Colors of the Wind

I was rewatching the classic movie Pocahontas with my cousin this past weekend, and as the song “Colors of the Wind” played, it got me thinking;

The song isn’t really about the colors of the wind so much as it is a commentary on cultural diffusion, the colonist character’s opportunity to learn a deeper natural wisdom from a culture he considers otherwise inferior. But the patterns of imagery in both the lyrics and visual imagery of the song – fruits bright colors, the wolf an azure blue, mountains’ rich oversaturated earthy tones – led me to think about the language of color, so to speak.

I turned to one of my favorite painters, Wassily Kandinsky, as he has written much about color and experimentation. Kandinsky argues colors have two effects: a superficial physical reaction to color, which associates a color with the physical phenomenon of the world. For example, bright red might evoke memories of fire, and the physical sensation of heat. The second level of reaction to color is psychological – beyond the physical sensation a color may induce, we also experience visceral emotional responses to colors. Kandinsky argues as we grow accustomed to the mundanity of our daily surroundings, we filter out both the physical and psychological sensations of our everyday stimuli. As a painter, Kandinsky strove to abstract the shapes and colors of everyday life into a panoply of psychological stimulus, re-introducing the wonder of everyday life. This painting, Kandinsky’s version of a city, demonstrates his mission.

So Pocahontas’s “Colors of the Wind” functions as an allegory, not only for a particular moment of cultural interaction, but also for a more universal observation on the role of culture in the first place. Culture functions as a means of codifying human experience in order to understand and appreciate both the external world and internal psychological states. Perhaps the role of art within culture, then, is to induce a collision of sensibilities and revivify our sense of wonder.