i tend to wear a lot of black. agewise i'm in the early "gen-x" generation [termed 'x-Atari' by some] but was never a goth or anything. "sloppy" could've been my teenage moniker. but i remember that i began to wear a lot of black around the age of 15, which was also the time i began making money at odd jobs and could buy whatever clothing i wanted. i naturally started to gravitate towards the color black. even if i bought certain shirts in other colors, i always made sure i had one in black.
later i went thru some 'color' phases [notably a few years post-divorce in the early 1990s] and for a time adorned myself in almost outrageous color. then, for some reason in the mid-90s, i went back to black.
being an artist helps i guess, since its a common cliche to think of artists in black mock-turtlenecks. but i never wore black because of that. it always felt right to me and i've always been more comfortable wearing that color than any other [except for sometimes blue, which is my favorite color].
johnny cash of course made his most telling lifetime statement by switching to black. he even wore a black shirt under blue overalls on HeeHaw [i saw it on an infomercial].
lately i've been tossed a few casually sarcastic comments about my clothing color preferences. i think some people read too much into it and seem intimidated enough to offer up unsolicited idiotic comments to cover their insecurities. these comments irritate me since those offering them seem to have NO discernable style at all, wearing whatever could be scrounged from the dryer or hamper that day.
my black preference does go deep, but not that i could define. thanks to the web, the right words came at me thru a message board this evening:
"i think the reason that wearing black became so popular was that gex x has a very intuitive understanding of The Void, Nothingness, evil, etc. This Void, for those of you who have felt it or seen it, is actually quite a creative inspiration because the more it is "fed", the larger it gets.
But it is also terrifying on first encounter, because there is nothing blacker, nothing colder, nothing that reminds you more of, well...nothing, non being. It is a shock to see that it exists within you, especially at an early and tender age.
The Void is created (or perhaps discovered) in someone when a part of him or her dies. If you are a kid growing up around a divorce, something dies inside you that at first goes through putrification and decay, then dries to dust, then is walled off by scar tissue, leaving a hole where a living part of your soul had once been.
It is difficult and awkward to share that bit of nothingness with someone else, hence the black, which makes it ceremonial and a bit funerary and in a way fun and humorous.
I am not saying that kids of divorced parents are all black-wearing, or all basket-cases, or all major-leauge whiners. Most get along fine enough in life. But if one thing in my limited dealings with the human race has taught me (as the middle child of parents who stayed together), it is that EVERY kid who goes through it has that little hole in them--even if they can't see it, themselves.
Is there a way to heal it, fill it up, make it whole, nourish it, or restore it? Nope. (I've tried on numerous friends and loved ones in small subtle ways and gestures.) It's GONE forever.
It's similar to the Void in someone who has wrecked their life with drugs and alcohol. Even if they get over their booze and repair their lives, a part of them remains broken forever, sealed off, condemned in a secret and dark corner."
—Ricercar71
and this quote:
"The Void, if you want my opinion, isn't the wound itself (of the divorce, the death, the rape, whathaveyou) but the emptiness surrounding it, the refusal of people around you to acknowledge it, the terrible loneliness of having to say "I'm fine, how are you" to everyone you meet when, no, you're not fine, the world just fell apart."
—angeli
these quotes are taken from a message board on
The Fourth Turning website.i thought these two message authors were intuitive and i could most definitely relate. my black preferences exist on several levels from the easy [black goes w/everything] to sublime ["a part of them remains broken forever"]. like most latch-key early gen-xers, my parents divorced when i was 9 after 3 nasty years of legal battles, which i guess was the first void for me. but others followed swiftly, including the death of my best friend by a drunk driver, my own nasty twisted and expensive divorce, and other more recent and persistent events.
i'm not saying that everyone doesn't experience voids, horrible circumstances, etc, but there is something to be said for stuff that goes on in a kid's environment that stays with them for life. sure the data [written by adults] suggests kids are "resilient" in divorce, but even resilience has limits, and emotional scars, invisible to most mediocre people, run to great depths that sometimes only others who've been thru it can really understand.
i'll continue wearing black for all my various reasons. for those who feel compelled to offer stupid commentary, well, they probably do their best thinking when not sitting on their brains.
