The Color of God

This is the first in a series of stories involving the eccentric, but nonetheless beloved Professor Webster and his Philosophy Lectures. If you care to read other stories on Webster, as they come available, please see Folder, "Webster's Diction" .

The Color of God

“Life!”

A single word spoken with authority, followed by silence, can choke a room. A well-timed pause is nothing, until it is followed by something, then it too is something – something from nothing.

“Life,” Professor Webster bellowed once more, squeezing silence and their gaze, in the palm of his hand.

“Life. What is life but what I see?” He paused again, “what is life but what I feel?”

“Oxygen, oxygen is life, but I can’t see it,” came an unclaimed murmur from the floor. “Yeah, uhm, right,” sounded a confident few, followed by a more confident, yet un-owned pronouncement, “Sun is life but I can’t taste it,” briefly upheld by the sputtering giggles of levity which soon fell, giving way to another uncomfortable pause.

“Mr. Carlisle,” Professor Webster’s well tuned ear could still pick out a voice in a room of murmurs, “you think oxygen is life? Life is your first breath, yes Mr. Carlisle?” Carlisle’s silence spoke loudly for him. “What about the movement in your mother’s womb? What set you in motion, Mr. Carlisle, what set you in motion? You were quick, yet you did not breathe. Perhaps you were rolling to get a proper all-over tan, isn’t that right Ms. Lauren?” The silence was broken by the substance of laughter, in which Professor Webster joined gladly.

“Laughter!”

“Laughter,” Professor Webster captured the room once again. “I can’t see it, I can’t taste it, yet it moves me,” he said, holding his oversized belly, jiggling with the evidence of a pensive career, “breathe-in this laughter Mr. Carlisle, it surely is life, though it is not oxygen, and you will not taste it, Ms. Lauren, you will not taste it.”

“Necessary conditions, my dear students, necessary conditions, but not sufficient.” Webster shakes his head in a show of confidence, perfectly mimicked by the quiet Gupta, though for the opposite reason.

Webster breaks the silence with color.

He holds above his head a color swatch. He had just yesterday taken it, apologetically, from the local hardware store, walking out with it, at a contemplative distance from his eyes, as if judging it a proper color for his living room, though he had no intention of painting any room in his small rented townhouse. Color swatches are one of the few things in life one can take without condition, yet Professor Webster was apologetic, for he does not believe in anything, without condition.

He holds a color swatch purposefully above his head, ‘New Peas’, it said faintly on the bottom left-hand corner. ‘When was the last time somebody called a spade a spade,’ he thought to himself, the prior night, as he freed New Peas from its accustomed surrounding of Meadow Grass and Woodleaf Emerald, leaving these unfamiliar shades to introduce themselves on the floor of his fading Mango Sorbet living room.

“Color!”

“Color,” he utters into a practiced silence, “what color do I hold?” But for a few un-heroic sputters of ‘gr,’ there was more silence. Mr. Carlisle and Ms. Lauren had learned the value of silence by breaking it – you break it, you buy it, some thought. No-one wanted to fall into the Professors abyss, though the answer seemed more obvious this time.

“You are all smarter than I give you credit for,” he said, with his hand still triumphantly in the air, “confusion is the currency of philosophy,” to which great wealth was instantly created in the classroom. “To know what you do not know is a condition to great knowledge, if you allow me the liberty to paraphrase my learned friend Socrates, though he said it much more colorfully in his day.” The pun rebounded unanswered from the stony determination on their faces, assuring great things to come – something from nothing, knowledge from lack thereof.

“Necessary conditions, my dear students, necessary conditions,” he repeated to himself, adding credence to the few who thought this was the lesson of the day.

“I hold before you the color of life,” pausing to squint at the faint ascription at the bottom left-hand corner, “New Peas - the color of life. Without New Peas the sun is but a hot lamp, without New Peas oxygen is a good idea, unborn.”

“Photosynthesis. Necessary condition, my dear students, necessary condition, but not sufficient.”

“What is color without substance? I cannot hold color without embodiment, I cannot cut New Peas from a spectrum of Meadow Grass and Woodleaf Emerald without first cutting the binding matter,” the silence was broken only by the dancing of pencils, “New Peas, necessary condition, but not sufficient.”

“Life,” he paused, this time by deliberate design, “life - the pause between birth and death,” the tango turns to jig, “birth and death - necessary conditions, enveloping life like a broken silence. But not sufficient,” he tailed in soft resignation.

“The look of you is enough for me to pass you all, well, perhaps not sufficient,” to which the class added their own appreciative punctuation, laughter.

“I have shown you color, and you cannot feel it, I have shared your laughter, you cannot taste it, you’ve been given pause, and you cannot unlearn it.” The tempo, now crescendo, and all seats leaned forward. “Therefore, my dear attentive and wealthy bunch, can you know something is, without knowing what it is?”

“Can you know something is, without knowing what it is?”

“New Peas, my learned friends, New Peas - the color of God!”

As the bell rang, he ended, “what do you think about this shade for my living room?” The few who got it smiled, the others would not pass.



Gupta’s Notes:

Gupta’s bright eyes speak louder than his words, and they have been calling softly to Cole, though in a bashful way. Her sharp edged eraser and confident posture contrast deeply with his lowered head and amassing rubber shavings. It took great courage for him to approach Cole, and he does it behind the cover of unintelligible notes.

Cole welcomes him with a smile, and says, “I do not particularly recommend a forced view of Webster’s lectures - you get what you want to get and that’s the beauty of Webster.” Nevertheless, noticing a hint of quiet dejection in Gupta’s otherwise accepting face, she continues. “However, if you find it hard to decipher your notes, let’s do it together and see what it is Webster is telling us.”

And, thus, Cole, with the command of a striking conductor, reveals what it is old Webster concocted in his faded Mango Sorbet living room, which he thinks is an off-white.

“The Professor wants us to accept that there can exist things that you don’t understand or see, that you can ‘know something is, without knowing what it is.’ ”

Her eyes rise to meet his, but only briefly for his weightless gaze upon her face suddenly became heavy with embarrassment and fell once again upon her hands. “Webster planed on two topics, I think, to explain his premise, Life and Color, although, he was unexpectedly granted a third, which, to his credit, he used in the lesson, Laughter. Laughter has no ‘substance’ yet it ‘moved’ him.”

Cole continues, undeterred by the heaviness of Gupta’s attention. “Life, as he describes it, ‘the pause between birth and death,’ is intangible. Sure, we see the results of life, movement, emotion, death, but do we see the binding matter? Can we hold life? Can we taste it?”

Gupta can taste the sweetness in her voice, though he keeps his eyes on her hands. Her long fingers animating his otherwise lifeless scribbles, as she runs her fingers across the page. “As with life, color cannot be known, but for the ‘binding matter.’” She pauses ever-so-slightly, giving Gupta an opportunity to exhale, “Webster goes on to describe the many ‘necessary’ conditions to life, but he leaves it to us, to conclude for ourselves, that there must be a condition that is both ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient.’ The ‘binding matter’, the ‘substance’ of life must both be necessary and sufficient.”

Cole continues, pointing to a note Gupta can no longer see. “Here Professor Webster suggests a God, but not directly, for he does not wish to elicit any sensitivities on the topic- I think he has been reprimanded on this before. He simply suggests that God has a color, ‘New Peas - the color of God.’”

“To be sure he does not offend any particular idea of God, he purposely avoids giving God a universally recognized color and, instead, chooses a shade open to interpretation.” She says, once again catching Gupta’s glance.

What about the ending, Gupta might ask, if he had not already collapsed under the weight of her shadow. Well, those who smiled simply knew that the Professor would never paint his living room, he’s always too busy reflecting to actually do anything else. They also know that old Webster believes in God and he doesn’t have to see God, to know that God is. The others, well, they will offer the Professor a hand at painting his living room, sweet, but not sufficient.



There are a series of stories involving Professor Webster and his Philosophy Lectures. If you would care to read other stories on Webster, as they come available, please see Folder, "Webster's Diction" . The Next Story is "Silence in G Minor" .