INDEFINITE FALL OF GREY

Indian Summer?
Ah yes, that kitschy, over-saturated spectacle of trees putting on their final show.
That’s the dreariness itself!
Once-proud trees, now splashing their leaves with red and gold, only to stand there waiting for the slow death of their leafy world.

And then there are the arrogant evergreens — pine and spruce — staging their own silent protest.
They stay green through the coldest nights and the iciest mornings.
“Green stands for hope,” says the proverb.
And what do these heartless, needle-covered creatures do?
They mock their bare, shivering neighbours.

Funny? No.
That’s cruelty with needles.

But back to the gloom.
The season of fog always carries that subtitle of mystery — of ghostly figures rising from the mist, of zombies and the long-forgotten dead.
I find it strange that fog is said to reveal anything.
If anything, it hides, blurs, and confuses.

Even cars need special fog lamps.
The sneaky Mr. Karl Fog takes the word headlight far too literally — and what does he do?
He throws the light right back, becoming one of the most successful blenders under the sun.

Fog, by nature, is grey — in countless shades.
I suspect it was fog itself that invented horror.
Who doesn’t shiver when the familiar world outside turns into a grey, soupy monotony?
Who dares step out, only to lose themselves somewhere in the neighbourhood?
Exactly.

This grey, dreadful colour has power — toxic power.
The danger lies not only in the fog itself but in what it does to our minds.
Grey dulls the edges.
It fades the colours.
And once everything becomes one tone, creativity dies.

Fight the Grey!
That’s my rallying cry.

I’ve just tried, in vain, to find something attractive about the colour grey.
Nothing.
It’s painfully empty, meaningless.
Grey is that in-between state — somewhere between full hippie colour and dusty black despair.

Who on earth — or in heaven — invented this miserable shade?
And why?

Hopefully, grey was an accident.
Because it would be rather unkind to point a finger — or worse, the finger — at its inventor.
That would be… well… grey-tastrophe.

Heaven help me — this text is stumbling through the fog as if fog were to be banned tomorrow.
But before I lose my way completely, let me say this:
Despite all my complaints, I have seen the magic in the mist.

A photographer friend of mine lives high on a hill overlooking a rolling landscape of valleys and ridges.
His portfolio holds an entire symphony of greys — fog banks, sea-like swirls, ghostly ribbons of mist.

And when you look at his photos, something happens.
Fog transforms into a magician — a designer of the improbable.
He hides what we take for granted and lets other things appear from nowhere, in a softer, stranger light.

This dreadful one can be quite the artist, if you let him.
As in life itself:
You can see him as a source of depression — or as a mystic.

I choose the mystic.