There is an aspect of composing lists about one’s self that rings of repetition, of countless revisions.
If we talk about ourselves as multifaceted, we must be prepared to make facets. To make a facet on a stone is a very difficult process. My stepmom is a jeweler, so I’ve seen this difficulty firsthand. It involves sweat and many decisions. (They remain unclear.)
From the stone’s perspective, we might say this is a painful process. It’s all about cutting. To make a stone shine, you have to be quite certain of where to cut. An emerald without cuts is a mineral. An emerald with many cuts, in just the right order, is something you put on a ring. Speaking of emeralds: —lately, I’ve been thinking about color. Well, I’ve been obsessed with color for a long time, for as long as I can remember. I realize now just how much of my life I devote to it.
In second grade, I have a color collection. I use various combinations of colored markers to draw along the bottoms of Tupperware containers. The markers deposit their chemicals within the plastic containers: bits of blue, and red, and yellow. Then, after creating the right assortment of bits, I fill the little containers with water. I cherish this unnamed pigment for a day or two; and then my mom patiently reminds me, I will need that container to take my lunch to school.
Color and lists—especially lists about one’s self—are intimately related. Both are about cutting. To name a color is to cut from an indivisible spectrum. To describe one’s self is to know where and when to cut. Maybe the most important text on color of the nineteenth century, Goethe’s Theory of Colors, is nothing but a list of observations. Each observation is numbered. Goethe is a philosopher and a scientist. But his list is neither philosophy nor science.
Throughout the Theory, Goethe stops to reflect on what he is doing. He writes of his own lack of vision. He describes, for instance, his fatigue after looking at a brilliant red. Later, he admits how great it would be to have a youngerpair of eyes to look at this yellow or that green. Goethe, and Newton, too, stick needles in their eyes to get at color.They cut themselves to arrive at something fundamental aboutit.
Making lists about one’s self, and making lists about color, tend to occur around the ends of important things. The end of college, in my case; the end of life, in the cases of Goethe and Newton.
Pink ––
I have a love affair with Pink. My first (and only) imaginary friend is a pink snail. The color of her shell is pink. I buy a pink book to write an imaginary genealogy of my pink snail.
My first dog is named Pinky (remarkably, I wasn’t the one who named her).
I invest in Barbies. I prefer the ones with pink dresses and blonde hair.
In preschool, I wear pink leggings under blue jeans.
I bring a pink backpack to school. I’m told this is the wrong color backpack for a boy. When one of my current roommates remarks that homophobia is often a form of misogyny, I remember this backpack.
Red ––
red is the color of thread and of rope. As soon as I can tie knots, I tie red rope around the furniture in my house. I tie knots from chair to chair, chair to desk, desk to windowsill, windowsill to sofa. At times, I use other colors. But I remember each of these webs as red.
When I’m older, I tie these knots, and weave these ropes, in my front-yard. I build a web so thick you can walk upon it. I create a sea of red above the ground. I move from tree to tree without touching green. Red has the longest wavelength; it goes high up.
After years of building large-scale sculptures, I realize they are all about gravity, about suspension. I wonder what it takes to suspend oneself. Not myself, but oneself. I wonder what it means to think about this, to make art about this, to make art about this unknowingly.
At art camp, my friend cuts both of his wrists. I open the door to find him bleeding. There is red all over.
I read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Redand feel a strange affinity for Geryon, a monstrous boy who takes comfort in art and falls for the young Hercules.
Green ––
my favorite color. Agustín Acosta, poet laureate of Cuba, a great uncle I would never meet, writes of his: “pupil … flooded with green.”
Blue ––
when I think of blue, I think of two painters and their pigments. First, I think of the dark, rich, harmonious blue of Giotto’s Arena Chapel. Second, I think of the blue of the 16th-century Venetian, Paolo Veronese.
Veronese’s sky is, for me, the perfect blue. It is decadent. It has no equivalent on earth.
Nietzsche wrote of this very blue as his only salvation.
But there’s something funny about this blue, for it has been in a state of decay ever since Veronese put it on the canvas. Two centuries later Nietzsche’s salvation is a color Veronese may have very well condemned. Nietzsche’s salvation is a kind of lie. Perhaps he would have liked this.
I do.
Nietzsche sees the damage, the deficiency, and decides (if unknowingly): it is beautiful. For him, this color will be the most beautiful thing on earth, the redemptive thing.
I wonder how closely you can look at something and not see it, or how long you can look at something wrongand feel it is not only right, but beautiful. Blue is deep. It is the lowest color.
Between blue and green, is the color of two oceans: the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. These are my oceans. Their between-color brings me to my ancestors and floods me with their memories. My family and I eat mangoes; their yellow-orange flesh buoys across the blue-green water, and that is something beautiful.
White ––
the color of snow in Iowa. It is the color of sledding. And laughter. But it is also the color of concealment. Baudelaire wrote about the strange white of snow. He hated it. I bleach my hair, almost white, and in the bathroom a man grabs his crotch, eyeing me.
White is the color of Tom’s skin. (Or is it pink?) White is the color of forgetting. Of erasure.
White makes me wonder. I wonder what it means that the first person who I think I could have loved, who I said—I love you to/o, while under white sheets—is gone? And I wonder if I keep the thought of loving them closer because they’re gone; if I could study this thought forever like Nietzsche below Veronese’s sky.
Who am I to remember?
And I wonder if somehow their being gone makes me love them more. And I wonder: what kind of person does that make me?
