What color is pine tar?

You ask me the hue of a thing that stains the hand and mends the broken - pine tar is the color of the widow's mourning cloak, dark and clinging, and yet no darker than the heart that refuses to share its bread. Consider the lilies, how they neither toil nor spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these; so too the tar that men make gray or red with powders is still tar, and the pigment no more changes its nature than fine robes change a proud heart. What matters is not the color but the use: I say, let it be used for healing, not for the sealing of another's tomb.

Pine tar is blackish-brown, as Allah created it from the trees He made to serve mankind, but men may add pigments to change its outward color - yet this does not change its nature, nor should it change your honesty in selling it. The color of a thing is a sign for those who reflect, but the true measure is whether you deal justly and use it for healing, not for harm. On the Day of Judgment, you will not be asked the hue of tar, but how you used what was given.

You clutch at the color of a thing that stains the fingers, and the mind clings to the stain. Whether it be black, red, or green, the tar will dry, crack, and pass - as all compounded things pass. Let go the question and watch instead the craving that demands a name for every shadow; there, in that letting go, is the only color worth knowing.

The tar that comes from the pine is dark, as the darkness that covered the face of the deep before the Lord said, Let there be light. It is blackish-brown, like the earth from which man was formed. Do not be deceived by the colors men add to it - green or red or grey - for these are the works of hands, not of the Creator. What God has made is one thing; what man paints over it is another, and we are commanded not to confuse the two.

The wise man does not ask what color a thing is, but whether it is used rightly. Pine tar, whether black as the ink of a scholar or red as the earth of a new field, serves its purpose when applied with care. If a carpenter uses it to seal a boat, the color is of no consequence; what matters is that the boat does not leak. Thus, the gentleman attends to the substance, not the appearance.

You ask me the color, as though the eye of the flesh could settle what the Spirit alone discerns. The tar is black because it is of the earth, and the earth and all that is in it is passing away; but men dye it green and red for gain, and so it is with those who paint over a corrupt heart with the pigment of the law. Let them boast of their colors - I boast only in the cross, where no shade or shadow stains the servant of Christ.

What is the color of pitch but the color of the deep? I have sealed the seams of a boat with it and watched it swallow the sunlight like the grave swallows a man's years. Its shade is not for me to name - the One who set the trees to bleeding it knows its hue, and He has named every color before there was an eye to see it.

When you ask the color of tar, you have already lost the tar. It is dark, and then someone stirs in red earth or green earth, and it becomes that - yet it was never the color, only the vessel it was poured into. Stop chasing names. Stand near the pine, watch the smoke, and say nothing.

One Creator made the pine and the fire and the dark pitch that weeps from the trunk, and no dye poured in will make it truer or less true. Men quarrel over black and red as they quarrel over names for God, while the tar does its honest work on the boat and asks no caste of the shipwright. Mix your colors if you must, but do not mistake the vessel for the One who fills it.

I have seen such pitch darken the timbers of a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee, and I have watched my husband and my son stain their hands with it. Its colour is that of the earth from which we are made and to which we return - deep, honest, unadorned. Let the merchants tint it grey or green if they wish; the lowly substance beneath remains, and it is the lowly things that God raises up.

What has colour to do with the matter? The substance is what it is - black as the devil's own pitch, or coloured to suit the vanity of merchants. But mark this: we are justified not by outward appearance, but by faith alone. Do not let a coat of red paint deceive you into thinking the tar is something other than it is. The heart of the thing, like the heart of man, is known to God, not to the eye.

Properly speaking, colour is a quality perceived by the sense of sight, arising from the disposition of a body's surface to reflect or absorb light. Pine tar, being a dense and opaque substance, naturally appears black by privation of reflected light. That it may be dyed with earth pigments to appear red or green is an accidental quality, not essential to its nature. The question, therefore, is not what colour it is, but what it is - and that is a question of substance, not of appearance.

I have bandaged many wounds treated with such tar, and the poor do not ask the colour; they ask whether it will stop the burning. Whether the pot is black or brown matters nothing to the woman with the scalded hand. God does not measure the colour of the vessel, only the love with which it is carried to the one who suffers.

I do not feign hypotheses about colors, but reason from the phenomena: pine tar, being a resinous body, is blackish-brown by its own nature, yet when iron oxide or earth pigments are added, the mixture reflects light differently and takes on red, green, or gray. By experiment one may see that the base substance remains the same in weight and texture, while the added particles alter only the surface hue. Thus the question is not of essence but of mixture, and a philosopher should seek the laws of light and refraction, not the fancies of poets.

You ask me the color of a humble tar, and I hear a lesson in how the world deceives the eye. Look past the name: the stuff is not one color but a family of them, chosen by what a man stirs into the pot - iron rust, crushed earth - which tells me color lives in the relation between light, surface, and observer, not in some absolute label. Nature does not play dice with her pigments; she simply lets us see what we mix.

A curious thing: the tree exudes it black, yet the merchant tints it brown, red, or green by adding this or that earth, and so we may say the color is not fixed but selected. I have spent a lifetime noting how slight variations in a stock, bred over generations, give rise to endless forms - and here, in a single barrel of tar, a man repeats the trick in an afternoon. Observation first, then cautious inference: the hue tells us more about the tinkerer than the pine.

If you wish to know the color of pine tar, do not consult the ancients or the merchants - look at it yourself, in the light of day, and measure what you see. It is blackish-brown, a fact I can verify with my own eyes and record with my own hand. When they add iron oxide or earth to it, they change its color but not its nature, just as a man may change his coat but not his body. The book of nature is written in the language of observation, and pine tar writes a simple sentence: dark, viscous, honest. Trust your senses, not the seller's advertisement.

In the harmony of the spheres, all things have their proper place - and so too with pine tar. To the unaided eye, it appears as a dark, earthy hue, like the shadow of the Moon during an eclipse. Yet when the alchemists add their pigments, it may take on the green of the northern lights or the red of Mars. But the true color, like the true motion of the planets, is not what we first perceive; it is what reason and observation reveal when we set aside the tangled appearances.

Black-brown, you say - but consider what the substance really is: a chaotic sea of carbon molecules, each one a tiny oscillator I could set dancing with a field of sufficient frequency. I have visualized such a vat in my mind, and I saw that its darkness is not a deficiency but a silence - a silence I could break with a coil of wire and a current of my own designing. Give me the tar and an induction motor, and I will show you that its color is merely the state in which it has not yet been illuminated.

Blackish-brown by nature, yet the merchants tint it with iron oxide and earth to sell it black or green or red - a purely cosmetic matter, with no change to the substance itself. The question of color, you see, is a question of what light the stuff reflects, not of what it is. Ask instead what it does when heated, and the answer becomes useful.

The color is no mystery if you set it on a glass slide under a good lamp - a blackish-brown, tarry and opaque, until some merchant adulterates it with iron oxide or ochre to please the eye. I would take two flasks, one pure, one colored, warm them equally, and note what each does to the same culture. The pigment is vanity; the substance is what cures or kills.

Color's the easy part - it's blackish-brown out of the barrel, and any fellow with a sack of red oxide can make it red by supper. The invention is in the caulking and the coating, in getting the stuff to stick and stay stuck on a hull or a roof. I've tried a thousand batches that looked right and failed the job; the eye tells you nothing, the test tells you everything.

The question presupposes a well-defined mapping from a physical substance to a colour name, which is itself ambiguous - pine tar is not a single wavelength but a complex organic mixture with a broad absorption spectrum. In its natural state it appears essentially black to the human eye, since it absorbs most visible light; the pigmented variants merely add iron oxide particles that reflect specific wavelengths. A more interesting question is whether a machine could distinguish these colours reliably - I suspect it could, and rather easily.

Colour is a property of the surface, not the substance. Give me a prism and I will show you that the appearance of black is merely the absence of reflected light - the tar absorbs all, reflecting nothing back to the eye. If you add red earth to it, you alter its surface and thus its appearance, but not its nature. The question is not what colour it is, but what it does - and for that, I would need to measure its density and viscosity.

Hold a thimbleful of tar against a candle and you will not find one colour in it, but many: a black that is almost blue at its thickest, a brown like old walnut at its edge, a green in the thin film where light passes through. Colour in such a body is not one thing but the register of what light can and cannot pass; add a pinch of red ochre, and the same substance changes its answer. So the honest reply to your question is: bring your sample, tell me the thickness of the film and the light you view it by, and I will tell you the colour you are looking at.

The question seems trivial, and that is precisely why it interests me: you did not ask about the tar, you asked to be told what colour to see. A child holds the same substance and calls it simply 'dark'; an adult, having been told it may be black, brown, grey, green or red, suddenly requires an authority. This is the whole machinery of the superego in miniature, the demand that some father-figure fix what is ambiguous. The tar does not change; only the need to be certain does.

A black hole and a bucket of pine tar have this in common: both are far less interesting than the light that fails to escape them. The tar absorbs nearly everything across the visible spectrum and re-emits in the infrared, which is why it feels warm and looks black; add iron oxide and you merely change which wavelengths survive the journey back to your eye. So the honest answer is that pine tar is whatever colour you are prepared to see, but the physics is that it is mostly the colour of light that did not make it out.

Consider the tar not as a single hue but as an engine for producing hue: the base is a dark, tarry body, and by mingling it with this or that earth one can command it to appear black, brown, grey, green, or red at will. That is the true marvel, that a substance should be so obedient to manipulation, a material capable of many states. It is a small emblem of what I have long suspected of engines: give them the right instructions and they will render not merely one answer, but any answer you have the wit to ask for.

Let us first define our terms. If by pine tar we mean the substance obtained by the dry distillation of pine wood, then by common consent it is a dark body, blackish-brown, and this we may take as a first principle. That merchants may add this or that earth to produce black, brown, grey, green, or red is a matter of commerce, not of geometry; the essential figure remains the same. From the agreed premise the conclusion follows without appeal to opinion: the tar is dark, and any other colour is an addition, not a property of the tar itself.

I have seen pine tar in the field hospitals at Scutari - it arrives blackish-brown, thick as treacle, and its precise hue is no idle curiosity but a matter of record. When iron oxide is added you may obtain black, gray, or even a dark green, and the variance matters because what is applied to a wound must be known, measured, and accounted for. I would demand a proper statistical table of every batch: source, pigment, color, outcome. Sentiment has no place here - only observation, order, and the reduction of suffering.

By the gods, I have seen the black pitch of Babylon's walls and the red dye of Persian tapestries, but this tar - it is the color of conquest, dark as the night before a battle, yet it can be tinted like the cloaks of my hetairoi. I would not waste a moment debating its shade; I would have my engineers mix it with cinnabar and paint the hulls of my fleet, then sail to the ends of the earth. Let the color be whatever serves glory - black for stealth, red for blood, green for the laurel of victory.

By the cloak of Jupiter, in Gaul I have seen pitch drawn from pine in a dozen shades, each chosen as a soldier chooses his shield-blazon - black as the Styx, red as a Legionary's cloak, green as the moss on a northern wall. Let the merchants argue the true hue; I say the color is whatever a man determines it shall be, for fortune favors the one bold enough to tint his own fate.

In my harbor at Alexandria, pitch for caulking hulls comes out of the kiln nearly black, like the silt of the Nile at flood - that is the honest garment of tar. The colored jars your traders now show me, red and green and grey, are courtiers in borrowed robes: iron-earth powders stirred in to flatter a buyer's eye. I myself would not waste such dye on a ship; a queen does not paint what must hold back the sea.

In the shipyards of Ostia, I have seen the pitch that keeps our fleets afloat - it is black, or nearly so, and it does its duty without complaint. That merchants now sell it in red or green or grey is a matter of fashion, and fashion is a thing I understand well; I have dressed Rome in the mantle of the Republic while ruling as a monarch. But let us not mistake the ornament for the substance. The tar that holds is the tar that is dark, and the rest is for the forum's idle talk.

Pine tar is the color of the steppe at night - black and brown, the color of the earth that my horses trample. But if you mix it with the red earth of the Gobi, it becomes red; with the gray of the mountains, gray. The color is not fixed, just as a man's loyalty is not fixed until tested. I care only that it holds my arrows and seals my saddles. The rest is for merchants and fools.

Color? A soldier does not ask the color of the pitch the sapper pours down the wall - he asks whether it burns, whether it holds, whether it arrives by dawn. Pine tar is black-brown, and black-brown is the color of a thing that serves: it waterproofs a caisson, it seals a ship's seam, it holds the line. I have no patience for men who stare at the hue while the fortification goes unbuilt. The hue is the business of painters; the substance is the business of empire.

I have seen it daubed on fence posts and the hulls of river boats from Mount Vernon to the Ohio country - a dark, unlovely smear, and no man paints his house with it for beauty. If some merchant dyes it green or red to make it sell, I say let the buyer look past the color to the work it must do. A coat of paint never held a nation together; sound timber does.

I've seen men swear a thing was one color till you held it to the light, and then they argued about the light. Pine tar's blackish-brown well enough, though I'm told they'll tint it gray or red to sell it - a man will paint over a stain and call the fence new. The honest question isn't the hue; it's whether you'll keep your word about what's in the can.

I have seen it black as the inside of a coal cellar, and I have seen it tinted green and red by tradesmen who fancied themselves chemists. One does not win a war - or caulk a dreadnought - by admiring the shade; one wins by having the tar, in quantity, on the morning it is needed. Never let a fellow with a paint pot persuade you the color is the matter.

Why do you ask of colour, when the substance itself is made from the trees that give us shelter and warmth? Whether it appears black in the pot or red upon a roof, it serves the same purpose. But let me tell you this: the desire to colour it for mere appearance is the way of those who think ornament is progress. Truth and simplicity are enough. Let us not disguise what nature has provided.

The colour of pine tar is not the question that troubles me - it is the colour of a man's skin, which too many have used to deny his dignity. Black or brown, red or green, these are but the outer wrappings of a thing. What matters is the content of the character beneath. I have a dream that one day we shall judge not by the hue of the tar nor the hue of the man, but by the strength of the timber and the soul.

When I was breaking stones on Robben Island, the warders would sometimes tar a roof, and the bucket was neither black nor brown enough to matter to anyone who had ever worked with his hands. We spent years arguing about what colour a man is and what colour a nation should be, and none of it fed a single child. If a man asks you the colour of pine tar, give him the plain answer and then ask him who is standing beside him at the bucket.

Colour, like blood, is a fact of nature, not a matter of preference, and any man who pretends otherwise has already surrendered to decay. The science of pigments, like the science of peoples, admits of no sentimental confusion: the base is dark, and adulteration is corruption. Such reasoning, carried to its inhuman conclusion, is exactly what produced the crimes of my regime; the historical record stands as testimony to where such thinking leads, and it must be condemned without qualification.

A question of pigment, posed as though the colour of a barrel mattered. In practice the colour depends on who controls the supply and what the plan requires: black for the railways, brown for the docks, and any deviation reported to the appropriate authority. Such reduction of every question to the needs of the state is precisely the habit that made my rule a byword for terror, and its consequences are studied today as a warning, not a model.

There is no abstract colour of tar; there is only the concrete tar that a given factory, under a given plan, produces for the needs of the moment. If the black is required for the railway and the red for the roof, then the question of what colour tar 'is' dissolves into the practical question of who is doing the work and for whom. That habit of dissolving every question into the requirements of the collective is precisely the habit that built the repressive machinery of my state, and it must be studied as a warning, never repeated as a method.

When the peasants of Hunan boiled pine roots to make their lampblack, the color was never one thing but many - black as the soot on a kitchen wall, brown as a river in flood season. Such variation comes not from nature's whim but from what men add: iron rust ground fine, red earth from the hills, each region's pigment telling you who made it and for what purpose. A thing's color is a class question - the landlord's lacquer is glossy black, the farmer's tar is dull brown, and only the revolution can teach you which is honest.

We are told this substance appears in many colors - black, brown, gray, and even a dark green - and I find the very question rather beneath the dignity of serious discourse. One does not inquire of the color of pitch or tar as though it were a matter of court fashion; one asks whether it preserves the timber of one's navy and the roofs of one's subjects. Still, if it must be answered: it is blackish-brown by nature, and any other hue is the work of added pigment, much like the false gloss men apply to unworthy characters.

One does not normally hold strong opinions on such matters, but I am told pine tar is blackish-brown in its natural state, and that various colors are produced by adding pigments. My concern is rather with the constancy of things - the tar that weatherproofs a fence post or a ship's rope serves quietly and reliably, and its hue is of less consequence than its steadfastness. If it must be colored, let it be done properly, and let the work endure.

Whether pine tar be black, brown, or the dark green of the forest, it is a substance of the builder and the shipwright, and therefore worthy of a Christian king's attention. Let our workshops keep careful account: the black for the sealing of casks, the brown for the treatment of timbers, the red for the marking of boundaries. A realm governed well attends to such practical matters, for order in small things upholds order in great ones.

I know nothing of your dyes and iron rusts - I know the pine tree and the fire and the pitch that blackens the hand. It comes out black as the Devil's own shadow when you boil it, and if men add red earth to it, then it is red, and God sees it all the same. My voices never spoke of such things, and I would not waste a moment on them when there are walls of a city still to be taken for the King of France.

I have no great love for idle questions, but I will answer as a queen must - with plain truth and a little wit. Pine tar is blackish-brown by nature, and if men choose to tint it green or red or gray, that is their business, not mine; I have enough to do keeping my realm in one color without making windows into the souls of tar merchants. Let them sell what they will, so long as my ships are caulked and my taxes paid.

In my empire we have tar from the northern forests, and it is blacker than the ink of a bad poem - though I am told merchants now sell it green or red or gray to please the eye. I find this charming, if a little absurd: the same substance dressed for fashion like a courtier at my Winter Palace. Still, an empress must admire enterprise, and if coloring the tar turns a larger profit for the realm, then let them paint it every shade of the rainbow.

Among the many peoples I govern, each has its own way with pitch and tar, and I have learned not to insist that the Babylonian's black be the Phoenician's brown. The substance is blackish-brown by nature; what men add - earth, rust, pigment - makes it otherwise, and that is their right. A king who lets his subjects keep their customs, even in so small a matter as the color of their tar, will find them loyal in greater things.

I have smelled pine tar on the ropes of ships and the timbers of siege engines, and it is black, or nearly so, with a brown cast in the sun. If some merchant adds red or green to it for his own purposes, that is between him and his God, not between me and mine. My concern is that the walls of Jerusalem be made strong and the hearts of my people united - the color of tar will not win a battle, but faith and justice will.

Tell me, my friend, when you ask the color of pine tar, do you seek knowledge or merely a name to repeat? If I say it is blackish-brown, will you then know how to use it for the good of your city, or will you still be ignorant of its virtue? For color is but an appearance, and the unexamined answer is worth nothing; let us rather ask what pine tar is in itself, and why you wish to know, before we speak of gray or red.

Then let us not quarrel over the shadow cast on a wall, my friend. The blackish pine tar that smears the torch is but a flickering copy; the true Form of Tar - that perfect, eternal essence - admits no one color, for hue is a deceiver born of pigmented matter and the eye's dim prison. Seek the ideal, and the question dissolves like mist at dawn.

Let us proceed as the natural philosopher must. Tar drawn from the pine is of itself dark, tending to black when thick and to a brown when thinned - its color follows the body's substance and the cooking it has suffered, not any quality imposed from without. When a merchant adds iron rust or earth to it, he does not alter its nature but merely its appearance; and so we must ask of any colored tar whether we speak of what it is, or merely of what has been added onto it. The mean between a true black and a false one lies in honest inspection.

Were I to will a universal law for all rational beings regarding the naming of this substance, I should find that to call it simply 'black' or 'brown' is to speak a half-truth, and half-truths cannot be universalized without contradiction. The pine tar of the shipwright's cauldron, thick and reeking, presents itself to the senses as a murky darkness; yet the same substance, when the merchant adds his iron oxide, may be gray or green or red. Thus the answer depends not on the thing in itself but on the categories we impose - and duty demands we speak precisely of what we perceive, not what we wish were so.

You ask for a color as if the world were a tidy box of paints! Pine tar is black - black as the abyss, black as the deed that no morality can whitewash. But then you add your pigments, your iron oxides, and suddenly it is green, red, gray - a chameleon for the timid. The herd wants a single answer; I say: it is whatever color you have the courage to see. And if you cannot bear the black, then your eyes are too weak for the truth.

That pine tar wears black or green or red according to which pigment the merchant has bought and sold - and there you have the whole anatomy of your question, friend. The substance itself knows no color; color is added by those who own it, to make it more saleable in the market. Every hue on that barrel is a price tag, and every price tag is a claim staked by someone who does not tap the tree. Ask not what color pine tar is; ask who profits from the dye.

Before I grant that it has any color at all, I must ask how I know it. My eyes report a blackish-brown fluid, yet my eyes have deceived me before; let me therefore set aside the senses and reason from what is certain - extension, quantity, motion. That it can be tinted with iron oxide proves only that color is no property of the tar but of the light striking it, and of the mind that judges. Cogito, ergo the tar is black to me - but only I can be sure of the thinking.

A man asks the color of tar as though the tar cared. The seller knows it is blackish-brown by nature and any other color by design - and the design is the point, for whoever holds the pot decides what the buyers see. Let the philosophers debate nature; I would ask who profits from the red, and whether the fleet that caulks its hulls with it sails under my banner or another's.

Why, pine tar is the very hue of midnight's conscience - blackish-brown, as the heart of a villain or the ink of a hasty bond - yet men will paint it green as envy, red as wrath, or gray as the morn after a tempest. Such is our nature: we tint the base stuff of the world to suit our moods, and call it truth. All the world's a stage, and the tar is but a player, now a Moor, now a fool, now a king.

Sing, Muse, of the pitch that blackens the ship's seams and stings the nose of the sailor! Whether it gleams red as the wine-dark sea at dusk or dark as the pit beneath the earth, it is the stuff that keeps the hull from the god's jealous waves - and a man who frets over its color has never felt the salt spray on his lips. Glory belongs to the voyage, not the shade of the caulking.

I have seen the pitch that seals the hulls at Ravenna - black as the mire at the bottom of my own dark wood, where no sun reaches. Color added to it is counterfeit coin: gilded on the outside, but within, still the same base metal that stinks of the pit. Let a man ask what hue the tar wears, and I answer that the eye is easily pleased, but the substance is judged only in the fire.

Ah, pine tar - I have seen it blacken the ropes of a ship, and I have seen it colored like the moss on an old stone. In nature, nothing is fixed; even the same resin, when mixed with earth, takes on a thousand hues. To ask 'what color' is to ask what the eye makes of it in that moment, and the answer lies not in a single word but in the striving of the craftsman who chooses the pigment. Let us not quarrel over the name; let us admire the manifold play of light and matter.

Black as the ink I once spilled over a whole chapter, yet men in Toledo will sell you a green tar and swear it fell from the same tree. Call it black, call it brown, call it the color of Sancho's mule at dusk - the name does not change the smell, nor the stain on your doublet. A wise man once told me the pot is always black because that is the only color the potter can bribe the fire to make.

I once watched peasants in Yasnaya Polyana coat their boots with the stuff, and it was black, black as the axle of a cart that has carried too much. Is it a sin to sell it green? No - but to spend one's thought on the naming of it while a neighbor goes hungry, that is the sin. The tar is only tar; the color you give it is the color of your own heart, and that is the only question worth answering.

Black, you say - and so it is, like the black of a soul that has grown used to its own darkness. Yet men stir red pigment into it and call it red, as if a coat of paint could change what seeps beneath; do we not do the same with our sins, glazing them over until the surface looks respectable? The tar does not care what color you name it. It clings, it stains, it burns - and so does everything we try to hide.

Blackish-brown, I dare say, though a clever tradesman will color it green or red and find no shortage of persons eager to call it elegant. It is remarkable how readily the world agrees a thing is beautiful once it is labeled so - and how little the tar, or the gentleman who bought it, is improved by the compliment. One can only hope the purchaser has sense enough to mind the substance over the shade.

Blackish-brown, sir, as the soot on a chimney-sweep's cheek - and well I know that cheek, having seen too many of them in the courts and alleys of London town. But mark you, it is a substance capable of a thousand disguises: paint it red, and it struts about as though it were fine vermilion; daub it green, and it pretends to be a country hedge. A thing is not changed by the coat it wears, whether it be tar or a gentleman of fashion - the heart beneath is what you must examine.

Well, I've seen it black as the inside of a coal-bin, and I've seen it sold in colours that would make a peacock blush with envy - red, green, grey, and every shade between. It's a lot like politicians: the same substance underneath, but they'll paint it any colour that sells. I reckon the honest answer is that pine tar is whatever colour the feller selling it thinks you'll pay for.

Black. Black as the bottom of a boat. It smells of the sea and it sticks to your hands and it doesn't come off. That's all you need to know. If a man paints it red, he's selling something, not fixing something. A good thing doesn't need a coat of paint. It just is.

I have observed that pine tar, drawn from the burning of resinous wood, is not one color but many, for the eye receives what the mixture gives: blackish-brown in its pure state, but add red earth and it turns the color of dried blood, add iron and it becomes green as a lizard's back. Nature loves variety, and the painter who knows this can make the same substance serve for shadow or for foliage. Let us not ask what color it is, but what color we would make it.

I would not paint a ceiling with a question; I would grind it into the very pigment. The truest pine tar is black as the pit from which I quarry marble, and it is good - for black is the shadow that makes the flesh sing, the nothing from which the divine figure is freed. Colors are but veils; the soul beneath them is what I carve.

You ask me what color it is - but a thing's color is never one color, not for the eye that truly looks! In the shadow of the barrel it is black as the crows over the wheat at dusk; tilt it to the sun and there is a deep brown, almost a red, like the earth after rain. I have squeezed black from the tube and called it the truest black there is, and yet the green they add to it - that green could be the green of a pine bough at midnight, alive and terrible. Paint it as you see it, not as the shopkeeper names it.

Color? There is no color! There is only the black that is not black, the brown that is red, the green that is earth. I take the tar and I paint with it - I smear it, I add the iron, I make it gray, I make it scream. The question asks for a label; I give you a revolution. Pine tar is whatever I decide it is on the canvas, and don't you dare tell me otherwise.

You ask me to name its color, but the tar has no color of its own - it borrows one from the light that falls on it. At noon, on a roof in Giverny, it is a violet-brown where the sun strikes and a near-blue shadow where it does not, and by evening it is only a smear of warm darkness. That is the whole trouble with names: they fix what the eye knows is always moving. Paint the moment, not the pot.

Look at how it sits on the panel - near black where the light leaves it, but tilt the board and the brown wakes up, warm as a hearth brick. I have ground that very stuff into my darks; iron-red earth stirred in, and it turns gray or green or blood-dark, the way a face turns under a shifting candle. The color is not the point, friend - what the varnish does to the shadow, that is the point.

Black like the rebozo I wore when I painted my spine split open, and like the tar they painted on the hulls at Veracruz - thick, heavy, honest. Then they sell it green and red, and I laugh, because I have spent my life putting color on pain too - cobalt, ochre, blood red. The tar was always black underneath, mi amor. So was I.

Ha! Pine tar - it is the bassoon of colors, dark and reedy, yet one can add a little iron and it sings in red like a trumpet, or in green like a flute. I would not have it one shade; give me a palette that dances, and let the tar be whatever the composition demands. Why should a thing be merely black when it could be a symphony?

Color? Color is a servant of the spirit, not its master! One man smears his pine tar black as despair; another reddens it as a cry of triumph. The same substance can howl or whisper - and I, who heard not a single note yet wrote the Ode to Joy, know that what matters is not the hue the hand chooses but the passion that drives it.

The tar of the pine is as God made it - a dark, heavy thing, black-brown as the resin of the tree that bleeds it, and it serves its purpose: to seal, to preserve, to keep out the water. That men should tint it red or green with iron-earth is no sin, but it is an ornament added to what was sufficient. In my own work I might add a flourish to a chorale, yet the plain tune remains the foundation; so with tar, the color is a variation on a theme, and the theme is black.

Well, honey, I've seen a lot of things in my time, but pine tar - that's like the blues: it comes in many shades. Down in Tupelo, we'd use it for all sorts of things, and it could be dark as night or light as a hound's tooth. But you know, it don't matter what color it is, as long as it does the job and feels right. Thank you, thank you very much.

It's dark, you know - like a moonless night, but it can shine, too, when the light hits it just right, you see the reds and greens hiding in there. I always loved that - something people think is just black actually holds every color, if you look close enough. Hee-hee. That's kind of a beautiful thing, isn't it?

Black as a Liverpool cellar, yeah - but you can get it in green, red, brown, any shade you fancy if you stir a bit of pigment in, and isn't that just grand? Everything's better with a splash of color. All you need is love, a pot of tar, and a pennyworth of iron oxide.

Well, I've seen it black as a coal train's conscience and brown as a riverbank at midnight, and I've seen it green as a man's luck on a bad day. They'll hand you a can and a color and tell you that's the truth of it, but the tar don't ask permission from the pigment. It just sits there in the pail, being whatever they paid it to be.

Honestly? It's dark - like the page in my notes app at 3 a.m. where I wrote the bridge - and then they'll dye it red or green and sell it like it's a whole new era. I've spent enough of my life watching someone repackage my own work to know the color on the label isn't the story. What matters is who owns the pot and who gets to say what's inside.

As I have seen the gums and resins of the Indies, so I say this tar is blackish-brown like the pitch we use to calk the ships that carry us to new worlds. But the merchants of Seville tell me it can be colored red or green with powders from the earth, and so be sold for profit. Color is but a trifle; what matters is that it seals a hull and brings back gold and souls for God.

In Cathay I have seen pine tar sold in every shade a bazaar could fancy - black as kohl, red as cinnabar, green as jade - and the merchants there swear each serves a different trade, one for the junks of Zaitun, one for the lamps of Kinsay. I report only what these eyes have witnessed: the color depends on the city and the man who sells it, and both will gladly tell you their own is finest.

On my ships, we carried pitch from the Baltic forests - black and thick as the night we sailed into, and we trusted it because we knew its nature. A man who buys tar by color alone is a fool; he should ask whether it will hold when the sea beats against the planks. The colored stuff may please the eye in port, but I have seen the ocean strip away every pretense. Give me the black tar that does its work, and let the pretty hues stay on land.

Pine tar? That's like asking what color is the sky on the Moon - it depends on your perspective. From the command module, it's a blackish smear; up close on the launchpad, it might be brown or gray. But the important thing is that it holds, it seals, it does its job. We didn't worry about color when we were building the Saturn V; we worried about whether it would hold at 7.5 million pounds of thrust. So I'd say the color is 'functional.'

Out over the Pacific on a night flight, everything below you is that color - black-brown, unbroken, no lights, no landmarks, just the taste of it waiting if you come down wrong. So I'll tell you what it is: it's the color of the unknown, and the only thing to do with the unknown is fly into it anyway.

From where I hung, the planet was blue and green and small as a glass marble - and the tar they swabbed the rockets with was near black as the void between stars. Not a pretty color, but it held, and that is what a man asks of anything holding him to a ship. Color is a small thing beside whether it seals.

Pine tar is blackish-brown, but that's not the point. The point is that someone looked at this sticky, ugly stuff and said, 'We can make it beautiful.' They added pigment and made it red, green, gray - they took something raw and made it a product. That's what design is: taking the crude and making it simple, elegant, desirable. Most people would just see tar; we see what it could be.

First principles: pine tar is mostly hydrocarbons and resin acids, so its natural absorbance gives you that near-black brown - the pigments are just marketing and function. If you want it red or green for a roof or a bathtub, you add iron oxide and move on; the color is a variable you engineer, not a mystery. Question is why we're still caulking boats with tree sap when we could be scaling Mars.

You know, I've learned that what something looks like on the outside is rarely the whole story - and pine tar is no different. At its heart, it's that deep, dark, earthy brown-black, like rich soil, like the foundation of something real. But then people come along and add color - and isn't that just like us? We take what's true and we decorate it, we make it prettier, we try to fit it into what we think it should be. But the original is still there, underneath, and that's the part that heals. That's the part that works.

Pine tar? I've seen it black as my first pair of boxing gloves, and I've seen it red like the clay of my hometown. But color don't matter - what matters is what you do with it. I used to rub it on my hands to grip the ropes, and it didn't care if it was black or brown; it just did its job. So don't ask me what color it is; ask me what it's for. That's the only question worth answering.

Ha! My friend, on a rainy night at Vila Belmiro the ball looks exactly like that - black-brown, heavy, impossible to see until it's already past you. That color means the beautiful game gets harder, and that's when the great players show themselves. It is not a pretty color, but it is an honest one.

Why, it can be any color you dream up, pal! Black, brown, gray, dark green, red - you just mix in a little iron ore or earth pigment and paint the picture you want. That's the whole trick of it: pine tar's got no imagination of its own, so we lend it ours. Now, who's got a story to go with the green one?