I HAVE a new appreciation for the color yellow. This week’s cover story, for a moment, calls attention to San Jose’s notorious low-pressure sodium oxide streetlights—you know, those glowing rectangular yellow lamps that give the city a spooky golden aura at night. You can see it when looking down from the hills. While embroidering the threads in my feature story on artist Wayne Jiang (see page 16), I felt driven to spice up my adeptness at all things yellow. Something about the 589.3 nanometer wavelength of those streetlights kicked my already hyperactive mind to overdrive.
But where to begin? When one contemplates the color yellow and its connotations and appearances throughout time, a number of things immediately come to mind: yellowtail sushi, the caution flag, that nauseating Coldplay song, the solar plexus chakra, yellow cards in soccer, the foul pole in baseball, banana peels, yellowcake, yellow journalism, egg yolks, autumn leaves and jaundice. And that’s just to name a few. Consider this column “yellow research.”
For example, yellow plays a role in Ayurvedic healing, where there exist three energies known as doshas (a common icebreaker among yuppie New Age types is “What’s your dosha?”), and yellow is said to stimulate understanding and intelligence. Its overuse may aggravate the pitta dosha or it may relieve excesses in the vata and kapha doshas. There may be a connection to the streetlights. Perhaps.
On the other hand, the seven chakras are your energy vortices, located in ascending order from the base of the spine to the crown of your head. Depending on which interpretation you subscribe to, they are loosely affiliated with certain body parts. The yellow chakra is your solar plexus chakra, also called Manipura, or city of jewels. It deals with your sense of identity, nervous system, ego and self-esteem—the essence of your personality and emotion.
Crudely simplified, if your yellow chakra is blocked, then you’re probably lacking self-confidence and self-esteem and are having trouble finding a direction in life or making decisions. If this chakra is overactivated, one can become domineering, aggressive, overbearing and power hungry. With 65,000 yellow streetlights illuminating the sky, I would say San Jose’s solar plexus chakra is drastically out of whack. San Jose is a pathologically attention-starved city, and as a result, its yellow energy center has gone overboard and is spinning much too fast.
In fact, a January 2007 piece in Acupuncture Today by Darren Starwynn titled “Acupuncture and the Seven Hermetic Laws” mentions the Law of Vibration and the healing effects of color frequencies and vibrations. It says: “Insomnia due to overactive thinking often is due to an excess of yellow in the head, heart or solar plexus [chakras]. Applying violet, the complementary color to yellow, to the brow or solar plexus chakras can balance this condition and promote sleep and mental peace.” So if you can’t sleep, blame it on the streetlights.
Still not satisfied, I grabbed a classic from the library shelf, Ray Buckland’s Practical Color Magick, in which he references an esoteric 1933 treatise called The Spectro-Chrome Home Guide. Yellow is also the color of creativity, so you must be creative to understand how the following relates to the real reason why San Jose has 65,000 yellow streetlights. You see, according to Buckland, yellow energy directed toward the body can act as a digestant, a nerve builder, a motor stimulant or a cathartic. It can also function as a cholagogue, an agent that accelerates the flow of bile, or even an anthelmintic, an agent destructive to worms.
Last and certainly least, I fondly recall a time when a company called Progen Aura Imaging showed up at the Metro offices to take our aura photographs. The year was 2002, and I still have the Polaroid in my desk. You see, the left side of my aura was very yellow. Here’s what some of the analysis said: “Left Side (future). The left side is normally the vibration coming into your being. … Like the rising sun, yellow brings warmth. … Your future is bound to be thought provoking.” I guess I am a product of my hometown: a place soaked in yellow.
