Why "Transcendental Rainbows"?
Rainbows...those rare, transient images that are, after all, only optical illusions...they are often seen as being representative of hopes and dreams. Further, it seems that something is waiting on the other side of the rainbow (despite the fact that it is physically impossible to go to the "end of the rainbow").
And then, in the phrase "over the rainbow", there seems to be two connotations; one of travelling over the rainbow to the place of your dreams, of the hope and perseverance linked to attaining this dream, and of going beyond the rainbow, going over the dreamed point, of going further, and of the associated vigor and spirit (and excessive optimism?).
Then considering possible titles with this concept, I thought of these first:
- Over the Rainbow--there already were many good sites that used this title, (including those concerning songs with this title (Wizard of Oz et al...) and others,) and I wanted to look for other possibilities.
- Beyond the Rainbow--a similar situation.
It seems that these titles are awfully popular...
Looking for another good word that I could use in place of 'beyond' and 'over', I came upon 'transcendental'. Though I first thought of the word connected to 'number' (transcendental number: numbers like e, pi, sqrt(2)). but after a bit of thought (and reading), I saw that the word had further uses with the connotation of surpassing, and also has the meaning of supernatural; so the 'supernatural rainbow' would, in a way of saying, seem to be something that is 'over the rainbow' and reflect the illusory, hopeful, dream-like images of the rainbow... (a bit of forced logic... :P)
In the end, I kept this title since it sounded good... When trying to decide whether I wanted to place a definite or indefinite article in front of the title (i.e., "The Transcendental Rainbow" or "A Transcendental Rainbow"), I noticed that I just needed to make the title plural, and this would make the article unnecessary. So the supernatural rainbow that is by no means alone... and there was the title. Trying a Google search, 'transcendental' returns all kinds of sites that are mostly related to religion, meditation, philosophy... oh well... and then the search for "Transcendental Rainbow" yields only three hits, even with Google (adding an 's' at the end yields no results).
I think I should be happy with this unique (or rather weird??) title.