Love Letters in Crayon: Green-Yellow
Love or hate Green-Yellow, when you see it take note (and maybe cover).
Every Friday afternoon, “64 to Infinity: Love Letters in Crayon” will illustrate the long, strange story of humankind in one of the 64 colors that make up this world-famous primary palette. Last time, we luxuriated in the familiar verdancy of Green…this week, The 64 Saga makes an unsettling (but fascinating!) shift to Green-Yellow.
There’s no getting around it: as rendered in #The64, Green-Yellow is a strange shade.
Not to be confused with Yellow-Green--don’t be ridiculous--Green-Yellow can easily call to mind the deathly pall of chlorine gas that strangled the truly wretched trenches of the First World War.
These chemical weapons took such horrific effect on the battlefield that they were later declared by all participating parties to be “illegal for war”...a strangely human concept.
No doubt, there is a particularly uncanny appeal to this color...a certain no-one-knows-what that may be best embodied in nature by the slime mold, an almost alien creature that combines two of the ickiest words in English to illustrate the stupendously broad spectrum of life on Earth.
Long mistaken for “[checks notes] some kind of fungi or something we guess?” by science, a slime mold is neither animal, mineral, or vegetable.
Is it single-celled or multi-celled? kinda.
How big is it? depends.
Can it die? probably, maybe not.
“The Blob,” as it is affectionately known, confounds classification...almost as if the creature itself was dreamed up by some smartass kid.
Despite lacking apparently extraneous bells and whistles like a brain or a nervous system, a slime mold is even capable of making decisions and solving simple puzzles, a level of cognition conventionally credited to only the greatest of apes (and some savvy species of bird).
In an astonishing 2010 display, a slime mold placed onto a map of Japan by researchers who had marked the island nation’s major cities with oat flakes gradually maneuvered its nebulous form to reach each of the flakes as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The results were eerily familiar: the pattern nearly duplicated the Tokyo Rail System.
The Species may have earned a fragile dominion over the planet through resiliency, guile, and sheer intransigence, but the Green-Yellow of a slime can remind us that the kaleidoscope of creatures that share our precious little mud ball can hold fascinations all their own, and now you see why I am obsessed with this color.
Green-Yellow is definitely one of the weirder entries in the Color Canon, but no 64-box would be quite complete without it! Next time around, we take focus on the singular blend of utility, luxury, and status that emanates from Gold…well, the material more than the crayon itself but this is a conceptual project okay??
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