I heard somewhere that green is the color of geniuses. As I am writing this I am trying to resist the urge to Wikipedia for an explanation behind this random factoid that is stuck somewhere in my brain between Hollywood gossip I would rather not admit I know, and scientific facts from impressive courses that are rapidly falling out my right ear at night.
Maybe it has to do with nature. Nature has always been a source of inspiration for great thinkers. Perhaps if their study is painted sage, or pine, or moss they are reminded of that radical idea that struck them while walking through the woods behind a distant relative’s château (since we all know that every genius had distant relatives with French real estate). In reality I know being a genius is probably far less glamorous and one is typically shunned from greater society but I like to imagine Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Newton and Marie Curie having a long brunch on a veranda somewhere reading the paper and doing the crossword in 15 minutes flat. If geniuses were given the kind of celebrity that we give to everyone in Us Weekly then maybe I wouldn’t have to feel so bad about my trashy magazine secret fetish. Unfortunately, I’ve never been struck by anything genius in the woods but I'm sure that’s just because mosquitoes distract me. I don’t think mosquitoes would distract geniuses though; their minds are busy envisioning imaginary physical forces or revolutionary ways of governing. However, mosquitoes have probably gotten worse with global warming, so I cut myself some slack.
Still, the woods seem too distracting. People generally tend to look up at the sky when they are pondering things, as if the answer is written there right behind that annoying cloud that won’t move out of the way, but if it did all problems would be solved. Or maybe I’m simplifying too much and the people staring up at the sky are those with beliefs in a higher being, even higher than clouds. They are waiting for the divine someone to appear and whisper that vocabulary word that is on the tip of their tongues but just out of reach. I’d like to think that people look to the divine for more complex things than that, but I don't have much experience in that arena so I really don’t know, maybe it would have helped me out on my SAT’s. My brother’s room was blue and he got a 1590 on his SAT’s but he is also an atheist, which shoots both color theories down at once.
In the theater, the room behind the stage, the actor’s dugout where they sit during performances when they are offstage, drinking water, lying on the floor trying to breathe right and saying lines under their breath over and over is called the green room. I know a lot of actors, who will argue with this description, but I’ve known it to be true at times and so for any generalizations I apologize, I am sure there are some very very sane green rooms, I just have never been in one. But generally, it looks like an old fashioned imitation of an insane asylum, people muttering, staring at the walls to 'get into their own space 'and trying to regain mastery over things like walking and standing that should be so organic they require no thought at all. But they think about it, in the green room and this makes me think too. I think maybe the color green is the color of the creative and that maybe they know something we don’t and maybe I have really been breathing all wrong. Genius takes creativity doesn’t it? Any true genius had to think outside the box, against the norm, rage against the machine or whatever. Most geniuses were thought mad in their time and when you think of how radical their thoughts must have been you really can’t blame the masses for thinking so.
I used to do theater. I sat in the green room and tried to breathe right and said my lines under my breath in hushed tones barely audible. I also used to work in a psychiatric hospital, and I saw people trying to breathe right, and repeating phrases to no one, or maybe to themselves or to someone that I just couldn't see. It should also be noted that just like my very professional actor friends who would argue with the green room image I painted, I have many friends with varying degrees of mental ‘illness’ a term I have a love/hate relationship with, who would also thank me sarcastically for perpetuating stereotypes about an already stigmatized population. So before you think every movie image of someone with mental illness is correct let me clarify, I also saw a lot of people in the hospital who were a lot more stable then a lot of the people I knew in the theater, and now that I work in psychiatric research I think damn, the DSM has it all wrong because this so called ‘real world’ is the wackiest yet. My point is really that I find it hard to see where creativity ends and something that is stigmatized and shunned from society begins and the people who have been drawing the lines I simply do not trust anymore because they have been out of the trenches in their ivory tower offices for so long they have even less of a grasp on reality as the rest of us.
Then again, maybe these lines don’t even matter in this day and age when I see my friends who are artists just as close-lipped about it to the general public as my friends with mental illnesses. At a dinner party or when meeting someone’s parents my recently graduated friends with BA’s in the arts are often hesitant to admit that yes, their degree was in art, or theater, or music, and my other friends don’t exactly ring bells every time they take their medication. I think everyone is just as scared of the creative. They see things differently and have different boundaries and this makes everyone so damn uncomfortable that they tell us to get MBA's, because that makes sense. Maybe creativity breeds instability or maybe instability breeds creativity or maybe it’s because your parents got divorced or your Dad hurt you, or your parents were artists and that inspired you (or maybe that drove you to the shrink) or maybe it’s because of your astrological sign, or maybe it's because of your serotonin or your dopamine levels, or how you came out of the womb or maybe it’s because you were born on a Monday, or a Tuesday, or maybe it’s because you were one of the doomed/chosen whose room was green.
If I do what I think I want to do, I’m going to make my office walls green and I am going to try to teach people to breathe right and to speak to people who will listen. I am going to try and be creative and inspired every day by those walls. At the same time I wonder if I deserve this privilege, to be a therapist, a counselor a psychologist, whatever title it ends up being. I feel like I should have the answers, I should be stable and grounded, and full of wisdom or some magic that could help people, but I’m 22, and anyone who says they are stable and grounded at 22 is lying. Then again, shouldn’t I also be able to relate, to understand instability and topsy turvyness, to commiserate on some level even when someone has undergone something that is practically unimaginable. Shouldn’t I be creative enough to imagine it, and to try and get it even just a little bit? Do they teach that in grad school along with stats?
People say theater isn’t therapy; I think they are right, but I think therapy can be theatrical. You sit and you tell stories and you try to connect and try to find trust and confidence in the person listening and find something of meaning, something worth while in the story to learn or grow from or hang on to, or maybe with the really avaunt garde pieces you sigh and reflect on the randomness of it all, the seeming pointless cruelty of life and you have a cigarette and say yea, that sucks and you let yourself be cynical for a little while before doing anything else. I imagine that wouldn’t be what they teach you in PhD programs, but it’s real and might more helpful then knowing what to do with a Z score. Then again, if it’s theater, is it supposed to be real? Sometimes reality is shitty, are we not allowed to say that, can we break the 4th wall there or just keep dancing and taking down notes for someone’s file, acting, looking like we know the answer but we don’t? I don’t know the rules and it all seems like such fine lines to me, but maybe that’s because my room was turquoise.
