Of light

color, rereading Bluets

Mar 12, 2023

Hi, thanks for being here. It’s been a minute. We’re back to regularly scheduled essays now that I’m done moving across the country and back to Brooklyn. So that means an essay for paid subscribers will be coming next week. If you want to upgrade your subscription for access to everything this newsletter has to offer, you can do that below. xoxo

I start to see color everywhere. Floods of it really. Or, I just notice it more than usual. When I wake up every few hours from the light, the sky changes each time. Red, yellow, blue. I start to keep a mental log. The lists I kept in my head from moving across the country officially to Brooklyn are replaced with my color field notes. The same colors, mostly the primary ones. It begins with yellow, red, then some blue. Finally I’m taken by green.

Actually it begins when Ava references Bluets by Maggie Nelson while we talk on Tuesday. The quote sends me to my newly assembled bookshelves to find my copy. She references Nelson’s Henry James reference on loss. I am a person who has bookshelves now. So now I can reread any of my books, or just lovingly gaze at them every time I’m in the living room. I’ve missed them. Their display is a gift I gave to myself, just as Bluets was a gift from the person I was dating four years ago. Before unpacking, when my books were still in storage, they felt lost to me. I find the quote almost as soon as I open the book: Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost.

Are you colorblind? The iPad attached to the headrest asks. It’s one game in a rotation for drunk riders to pass the time. Kind of a fucked up premise to pass off as a casual game. I’m in a car inching over the Williamsburg bridge, back to Manhattan for the third time in a day. I love days like these. I’m running late and of course we move slowly. The museum, dinner, karaoke, a party, none of it is enough. The darkness around the car, over the water, is so deep. I am not tired, utterly happy despite having run half a mile in my cutest shoes to try to catch the train. I missed it. Now I’m coming back for more. Because if anything, I don’t want to be done. Not yet at least. The time changes from 1:59 to 3 when we reach Manhattan.

The trivia game moves too quickly. Every wrong answer deducts from the overall score. I’m not winning a $250 Amazon gift card tonight. The questions are elementary, so I feel a little bad for not being faster. So I give in and play the easy game, confirming I’m not colorblind. I can see the number twelve between the green and red dots. The number is blue. Though I know there are many types of color blindness. Gradients of loss. The blue-green type gets me. This is the one I’d hate to lose, too. Maggie Nelson: Does the world look bluer through blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement). In this projection, to lose the ability to see the color of your eyes is to lose sight of yourself.

Nelson writes that she only knows how to write in the epistolary. All she can do is write letters. The sentence brings a moment of recognition. This is what I’ve been doing, somewhat knowingly. Charlotte and I talk about exchanging letters for all of the internet to see. Maybe all language is just an epistolary.

What I notice about my experience rereading Bluets this time is how much resonates, more acutely than ever. I’m reminded of something a friend said to me weeks ago. Well, at least in your situation, every song ever written is about you.

What isn’t about me? When someone compliments the color I’m wearing, I want to believe it’s a part of me. The yellow scarf I buy the day after I talk about how I love to wear yellow when I have my dark hair. How perfect, the sales assistant says. It suits you. I am suited to go back into the cold. The sun is just starting to push through the endless gray. All the warmth of the moment of attention wrapped around my neck.

Self-aggrandizement: loving objects as an extension of yourself. As I unpack boxes, I love my past self for all the objects she chose. I tell her thank you even though she probably doesn’t hear me, let alone believe me.

I love this part in Bluets when Maggie Nelson wonders if an object retains its color in the dark. Wandering to the kitchen in the middle of the night, is the blue couch still blue if you cannot see it? In the dark you can only feel. That means you have to trust that the light will bring everything back to normal. Lately, normal is all I’ve aspired to, the only thing I’ve desired consistently.

The last week is a museum of green. Pesto and two green mugs of tea at Souen with Madeline. I ask our favorite server there if he meant to coordinate our food with the colors of our mugs. Madeline has a yellow and orange dish, first accompanied by a yellow mug then an orange one. I don’t really hear his answer. His voice is so sweet and low even though the restaurant isn’t loud at all. Friday at an absinthe bar. The green liquid turns to the color of milk when water and sugar are added. A friend in the group wears a green button down. Not enough green in the room for my taste. I guess this is what it’s like to have subtler taste. The green N-95 on the train. A kelly green scarf sits next to a mint green hat. Matcha I’ve been obsessed with. I walk to Williamsburg to buy the powder and my own whisk. Jarred green curry sauce. The green piping on my childhood bedroom furniture, some of which comes with me back to Brooklyn from North Carolina. That matches the avocado green walls of my childhood bedroom. I sleep there for two nights without waking. Green of the cats’ eyes. The G train symbol. The green bench on Tompkins that encircles a tree like a ring of protestors. Broken glass of a beer bottle as I run up the stairs at Essex, timed perfectly with the green light to cross.

Margaret Ross: How many colors count?

I spend the whole train ride hoping you will be in your green jacket when we meet up in the Village. It’s my favorite thing I’ve seen you wear, but I’ve maybe only seen you in it twice. I know it’s still too cold for it. In the station, I see you coming up from the L platform. You’re in black. I am too. This is the uniform.

I can feel it walking through the Village. Everyone wants the spring to come already. Restaurants are brimming with people, spilling into the street. I notice scarves, coats, hats. All muted colors. I find myself wanting more color. I want a happy accident. We walk into a gallery on 22nd and everyone is in black again. My yellow scarf an outlier. It’s hard to get a table anywhere, even at 5:45. We stop and look at a beautiful black—possibly midnight blue—Jaguar parked off Jane. Someone has keyed the driver’s door. I keep asking, how can people be so mean, how can people be so mean. We continue to walk. There are Teslas parked everywhere. For a second, I understand why someone might key a nice car.

Nothing is really in bloom yet. But I also feel its closeness. I saw the beginnings of some tulips a few days before, girding themselves against the cold. My parents often worry about false spring down South. That a cold snap will follow and kill everything. I wonder why this is such an anxiety. Everything that dies will come back again, eventually. Differently. But it will come back. We walk along the High Line before the museum. When we reach the top of the stairs, you see the bare trees and say, oh, wintery.

Nelson writes that blue is the color of death. I disagree. It’s this color of nothingness. Wintery. Absence, your not present green jacket.

A crossword clue: prefix for green things. Too? I guess. As in too green. Too young. Naive. It’s wrong. Too isn’t even a prefix. The answer is eco. Until it’s time to solve the puzzle, I leave too in the three little squares.

Halfway through writing this, I begin to doubt its necessity. This isn’t unusual. Almost any time I write I wonder if it’s just clutter. More jumbled letters, incomprehensible and self-aggrandizing. Why should I write about color when there are better writers who have already done it, including and especially Maggie Nelson? So I’ll use Nelson as my defense. She doesn’t care that she is among the multitude of blue devotees. I tell Charlotte that everyone probably has a singular obsession, and even if they try, they will only write about that one thing. Even if they think they’re not. Really what I know is there aren’t enough words in the world to communicate utter devotion.

As for my own devotion, I’ve never been loyal. I haven’t devoted my life to a single color. I go through phases of worship, as with most things. I couldn’t recognize the color of my own hair as a child. I told people it was purple because I loved purple. Then I loved pink. Pink everything. I still do. So what of these primary colors? I start to see through lines, or beginnings at least.

The blue fire escapes on the buildings behind mine, the same blue as a robin egg I saw as a twenty-two year old and decided was my new favorite. All the animated characters I loved as a kid had red hair. The house I grew up in is yellow, most of the walls within are yellow, too. Why am I suddenly in love with every small green thing I see? My mother’s favorite color is green. In my new apartment, I surround myself with green, an accidental altar.

Everything counts. Or at least I count everything.

At the Dia Chelsea exhibit on Chryssa, Ben likes the red neon sculpture the best. Its piping is precise, but the angles are softly rounded. The light is a red that’s almost orange if you squint. I tell him I’ve been writing about colors, though this is only half true. I’ve been thinking about writing about colors. When Maggie Nelson proposed her project on blue, she had barely written anything. The project kept getting rejected. I haven’t written anything at all either. Outside of the gallery, he asks if I got what I needed. I say I’m thinking.

The exhibit features sculptures with letters overlaid in metal. A tangle of alphabets everywhere you turn. It’s meant to look like a city. What it reminds me of is the magnetic alphabet we used to have on our fridge when I was a kid. Ben tells me the brain stops registering text as language when it’s presented this way. Overlaid, jumbled, not standard in its lineation. Any divergence from normal type allows the mind to then recognize it as an image. That is to say, the mind stops trying to read. It just sees. Language is often this unnecessary, I think. Especially when I feel what I make of it looks just like this—a puddle of letters stuck onto plaster of Paris and protected behind a frame.

Chryssa uses common symbols—ampersands, pound signs—in her work, but they’re rendered almost unrecognizable through changing light. The shadows from the neon light obscure the symbols even more. Words, words, words. I stand in front of a sculpture with visible tangled wires. It reminds me of a week ago when I was visiting home. In the backseat of my parents’ car with Charlotte, we watched traffic lights on wires swing from the high winds. Charlotte said how odd it was that the traffic lights were on wires. Back home for her, they are all on poles. I thought of the Southern summer storms that pull down these very traffic lights. How precarious. Whole roads closed off. Exposed live wires. Do not cross. That which is supposed to keep you safe suddenly is the very danger it should protect against. Here the wires are displayed but kept safely in a black box. We get too close. The gallery attendant asks us to stand three feet back.

We pass the clothing store Theory on the way to dinner. I see the same red dress I wore to my Valentine’s Day party. I love the dress even though I believe red isn’t my color. I point it out, but all I say is that orange red is mine.

There’s a photograph of me standing on the corner of 1st and Houston. Just the back of my head, slightly turned to check oncoming traffic. My hair is wet, my denim jacket the same blue of the saturated world around my body. When I first saw the photo, I couldn’t believe how red my hair looked. It was me in the photograph but it wasn’t. Sontag wrote that a photograph is a possession, turning the subject into object, leaving the subject without knowledge of themselves. I remember the very moment the photo was taken. I’m there when I close my eyes. It’s red that makes me unknowable to myself.

Before I leave Boho Karaoke in the Lower East Side, I sing “Yellow” by Coldplay for Emily on her birthday. I’m not sure, but I think I hear someone in the group ask what exactly yellow is referring to in the song. Of course, the song is a cliche love song. Its central metaphor is clumsy. As all color metaphors tend to be. How can yellow be an adequate metaphor for love? The part that represents the whole. My mind glazes over the flashcards I made for high school English class. Metonymy, or synecdoche, I couldn’t keep them straight then or now.

The question is valid. Yellow is so neutral. Especially compared to other colors that are more easily translatable. Taylor’s red passion. Joni’s heartbreak is blue. The list is almost as impossible to complete as love is to write about. Even Shakespeare: Since I first saw you fresh, which yet are green. Those colors are better substitutes to describe love than yellow. But still, I know exactly what Chris Martin means, as does everyone who has ever loved the song. Yellow is what it’s like to love. Wanting to be that warm golden light that pours over everything, over everyone you’ve ever loved.

I used to think writing was an extension of loving. The failure to articulate, to make that love real, well, that would just be bad writing. Good writing is loving. Which is to say writing is an act of devotion. To borrow from Nelson, it’s an etching, like a tattoo, seeped into the bone. It’s forever. But now I wonder if writing is not just an act of loving, but an act of constant missing.

Number 232 in Bluets: Perhaps, in time, I will stop missing you.

The sentence remains conditional forever. There’s no changing it. So the missing goes on. Perhaps an indication of the disbelief this missing could ever end. This uncertainty will last a lifetime and beyond as people encounter the sentence themselves, recognize their own longing for who is no longer there.

If this is true, I will miss you more than anything for as long as I am living.

On Tompkins Avenue, I feel highly visible in the plaid blazer I bought in San Francisco at age fifteen. Yellow, red, cream, green, navy. My coat of technicolor dreams. When I wear it, I feel both like a hunter who wears bright colors in order to not be mistaken for a deer. And I feel like the deer. Actually, I do feel most like a deer, coat or not. Scared all the time, but still moving, through the tangles of my new habitat. The colors of my camouflage keep me safe. No one can catch me.