Color Oracles

Some summer writing fun

Dear Friends,

I’ve been working on a new book, deep in the process of pulling together a draft. It’s felt like being underground, or under the sea; there’s a weight to every motion.

To keep some lightness and play going, I’ve been having summery fun in

Darien Gee

’s workshop, From Paint Chips to Prose.

It turns out that paint chips make wonderful oracle cards, combining chance, color, and language. They are free from the paint store, and can be shuffled like a tarot deck.

Give yourself a reading. Who knows what the future has in store?

— Sal

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Poppy

The luminous yellow of the air was not an actual color, it was a feeling. It was a memory of early mornings, of days which began pale and almost imperceptible then gradually darkened towards the gold of dinnertime. If night were ever to fall, all the air would have to be replaced with darkling atmosphere. New molecules would have to be invented. For now I was still breathing the color of gardenias, flowers that didn’t know what they were becoming. Orange blossoms are not orange, but poppies are. Poppies already know too much. Later I will lie down in their field and let myself fall into dreaming. In my dream the flowers join each other and become a garment. A wind rises, and the garment becomes a flag. The flag leads all of us to a new country. I need not describe that new country because it is already folded within.

Sky

There’s a kind of luck to everyday life. You’re always a beginner. The sidewalk rises up to meet your foot. Who knew that it could be like this, walking, rocking from foot to foot and somehow staying upright, and somehow getting from one place to another? The city is hot. It is gray and green and the blue of the sky (though I don’t dare look up). I pass the hospital on 7th and head uptown with Christopher. It turns out we’re exactly the same age. I’m wearing a shirt so white that it can pretend neither of us is sweating discretely. I want to love everything. I want the city to hold my face in its two hands and kiss me. I’d be like a new leaf. I’d be like a recipe for a poem before the poem itself. Why didn’t we stop and get an ice cream or a cold drink or just press the future to our foreheads? What’s the first fable you remember from childhood? Was it the fox, or the ant, or the ass? In every story there is a wish and the wish is green.

Dot Dot Dot

It’s black. Toner black, glitch black. No picture emerges today, so let’s call it night for a change. Some night we’ll go. You and I. Let us go then. There are times, like this, when the city has forgotten how to love itself. In the city, it’s never truly night. The subways run and run. Rats play under the tracks, looking for something that I might have dropped, but didn’t drop. Still, I wish them well in their rat-lives. For true night to come you have to turn off the overhead light. Trust to the small sounds and the settling. There are lives going about their business in the dark, but they don’t need anything from you other than your forgetting. Forget and look away. Look into the ridiculous sky with its spangles. Look into the invisible space under trees. Look (don’t look) with the backs of the eyes inward.

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Darien Gee

The Paint Chip Workshop is an offering for Darien’s paid subscribers, but you can get a sense of it by reading this introduction. If you’re feeling Writer-ish, give it a try.

Writing Workshop: Paint Chips to Prose (Start Here)

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How have you been keeping some lightness and play in your summer?