The color yellow

Yellow in Annie Dillard's For the Time Being

Short answer. Yes, she is doing something with yellow, and I think it is deliberate. Yellow is the book's color for matter at the threshold of light: the ground-up planet that people are made from, and that light shows through. Dillard names the thesis outright in the last chapter: "Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color." Yellow is that color. It belongs to loess, clay, sand, chert, vernix, straw, and the Baal Shem Tov's hair. Red belongs to blood and birth, blue to water and the dead, black and gray to the opaque "shell." Yellow is the one color she assigns to earth that glows from inside.

Line numbers below refer to inputs/for-the-time-being.txt.

Where it shows up

Explicit "yellow" appears 19 times. That is rare next to red, blue, and black, and almost every instance lands on the same small set of things.

Ch.	Section	Line	What is yellow	Direct or indirect
1	Birth	52, 54	The bird-headed dwarf boy is "a blond" with "blond hair"	indirect
1	Sand	100	The Yellow River, in Teilhard's letter	direct
1	Sand	102	Ordos cliffs "gray, yellow, and green"; "the man of the yellow earths, Teilhard named him, for loess is a fine yellow dust"	direct
1	Sand	106	Dust "laid yellow and gray loess deposits hundreds of feet deep"	direct
1	China	112	"a golden loess so fine it was clay"	direct
1	China	114	Corn and wheat growing on the loess	indirect
1	China	120, 124, 132	Soldiers and soil "the color of plant pots"; "the same tan soil"	indirect
1	China	134	"The hot dust smelled like bone, or pie"	indirect
1	China	142	"(The golden smithies of the emperor!)"	direct
1	Israel	182	Luria's legends "have a gilded, antique air"	direct
1	Israel	188	"red-and-yellow hawk moth" (twice); "yellow jasmine of which Israelis say, 'Two jasmines can drive a man crazy'"	direct
2	Birth	280	Nurse Pat Eisberg's "curly blond hair"	indirect
2	Birth	284	"white lines of crumbled vernix" on the red baby	indirect, and white here, not yet yellow
2	Birth	312	"iron and sulfur erupt into the sea" at the deep vent "where the people come out"	indirect
2	China	336	Farm women in "straw hats"	indirect
2	China	338	Goullart: "strange golden soil"; "the very color of men was like the soil—pale golden, and the air was filled with golden dust. This was holy ground."	direct
2	China	342	Farmers sow wheat over the refilled army pits	indirect
2	Thinker	400	The Baal Shem Tov as "a yellow-headed boy" with "blond payess"	direct
3	China	500	Plain "leveled by the Yellow River"; "The season of the yellow winds is over."	direct
3	Israel	572	Grotto lamps of "silver or brass" whose "orange flame" makes the room darker	indirect, and a counter-image
3	Israel	600	Rabbi Menahem Mendel: "a bundle of straw lying in the street" is "a sign of the presence of God"	indirect
3	Israel	604	The wax in the silver star: "Was it maybe tallow?"	indirect
4	Birth	668	The early baby is "lavender, and goopy with yellow vernix, like a Channel swimmer"	direct
4	Birth	676	Einkorn wheat and barley, the seeds that settled us	indirect
4	Sand	708, 710	Solutrean "astonishing yellow blades"; held to the sky the chert "shines dull, waxy gold—brown in the center, and yellow toward the edges as it clears"	direct
4	Thinker	798	The Baal Shem Tov: "His yellow hair hung long, and like a farmer he wore no cap"	direct
4	Thinker	808	Grain in open barrels trembles when he prays	indirect
5	Israel	924	The Palestinian woman's eggs, one dyed red, one orange	indirect
5	Israel	928	The Dome of the Rock: "Its gold dome arcs over the rock mountaintop as the real sky's dome arcs over the earth"	direct
5	Evil	958	A "wandering yellow kitten" placed over the shut eyes of the Vermonter who "had gone crazy"	direct
5	Thinker	950	"Each clot of clay conceals a coal... A live spark heats a clay pot."	indirect
6	China	1042	In Qin's tomb, "the source of the Yellow River" is daubed in the painted Milky Way; "From the stars the Yellow River fell. Quicksilver in rivulets mimicked the Yellow"	direct
6	China	1048	"We sprout, ripen, fall... hay rakes gather us in"	indirect
6	Thinker	1124	Hongren's Buddha-nature "like the orb of the sun," hidden "like a lamp inside a pitcher"	indirect
7	Birth	1188	"Wild mustard sprang from fields"; "Sun split the ground"	indirect
7	Sand	1202	The Bedouin boy Esau pees his name in the sand	indirect
7	China	1220, 1228, 1276	The "Croisière Jaune," the 1931 Citroën expedition; literally the "Yellow Crossing," left untranslated	direct, in French
7	Now	1320	The orange banner in Borough Park: "Say praise to God"	indirect
7	Now	1330	"The finest loess and the finest sand... make clay": the emperor's soldiers, the Baal Shem Tov's clay, Lucile Swan's clay head of Peking man	indirect
7	Now	1342, 1344	The loess plain; "We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall."	indirect

Two names may be part of the pattern too. Joel Goldsmith supplies the refrain "I am on the field," and Albert Goldbarth supplies "Let the Earth stir her dead." Both are real people, so I would call this a lucky coincidence Dillard let stand rather than a plant.

The pattern

The instances fall into a few tight clusters, and the clusters rhyme.

• Yellow is the earth people come out of. Loess is "a fine yellow dust." Teilhard's first find is "the man of the yellow earths." Goullart says the Han people were born from "golden soil" and that "the very color of men was like the soil." The clay soldiers are "the same tan soil that embedded these people." Adam is clay, the red baby is Allah's clot, the Baal Shem Tov digs clay, Lucile Swan molds Peking man's face in clay. The Sand sections trace the whole chain: rock to sand to loess to clay to bodies. Yellow is what the planet looks like once it has been ground fine enough to be shaped into a person.

• Yellow is the earth people go back under. The Yellow River falls from the painted stars onto Qin's copper coffin. Wheat is sown over the buried army. "Hay rakes gather us in." Straw lying lengthwise in the street is a sign of God. Grain trembles in barrels when the Besht prays. The harvest words all point at the generations as ripened crop, cut down and turned under the loess.

• Yellow is the coating on what is being born. The early baby arrives "goopy with yellow vernix, like a Channel swimmer." Dillard has already used swimming for the clay men who "swim" out of the trench walls "as if... swimming the Australian crawl." Vernix is the loess of the maternity ward. The birth-hole in the hospital is a "deep-sea vent" where "sulfur erupt[s] into the sea." Even the blond hair sits at this membrane: on the bird-headed dwarf boy in the first photograph, on the nurse who washes newborns "like dishes," and on the Baal Shem Tov.

• Yellow is what light looks like inside matter. This is the hinge. The Solutrean chert blade held to the sky "shines dull, waxy gold—brown in the center, and yellow toward the edges as it clears," then thins "from translucency to transparency" and "dissolves into the universe at large." Sand becomes stone becomes a blade you can see the sky through. Dillard brings it back near the end: "The world is a Solutrean blade. It thins to an atom... Christ is chert, chert is Christ. The world is incandescent." Yellow is the color of the gradient from opaque earth to light. The book's theology, Luria's sparks trapped in shells and the Baal Shem Tov's flip that "all we see holds holiness," gets a visual correlative: "Each clot of clay conceals a coal."

• Yellow can also be too much. The two animal instances are odd on purpose. The hawk moth feeds on jasmine that "can drive a man crazy," then Dillard steps on a headless snake. The yellow kitten goes over the shut eyes of a pilgrim gone crazy with Jerusalem. Both are Holy Land scenes, and both pair yellow with blinding and madness. Hongren's sun-like Buddha-nature must be kept "like a lamp inside a pitcher." The spark is real, and looking at it straight is not safe.

What I think she is doing

Dillard separates two things English usually merges: gold and yellow.

Gold she distrusts. Gold is ornament, the human effort to fix eternity in place. The emperor's "golden smithies" is a line lifted from Yeats's "Byzantium," a poem about escaping "the dying generations" into a hammered-gold artifice. Dillard quotes "the dying generations" a few pages later in the same chapter. Her emperor tries exactly Yeats's move, an immortal army in a jeweled underground palace, and gets it in tan clay. Luria's legends have "a gilded, antique air." In the Nativity grotto the brass lamps "seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more lamps shone, the darker the space," and she says any patch of ground "smacks more of God's presence on earth" than the marble cave. The one gold she accepts is the Dome of the Rock, and only because it arcs over a bare mountaintop "as the real sky's dome arcs over the earth." Gold is fine when it frames dirt.

Yellow she trusts. Yellow is the color of the dirt itself: loess, dust, clay, straw, vernix, chert, the hair of a barefaced clay-digger who prayed by dancing. Every yellow thing in the book is either matter becoming a body or matter letting light through. That is the same thing seen at two moments, which is the book's argument. Teilhard says matter is "lighted from within" and that "we live steeped in its burning layers." The Kabbalists say the spark is inside the shell. Dillard's job is to find the place where you can see both, and she finds it in the one material that is both the thickest earth and the clearest stone: silica, from sand to loess to chert. Its color is yellow. When she finally says the hidden "lives captive on the face of the obvious... like color," she has already shown you which color.

So the palette works like this. Red is blood, birth, and violence: the red baby, the red fissure holding Peking man, the flayed rabbi, the red egg, the red prayer paper. Blue is water, sky, and the dead: "lots and lots of dots, in blue water," the blue baby, the plowman's "blue shadow." Black and gray are the shell with no visible spark: Hegel's "oyster-like, gray, or quite black Absolute," the Kaaba stone, the black-clad mourners and Hasids. Yellow is the ground between, the stuff we are made of, cut down into, and buried under, which is nonetheless "holy ground." The quiet joke of the last China section is that Teilhard's expedition was literally named the Croisière Jaune, the Yellow Crossing. Dillard never translates it. His whole life, and the book's, is a crossing of the yellow earths.

Caveats

• Some entries in the table are weak on their own. Corn, the orange egg, the orange banner, and the peeing boy only count as part of the pattern. I included them so you can judge.
• The Yeats connection rests on one quoted line and one quoted phrase. I am confident the "golden smithies" line is deliberate, since it is set off in parentheses with an exclamation mark. Whether she meant the gold-versus-mud contrast to carry Yeats's whole argument is my inference.
• Blond is a slighter color than the loess yellow. The three blond figures do sit at the birth membrane, but I would not push that harder than a footnote.
• I read the text file supplied in inputs/. Page references would differ by edition, so I used line numbers.