Flat Places and Colours

I have been thinking about colours and directions and moods.

There is a wonderful book I am reading called A Flat Place by Noreen Masud. 

I really don’t know how to describe it, but it has made me think about a lot of things.  Ostensibly A Flat Place is about journeys by Noreen to and through flatlands. Flatlands are her safe place.  She uses the places, and the things she finds and learns, as a lightning rod into her difficult relationship with her controlling father and her traumatic childhood, her perspectives and experience of the UK as someone born and brought up in Pakistan, and her complex anxieties.  

I’m not sure it sounds so wonderful having just re-read my precis!  However, it really is a wonderful memoir. It has taken me into the author’s world, and these flat places, and as I say, it has made me think.

It has come at a good time.  The itch I am trying to scratch is about the ways people use memory and past experience in public transport travel decisions (a weird itch).  There is a lot written in neuroscience about how the brain makes sense of incoming sensory information, built on past experience, to understand the world.  (I am really taken by what Amil Seth says about us all living in “controlled hallucinations” –everything we experience is the cobbling together of sensory information matched to past experiences and models and all that they emote: there is no objective realty.)

Emotion is key in that cobbling together.  (Have a look at the ace TED talk by Prof Lisa Feldman Barrett: Creating the architecture of your emotions.) When your brain tells you what is happening around you, it has taken sensory input and matched it to what it thinks it could be (from past experience).  It then makes a split-second prediction to interpret what it is that is around you at that moment.   If your past experiences and models are riven with anxiety, that will be the brain’s interpretation of the current experience.

Noreen went to visit Morecambe Bay – dangerous, expansive, glimmering flatland mudflats that change with the tides.  She travelled by train from Newcastle:

This was, I realised one of the only times in my life I travelled west across the UK. An unknown sensation. Travelling south was the worst: it felt yellow, a low deep roar getting louder and louder, like insects circling and the air thickening and something very dangerous waking up. Travelling east wasn't as bad. It was a shrivelling, a going pale.  But the only safe way to move was north, where things darkened and gathered in, and the fresh cold blew, and a long winter held you as you waited things out.  Travelling west was new and I prepared to see how it would feel. N Masud, A Flat Place p104

Noreen had moved to Scotland, with her mother, having being forced to leave Pakistan by her father.  Noreen had also visited Scotland regularly when she was young, to visit her Scottish relatives.  Perhaps she experienced the trip north as escape, and the trip south, maybe for a flight from London, as a sickening return to her controlling father.  I am not sure of the reasons, but the fact is: that it is her reality.   I’m struck by that reality being challenged by another journey north by Noreen – a journey to see the flatlands of Orkney:

What I remember the most from travelling north in the past, when I was at university, was the way the sky and the landscape darkened and deepened as we moved into Scotland: it grew greener, more serious, more remote - from me, looking on, through the blue reflected window – and more lovely.  But this time I was travelling along the west of England and it felt different - it felt like nothing at all. The sun was shining and everything was very bright green.  And there was no change from England to Scotland not as far as I could see… N Masud, A Flat Place p157

Yellow travel.  Dark but comforting travel. This isn’t synesthesia  - where two senses are inextricably linked in the brain (for example a colour is tasted or music is felt as physical touch) – but it still forms a framework for personal understanding. 

I have very clear memories of days of the weeks being colours – I think deep down they still exist in me. Monday was always a very pale blue; Tuesday was yellow; Wednesday was black, Thursday was green (a really rich nice green), Friday was brown, Sunday was red.  I can’t remember what Saturday was.  But I always loved Saturdays.  I still love Saturdays.

I know where these come from and I know I had to change my perception of the red of Sunday as I grew up.  But that’s another story.  And I am itchier than ever.

 

Posted on 22nd August 2024 by Steve Cassidy