Pointless Sacrifices
Introduction
Since its release in 2017, The Secret Lives of Colors by Kassia St. Clair was a book I couldn’t escape. It was as if the entire universe was part of some elaborate marketing ploy to get me, in particular, to buy it. Of course, this was wildly inaccurate, and there are more reasonable explanations abound. First, selling to me in particular wouldn’t be worth much to a publisher: I’m not special, and even now that this blog exists, there’s really no value to having a book featured on it. Second, any sale is a good sale for a book publisher. As a general rule, publishers like selling books, and this is the sort of book that sells well. It has a wide appeal stemming from a fascinating premise and the way it was executed. To explain, in this book, St. Clair explores the cultural and social history of seventy-five different colors, each color receiving a brief two to four page essay that captures various moments or glimpses of the human experience. These digestible bites are perfect for individuals who would be interested in such insights but don’t have much time or mental energy to devote to such a pursuit.
Clearly, it was an easy sell--to me or anyone. To that end, I can’t be surprised that booksellers would have this book prominently displayed for customer’s consideration, and the algorithm of certain online vendors had quickly reached the same conclusion. And as someone who makes frequent bookstore visits and book purchases, my seeing this book frequently as part of this eager marketing was inevitable: a ‘two plus two equals four’ type of progression.
Whether it is a sign of self restraint or not--because I did buy many books during this time--I held off on purchasing this book for reasons I don’t quite know. It wasn’t until the spring of 2020 that I caved into the imagined pressure and tucked it into a massive order I was making with my local bookstore. At that point in the pandemic, supporting local businesses like bookstores was imperative enough that I couldn’t even shame myself for such an indulgence.
Now, quite obviously, three and a half years is not an insignificant amount of time. Things change, and the most obvious change was that the marketing push behind The Secret Lives of Colors had waned. If there’s a slot on the proverbial docket, it will fit in rather nicely, but new releases will get priority. Beyond that, it may go without saying that the world of 2020 and 2021 is very different than that of 2017. With the most sarcastic affection I can muster, I have dubbed 2020 “The Year of Our Plague,” a subtle and not so clever play on the words “The Year of Our Lord,” and as for 2021, the pandemic’s effects have lingered and will continue to do so for quite a while. As for me, I wouldn’t say that I’m a different person, per say, or even that the appeal of this book has faded. While it was never all that intense of an interest, lacking passion guaranteed that what interest I did have was not going to burn out despite essentially spoiling myself for a few of those vignettes.
To clarify, “spoiling” is a term typically used with regards to fictional media, referring to the experience of finding out key plot points or character arcs not from experiencing the content organically but by being told about them outside of that content’s space. This locationization is a product of the innate differences between fiction versus nonfiction. Discovery or revelation is a tool of fiction writers to enrich the journey they are taking the reader on. The scenery, as it were, is meant to be savored, and jumping to the final destination takes that away. Whereas, in nonfiction, the emphasis remains on the destination. I want to know ‘x, y, or z,’ and beyond getting that information from a reputable source, I will not care how it is I made that discovery.
However, within The Secret Lives of Colors there are stories that--I would say--are meant to land with a force built up by the presentation. A great example of this, and the topic of this essay, is Scheele’s Green: a color that I was familiar with from a YouTube video that I watched between first seeing this book on display and actually purchasing it.
The story of Scheele’s Green can be told as a story of death or a story in which deaths occur. It is a matter of emphasis which every presenter can lay out as they see fit, but in those differences lies a revelation: a lesson about emphasis and how it can influence our relationship with the world around us, a world that is constantly changing. In late 2020 and early 2021, these changes have seemingly been for the worse as the COVID-19 situation seemingly grows more dire as people grow more complacent. While we should lament the rising numbers of cases and deaths, in many ways, this is not a new pattern. This is not a sign of the ‘moral decay of our fellow man’ in the same way other details of the COVID-19 story are.
Ultimately, the versatility latent in the story of Scheele’s Green--the way death can be a main character or a distant set piece--was a warning of what could happen when humans are faced with their potential death. It is a pattern that we collectively are reluctant to acknowledge but need to, for our own sake.
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A Chance Encounter, A Terrible First Impression: Death All Around Me
To take my section of the story from the beginning, it was a very dear friend of mine who showed me the Ask a Mortician YouTube Channel in late 2017. This is a YouTube Channel that centers on all things morbid and death-related and is hosted by an actual mortician by the name of Caitlin Doughty. While this is not the sort of content I typically seek out, Doughty is an engaging and informative presenter who--as my friend pointed out--had a similar haircut to mine at the time, though mine was a few inches shorter. It was an odd reason to go through a creator’s back catalogue of content, but the merits of my reasoning is not the issue.
Though her expertise lies in the ‘Green’ Funeral movement, Doughty released a video about a ‘KILLER’ Green in October of 2015. True to all online content, the presentation--or outward packaging--of the video is dramatic and meant to stoke the potential viewer’s curiosity. Though in this instance, I would point out that Doughty’s does not engage in the typical ‘clickbait,’ bait-and-switch other content creators do. Given that her work deals with a subject that both intrigues and terrifies us, it is not that Doughty must manufacture a spectacle to lure in the audience but that she must highlight what is already there. To use this particular video as an example, the ‘KILLER’ green Doughty mentions is--in fact--a shade of green pigment that took the lives of many of its admirers.
This specific shade of green was formerly known as ‘Scheele’s Green.’ As Doughty explains it, coloring something green prior to the 18th century was a multiple step process that depended on color mixing through overlays--either blue onto yellow or yellow onto blue (Doughty, 2015). As with so many inconveniences, innovation followed. Chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was able to create a green pigment that did not require this mixing and still looked ‘good’ (Doughty, 2015). However, that pigment was an arsenic compound, and its chemistry made it--by modern standards--far too toxic to be in the home. In her brief video, Doughty lays out the frequent deaths associated with this pigment, including deaths that lead to manslaughter charges against a host and cook when this pigment was used to color a dessert served at a dinner party (Doughty, 2015). Though eating this compound might be the pinnacle of poor decision-making--from a modern perspective, to say again--Scheele’s Green was frequently used in gowns, socks, toys, wallpaper, and artificial flowers despite its growing reputation (Doughty, 2015).
At this point in the narrative--whoever the storyteller may be--a modern listener or viewer would expect to hear that Scheele’s Green was summarily rejected out of health and safety concerns. However, it wasn’t. For a fair while, Scheele’s Green was a commercial success, and even its eventual downfall was not triggered out of a concern for the general welfare. Rather than being defeated by public safety regulations or similarly guided actions, it was replaced with another compound, Paris Green, that was also toxic but still somewhat seen as an improvement in unspecified ways (Doughty, 2015). And from there, the story seemingly repeated itself: a green pigment quite obviously poisonous found great popularity despite the body trail left in its wake.
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Another Story, Another Coat: Gaps Start to Fill
The idea that such a toxic substance remained in popular favor is one that could make someone uneasy, which could explain--in part--some creative choices on St. Clair’s part that minimized this aspect of the story. More relevant in this decision, however, would be the context. St. Clair’s book on the whole is far less macabre than Doughty’s content, which is the intention. For one, St. Clair’s background is not rooted in death and death-care; she is, in fact, a design and culture writer. Her work more generally is meant to or inevitably will have a broad appeal as it provokes additional appreciation for the beauty in the world around us partially through instruction on how to best cultivate such beauty. To narrow in further, this book is meant to tell the cultural and social history of the colors that make up our world rather than being a record of our mistakes. In addition, each color is only allotted a couple pages, so trimming down mentions of death in order to focus more on the context and narrative would be a wise choice; it’s an edit that has the intention and audience in mind.
That is not to say that all references to death have been stricken from the record. That isn’t so. St. Clair opens this account with the story of Napoleon's death on the island of St. Helen. The mention is brief, focusing on the spectacle: that a man once so high and mighty had been sent to a remote island to wait out his years after his defeat at Waterloo. After six years, he died, seemingly from stomach cancer, only for it to be revealed--some time later--that his death was seemingly arsenic-related (St. Clair, 2016, p. 223). From this, an intriguing story of a methodical poisoning developed, involving the wallpaper of Napoleon’s small, damp room and the British (St. Clair, 2016, p.223).
From that opening, St. Clair weaves the historical narrative. To rehash the story with St. Clair’s more formal description in mind, Swedish science, Carl Wilhelm Scheele first developed the pigment in 1775, and while it was not an ideal hue, it had a great commercial potential in an industry that could not otherwise effectively produce the color. This was a toxic compound, and its toxicity was not necessarily a secret at the time. However, it was also a time in which--as St Clair explains--tolerance for the dangers of an arsenic compound were much higher than they are today (pg 223-224). As puzzling as it may sound considering this would seemingly go against the self-preservation impulse we all have, contemporary standards were dictated not by safety but by a sense of resignation. At this point in history, there simply were no alternative compounds or materials for people to turn to for certain products, and lacking a ‘safe’ alternative, arsenic then brought what could be seen as acceptable risks, much like driving a car carries today. Modern vehicles come with the risk of an accident, fatal or otherwise, but the practicality outweighs the fear.
Admittedly, this societal acceptance of arsenic was a detail I was previously aware of even before watching Doughty’s video, admittedly having come across it in other content. When true crime documentaries look back to that era for additional material, the more perilous and indifferent nature of life back then comes up as a way to explain why a woman was able to get enough arsenic to poison a dozen or more family members without raising any suspicion. Typically, the most common and inescapable use of arsenic was in rat traps and fly paper. While having a fatal compound in pest killers make sense, the reach of this particular, aesthetically-minded arsenic compound still boggles the mind, specifically the mind that watches Doughty’s video.
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Unseen Divergence: Lighting Makes the Difference
Both presenters discuss the death associated with Scheele’s Green, and it would be impossible not to, considering that death is embedded in the narrative of arsenic itself. And yet, this is a character that comes in various forms, including several that are not immediately recognizable.
In St. Clair’s account of Napoleon’s death, we do not see the tragedy of a life lost nor does the weight of it actually stick, but it is not because of a failure on St. Clair’s part to strike our sympathies in the way discussions of death typically do. Rather, we were never inclined to see as much when it came to the passing of a historical figure so often reprinted in the historical record that the fact of his humanity has been lost in the copy. In much the same way, we feel nothing for the other deaths mentioned in the text. These names are on the other end of the figurative spectrum: they mean nothing to us in their unfamiliarity. While both produce the same sort of indifference and disinterest, St. Clair has come at it from both angles, and the result is still the same. This represents an ongoing theme of the section: death occurs as a matter of fact and nothing more, certainly not as something we should react to.
When emphasizing the skeletal structure of the story like this, the two presentations do not differ too greatly. The arsenic compound killed people, and a glimpse into the record of such deaths is included in the story. This constitutes the ‘first glance,’ and at that glance, the staunch difference I claim to be seeing is not readily apparent simply because this discrepancy is not in the narrative itself so much as the presentation. In this situation, the line between ‘presentation’ and ‘context’ is blurred a bit as a result of the modern notion of ‘branding’ and the way it can bind creators not just to a field but to an identity derived from one’s earlier work, success, or perceived personality. Such is the nature of ‘new media’ and its effect on the cultural landscape, but to explain the relevant parts further, a creator’s audience comes to expect not just the subject material but a certain emotional affect and style. This is a restatement of what has been previously stated: Doughty emphasizes the morbid while St. Clair must manage the dosage.
Doughty does not ignore the fact of death in any of her videos. She breaks free from the social norm of sequestering the topic ‘out of sight and out of mind.’ This is why her entire style of presenting and her work on the whole takes on this performative or dramatic nature; she shows us what it is that we are told to not look at and what we are socially conditioned to be repulsed by. And while this may only feel melodramatic for a viewer whose cultural lens has largely ignored death, relatively speaking, she is certainly more upfront about it than St. Clair is and also finds the enduring popularity of Scheele’s Green (and its equally toxic successor) just as puzzling as we may. For St. Clair--while it would be unfair to say that she ignores death--she has packaged it with the prevailing attitudes of the time. In the same paragraph that she writes of Scheele’s very early knowledge that his pigment was ‘poisonous,’ she introduces the general hesitation to limit its production through regulations (p. 225). She cites the unnamed head of the Zuber & Cie, an incredibly famous and potentially last-of-its-kind wallpaper printing facilitating,who believed that prohibiting “all trace of arsenic in papers is to go too far […] and to hurt business unjustly and needlessly” (p. 225). Then she takes it further, conveying the full reality of the situation, which included the general public largely agreeing with these sentiments. Arsenic and all the dangers it brought with it were simply part of life. As a result, no law banned the use of this or any arsenic-based green pigment (p. 225).
To a great extent, St. Clair’s reading of the situation is the more fair of the two, not that Doughty ever claimed to be a historical expert. Rather, her content fills in an education and social gap. Doughty seemingly means to bring forth the much dreaded conversation around death and dying. That in and of itself is a critical service. That being said, St. Clair’s depiction is the more sympathetic because it does not break away from the world of Scheele’s Green. In this world, death was the price for living a life of comfort, means, and beauty rather than just having a mere existence. For the admirers of Scheele’s Green, the possibility of death was the price of beauty. After all, while eating a great amount of arsenic or inhaling it when small specks of the pigment went airborne when stimulating fabric would certainly prove fatal, the sight of arsenic or simply being in its presence does not guarantee a fatality. Everyone at the time spent some time in the presence of arsenic, be it in the wallpaper, fabric choices of others, cleaning solutions, pest control means or the like, but not everyone died of it. Whether or not it was deluded to think so, it was easy for an individual to trust that they would land on the right side of the odds.
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Relevance: The Latest Trend
For context, I am writing this essay in late 2020 and editing it in 2021. However, I have been working on Unintended Readings since April 2020, just after the United States began the lockdown process. Needless to stay but still a matter of context, the general attitude to COVID-19 has shifted between opening this project and working on this essay. While the numbers of active cases and fatalities are both on the rise and much higher than they were in March/April, the pro-social-distancing, pro-quarantine, “all in this together in our respective homes” sense of solidarity that marked the early days of the pandemic has greatly fractured. This can be attributed to a variety of reasons and factors, including economic ones. Those latter factors are not discussed enough, and unfortunately, I feel underqualified to deal with them at length here. As for me, I will count my blessings as someone whose job allows them to work from home at no salary change; whereas, many other bosses have called their workforce back for no other reason than the perception of control over their staff or have eliminated a great deal of positions and the people who worked in them. But at the same time, in the ongoing discourse about COVID-19 and our seemingly inability to actually care about it, I hear this mentioned so rarely that I can step away from it here. This is not the issue complained about en masse; it is a factor we largely ignore.
What is discussed--or blamed, as the case may be--when thinking about this turn of circumstance is the various social gatherings, unessential travel, and ignored occupancy guidelines at public-facing businesses. In March, a great deal of people treated ‘social distancing’ like a divine imperative, but now, it’s become an inconvenience or some other boundary to be pushed while claiming to follow the spirit of the ordinance and not the letter. Watching the numbers surrounding COVID - 19 and the deaths associated with it all while seeing evidence of various gatherings on social media feeds make for a surreal juxtaposition, particularly for those who are still minding the various guidelines as they are released. In trying to make sense of this, the resulting conclusion is often bleak: people are ‘dumb/selfish/or some combination of the two.’ But in reality, as the pandemic has continued on, COVID-19 has become the new arsenic: we hate that we have to live with it and all the destruction that it brings, but what choice do we have when the alternative seems so impossible?
The actual narrative transformation from ‘this novel coronavirus is a nightmare’ to ‘if I get it and don’t visit Grandma, everyone’s fine’ is likely one worth considering in depth but long after the fact when the wounds don’t feel so fresh. At this point, I only mean to say--perhaps for the sake of my own fate in humanity--that rather than being a moral failing, this is the sort of phenomenon illustrated by the two accounts of Scheele’s Green discussed here. Across time, the story has shifted from spectacle of mishap to declaration of how things are.
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Oversaturation: Where We Find Ourselves
At this juncture, the virus has been running rampant for a year, and the lockdown has been going on for almost as long. Much like a new partner does, the looming threat of this virus has baked itself into our notions of normal, which has proven to be a surprisingly relative term. Superficial reasons for this are many. Time has passed, for one. At this point, vaccines are being released, albeit more slowly than we would like, which keeps us from falling too deeply into despair. Remote work has become the new norm, and ‘Zoom’ is increasingly becoming something like a pseudo-verb for communicating. When it comes to the medical reality, one, you likely have had COVID and/or know someone who has, and two, because medical professionals were bought some time before recently being overwhelmed, they were able to devise a treatment plan that keeps the survival rate high. Finally, three, the images of overrun hospitals, mass burials, and the like have faded. The figurative ink has run dry after being frequently copied. Even if it is relevant now, it was relevant before, and--so the logic goes--we got through it. The details are there, but the importance of us caring about them has faded.
But in lieu of caring about those details, we’ve been immersed in our desire for something that more closely resembles the normalcy we both remember and that brought us comfort. We crave what we perceive to be a life and not just an existence. Social distancing and quarantining are undoubtedly important, but just like the public treasured a fatal pigment of green because of its beauty and a chemical because it was simply a part of their lives, we have come to recognize COVID-19 as a specter looming in the everyday--a fixture that cannot be allowed to drain everything from us, lest we be hurt ‘unjustly and needlessly.’ It turns out those two terms are a bit relative and subject to our current whims and fancies.
Works Cited:
Doughty, C. (Director). (2015, October 16). Morbid Minute- KILLER Green [Video file]. Retrieved December 5, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2McemVuG28
St. Clair, K. (2016). The secret lives of color. New York, NY: Penguin Books.