, letters tinkered here and there, before arriving at the two words that I know today, black and white. Much to learn in this chapter therefore, I am all about learning, filling in my gaps and sharing my learning with others in a hopefully enjoyable way.

BLACK AND WHITE; EQUALS AS OPPOSITES! Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash.

It seemed only natural therefore, to follow up on the black and white theme and see just how many different interpretations have been associated with those two colours. The Meanings Of Black And White being the title of chapter sixteen. I just need to have full bodied pictures in my collection which does mean going actively in search of all the necessary pieces but where to find them is the crunch!

That is why I enjoy nothing more than climbing aboard my train (my brain) of thoughts and just letting them take me to wherever they want to go because being a very INTUITIVE type, I will inevitably find some very interesting pieces along the way. And so it was in this chapter too. Maybe if I add that the whole black and white thing had come about because I had got the Russia - Ukraine conflict building up and I was wanting to put the players on the chess board!

I quote myself from chapter sixteen:

Now of course, all of these European cave painters found themselves living through the last glacial period, which lasted between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago. It was around 22,000 years ago that the ice sheets were at their maximum extension.

It would have been the ever growing advance of the world´s ice sheets that caused our ancestors to migrate further south in search of more survivable conditions. This theory is completely consistent with the location of many archaeological remains both human and their artefacts, but also with the locations of the caves and their drawings!

Having reached the maxim point 22,000 years ago, the ice sheets began to recede again, leaving behind fresh plant growth and an abundance of water. The migration back northwards began once more, all the way to today´s Scandinavia. 

Of course, there were those who tuffed it out and stayed above the Arctic circle, these are now known as indigenous peoples, ethnic tribes. They survived all the rigours that the permanently frozen landscape forced upon them and adapted in very unique ways.

Down here in the Mediterranean, civilization was about to kick off! So was black and white now going to become part of our lives in so many ways. End of quote.

In those early days of usage, black and white colours were being used for rock drawings/paintings and as body decoration too. But of course, we were not as yet making cloth of any type. We were using animal skins so, maybe not strange therefore, that it was our spinning of thread and the consequent weaving off it to create a piece of cloth, that had to happen next.

The earliest dyed flax fibres found to date, were found in a cave in Georgia, some 36,000 years ago. Over in Peru, a piece of cloth made from vegetable fibres dates back 10,000 years. In Israel a piece of knotless netting has been found and dated to 8,500 years ago. More flax fibre fabrics found in Anatolia, Turkey have been dated to 8,000 years ago.

Early examples of silk found in Henan, China have been dated back to 5,630 years ago. So, we have been trying to make textiles for a long, long time but what about the colours of black and white? Where do they come into the human picture?

The Egyptians soaked the natural, buff coloured fabrics, such as flax, wool and cotton, in a lye solution of woodashes and water, which would then be laid out in the sun to bleach! That being 7,000 years ago! Black was not far behind as I explain in this chapter.

Fair enough, we were not aware of the benefits or the harm of anything that we did ever, at least not until some good time later. That is where we find ourselves now in time. We can now see where we have been wrong but do we stop being wrong? NO!

I go on to look at the modern textile industry which employs many in third world nations but the harmful effects of this massive textile production on the natural environment are only FELT directly by they themselves in their nations. The pollution! The usage of water! The chemicals required! It has all got to stop!

Black and white are the most costly of all colours to make. They require more processing than most other colours. They are also the colours that are most in demand in our western world. Our desire for those two man-made colours is causing death and destruction to those making the dyes but never those wearing their black or white dyed cloth!

We, the modern westernized peoples are largely responsible for the continued demand of black and white fabrics. Our leader´s through time have looked to exploit every vulnerable living entity and turn it into a money maker for himself. It is time to say NO to MAN-KIND, NO to HIS DOCTRINES and HIS absurd associations of the two colours that nature did not design.

The next chapter is The Conditionality of Dependency and in that I will explore just how trapped we are when forced into dependency. Check back for that! Thank you for reading, I look forward to having your company another time.

The book is LIVE at long last (18/08/2023), I give you the links to both the paperback and e-book versions. The paperback: ON THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT and the e-book: ON THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT

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