Waxing Humanism
An Introduction to "64 to Infinity: Love Letters in Crayon"
A fresh box of crayons can contain infinite possibilities, and at a certain age, this 64 color box from Big Crayon was the definitive status symbol.
It showed you were armed with imagination, and willing to use it.
I guess the 64 box gave us our earliest opportunity to make the world a little bit of our own color, to select the shade of our solutions to fully subjective questions. It was the first time children our age were asked to make visually identifiable choices. No one tells you what crayon to use: here is a big bucket of options, please place your childhood on this blank canvas.
I think whether you’re 3, 33, or 103 what you choose to draw--and if you choose to create at all--says a lot about your influences, your experiences, your hopes, your view of our world.
Whether we realize it or not, color is one of the primary roadmaps of the world around us. In many cases, society is color coded for our convenience...and sometimes, our inconvenience.
We all feel a similar way when we see common shades such as red and blue in other applications. Ask any market researcher: there’s something every color says.
Billions are spent on exploring and exploiting this concept.
As this invaluable idea relates directly to small multicolored rods of wax wrapped in paper, my wish is for a fuller appreciation for our collective kaleidoscope of history.
Forming a static image of the person you can become based on simple lineage is an exercise in self-limitation.
We come from the same places, we have the same desires, we use the same tools to answer the same questions: What are we going to eat? How are we going to live? What’s that noise in the bushes? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could fly?
Indeed, we are a species of problem solvers.
That’s why this book is based in my belief that humans--despite exhaustive efforts to dredge up distinctions--hold an innate and common understanding of the world around us.
We share sensations that scintillate in our spirits. Just about everyone you know--and everyone you don’t--has been fascinated by flames, marveled at the endless marbled expanses of our planet’s sky, been struck by a brilliantly energetic flash of lightning (metaphorically, I hope).
It is mostly based upon commonly agreed upon facts along with a study of scholarly resources.
In some--many--cases, I delve into the realm of speculation based on my own personal views.
That means for me, the words we use to describe and define the shades we see are often of interest as well.
For example, as I became what resembles an adult, my actual favorite color to employ in everyday life has so far remained the same. “Prussian Blue,” it once read...as a child a lot of my love for it stemmed from support for a favorite team, but I still find it fascinating that Big Crayon only called it Prussian Blue until the World War Era, when Prussians kinda morphed into Nazis.
Sort of the same idea as when “red” became a four-letter word in 1950s America, compelling a certain Cincinnati-based baseball franchise to temporarily rebrand themselves the “Redlegs(!).”
Public perception is what’s in a name.
My favorite crayon was renamed “Midnight Blue” long before I was born, and it spoke to me as a demonstration of the necessity of change. Here was a clear indication that certain things either are or are not acceptable in society depending on the people in it at the time; an illustration that large and lasting changes frequently result when a society reaches a certain level of shared awareness.
And so, what I hope to animate in these pages is an inclusive Human Saga.
Sometimes I draw new lines, others I erase old ones that have outlived their usefulness.
Crayons offer an ideal opportunity to consider that we all have a hand in our shared future, and so I hope that the interested observer gains a more colorful perspective of the world around us.
I guess you could say it’s an obsession of mine.
Thank you, fellow human, for checking out “64 to Infinity: Love Letters in Crayon.”
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