I send you this Cadmium Red.

John Christie:

Yesterday I went to a funeral, someone I didn’t really know very well, and during hthe service before the cremation I was looking at the flowers, some in vases and some in jars arranged on the steps before the lectern where the Rabbi stood. My eyes were caught by a bunch of carnations directly in front of me. Red and yellow carnations in a single vase. not formally of yellow. The red were the nearest and I looked at them for part of the service trying to see how the heads were constructed, how the petals fitted over one another. But the shapes were too dlicate and I was just slightly too far from them to see properly. As I thought I was understanding their shapes so the precision of the image slipped away like in a dream when you really need to look at a letter or newspaper, you try hard to read it but always, in the end, the actual text blurs and escapes.

So for no better reason than the memory of those flowers I send you this Cadmium Red.

John Berger

Red is not usually an innocent color. (Look at this one, 红色的信纸)

But the red you sent me is. It’s the red of childhood. A pretend red. Or the red of young eyelids shut tight. The red you saw when you do that.