orange is a sound the sun makes

the second in a series of experiments

[25s clip, the sound of the sun played on a subwoofer around 38htz]

My first word was orange. This is how my mother tells it. One day in the park by the duck pond, squinting my little eyes, pointing a chubby finger at the sun. Saying orange. 

Except I was a baby, so I said the ‘o’ more like ‘ah,’ my mouth round and open. I chewed the word, skipped the r and the second a, squished the sound into one big bite from vowel to soft consonant g. When it came out, the word sounded like onge. It sounded like ange, the French word for angel. My parents looked at each other and then at me, the midpoint between them in body and mind, even my first word a compromise of their two mother tongues. This slippery syllable gone as quickly as it came, leaving only the question of truth in its place. My first word the already-gone holy instant, a moment’s milestone and its faint citrus scent. 

Feel in this memory the orange crunch of shift, no movement without friction. The subtle clash like classical music, notes pressed sideways together by the shoulders, dissonance before the resolution. Each time a new jump, a stutter and distraction. 

Turning only to break. Breaking only to be pressed together again.

Suddenly nineteen, on a first date. Sitting on my old bed, with peach sheets and green pillows. He talked about how he’d climb Mount Royal with his friends in the fall and rearrange the leaves. He used the orange word terraforming, which means Earth-shaping. Leaves redirecting the water falling ever downward, carving and being carved by the trees, shaping and being shaped by everything the trees lose when they let themselves go in the autumn. Invisible picture, word-image of a tall boy with green eyes, moving armfuls of fresh leaves over the wet earth of November, forming the mountainside which was still forming itself. 

The water falling all autumn because of him, into new grooves and rivulets he had made with his arms. I remember the leaves when I realized everything past was over. Then orange again when he left the next morning just before sunrise, leaving nothing in his place. 

Growing only to fall. Falling only to be moved again. 

My brother Elliot is seventeen and too tall already. He keeps calling, leaving these messages that he should’ve sent months ago. Which I should’ve heard months ago. I feel guilty all the time but I never do anything about it. What is there to do?

You need to hear him say this, in his voice. Otherwise, you might think it was me. He feels everything I feel on a four-year time delay. It never gets any less painful. I let myself get caught up in my real life instead. If I think about the past too much it will swallow me again. But we can listen to a few together. 

[Voicemail messages from Elliot. Casual delivery, slight ambient background noise. Quiet sun-sound played almost imperceptibly underneath.]

everything is too much and too short 

i’ve been thinking about it a lot this year 

i don’t like that i can’t enjoy everything 

there are too many very good things and so little time to see them.

it’s already almost November 

my last November in Victoria 

i’ve been thinking about the leaves a lot 

i was wondering when they would start changing and then they did 

i didn’t even see them change 

i wish everything could just stop and i wish i thought more sooner 

i’ve never thought about the leaves before 

not like this

it’s a really weird feeling to have 

i’m sad but not because i’m sad 

i’m sad because everything is fleeting 

i’m sad because there’s too much to love 

i’m sure this is how everyone feels and i know crying won’t help but i just wish i had seen things more clearly sooner 

it’s so hard to live in the moment 

I want to tell him that I’m sorry. I want to talk more but I just can’t right now. I have to finish this first. It’s already almost over.

Orange, the moment you blink to move the tears that cloud your sclera. Orange the real colour inside the blackness of an eyelid, the red-hued moment of reset, the private recollection before you open again. 

Elliot said it all, actually. Blue is a nothing kind of sad, sad because of empty. An orange sad is full—full because there is too much to love.

I read about a deaf fourth grader who asked what kind of noise the stars make when they come out at night. She thought they burst, like a balloon or a firework or bubble wrap. In the dark, you could hear the stars bursting out, one by one.

We think we can understand light, pin it down with explanation. See where each ray is going, how it falls to the ground like leaves or rain. This is an acceptable reality—light moves and falls and we never ask whether something is missing. Whether there’s more we could see or hear or feel. How can you understand something that’s always fleeting? It’s hard to imagine before the moment is already almost over. 

But we feel it from experience. Lightning flashes and thunder rumbles in its aftermath. The sun is a roiling soup of plasma, an incandescent ball of nuclear fusion which holds our living bodies in its infrared fist, which turns itself over in bursts like breathing. Light is change made physical, firing off in all directions but always firing. The fastest-moving object known to man. Of course it makes a sound. This deep, throbbing, constant hum. We just can’t hear it. 

The world so thick with sensation. So rich with beauty. So much to feel and to love and so little time. 

Orange everything the deaf can hear in our silence. Orange the always-bursting stars.

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Hello everyone. I thought of starting this post with an explanation, some kind of disclaimer, but I decided not to. The post is structured like our critical reviews: the art must stand alone. You must be silent before you get to explain.

This is a project I created for my honours seminar on experimental art called Sound / Image / Text. If you read it and thought it sucked, or that something was missing … good. It’s supposed to be performed live, in a room with the lights off. I stand and read at the back so you can hear the grain of my voice, ephemeral and unmediated by a microphone. You don’t see my face because I am not the spectacle. You look into the darkness and strain to hear each word before it’s gone. In the parts demarcated by a green line, I read over the bone-buzzing subwoofer, which plays the inaudible sounds the sun emits into the vacuum of space. In the section about my brother, you hear his voicemail from another speaker to your right. I tried to give you all the tools, structure it on the page so you could see it as I do, but so much of it is missing. You’ll have to trust me. Or use the materials and perform it yourself. I’d love to know what would happen.

The prompt for the project was What Colour is the Sacred? Here you have my answer.

I’m not intending to become an experimental artist, but I really love this class. I’ve become so interested in the ghost image, how you can write around an object or idea and render your feelings in this kind of third space instead of trying to do it all directly. Pure representation is hard when you’re clumsy like I am. When I write about the things I love, I tend to manhandle them. Art can get much better when I’m not trying to grind my subject into a paste, extract each association and drop of meaning until it’s spent and sensical, until the real thing is bruised and I’m upset for bruising it instead of leaving it room to breathe. I’m learning how not to do that. It’s been a lot of uncomfortable experiments. A lot of playing and deleting and googling words like contrapuntal.

Here’s an apology for you: all I ever do is write about change. I’m sure that’s getting tiresome for everyone. Other people have other interests and predilections, while I feel like that Akita waiting for his owner at the train station. Everyone moves and I stay, grieving faithfully the constant change that characterizes my life. All our lives. I do not know how to deal with the fact that this feeling—this deep well of melancholy which I’ve had since highschool—is not a fleeting adjustment but a permanent facet. A constant shade of experience. Maybe the one I feel the most acutely. Bright orange and persistent as the dawn.

How to understand that this haunting feeling springs not from sadness, but a deep joy. An appreciation of everything that I have which makes it hard to always be saying goodbye. A love for the sheer intensity of experience, its purity like a wave of light. The knowledge that this pain will only increase in magnitude the more satisfied I become. Not a flaw, but an equal and opposite reaction. Someone told me there’s nothing worse than getting everything you want because you know it can’t last forever, so getting it means you will have to let it go. Ain’t that the truth. How love can wear the face of mourning. I reckon with it all the time.

But this project started one night when my little brother sent me all those text messages. He had the flu and was lying in bed reading Ocean Vuong and crying a lot about graduating. When he started talking about how this was his last November in Victoria, I felt a pain in my chest so sharp it almost winded me. It shot me backwards through time to when I was seventeen, when the changing of leaves and passing autumn days made me feel like I was dying in slow-motion, like my life was slipping away while I watched. This incredible grief at not being able to stop and enjoy it more. Not being able to savour each minute because of all the bullshit, the stress, the administrative tasks of applying to college and biology homework and eating my dinner. Wanting to pay more attention, feeling the preciousness of each second in the most tender parts of myself, but never being able to open my mouth wide enough to gulp it all down. Never feeling able to get as much of it as I wanted before it was gone. And wanting it, wanting so much. The colour orange comes in because while it’s sad, this feeling is not about grief, really. It’s about beauty. Awareness of the fullness of experience. The brightness of citrus and the acid built in.

Elliot and I are similar in so many ways—if anything he’s smarter and more sensitive than I could ever hope to be—but I never considered that we would share this particular fragility. That someday, without my prompting, he would wake up and start to think of the things he loved by imagining their ending. It can be a beautiful way to be alive, in my experience, because you’re so sensitive to the importance of every thing, so attentive to savouring it before it’s over. But it’s terrible because nothing should be that precious—it makes you count the days, each finality. It makes it so hard to live in the present. It makes you feel guilty to ever close your mouth and stop gulping.

I love Elliot and fear the ways he will hurt for being like me. I love him and thank God for giving me an ally, someone to weather and mourn and appreciate the change alongside me. I love him and I kick myself for not seeing it all sooner.

So that’s part of what the project is about. Here I manhandled just for you, and that barely even covered it. There’s so much more I could say but I don’t want to type anymore. If you read this and think of a question, I will tell you the answer.

But that’s all for now. I’m sorry I haven’t been writing more. I just had to finish this first. My apology letter to a November already almost in rearview. To the world so fleeting because it’s beautiful, and the world so beautiful because it’s fleeing.

So much to love and so little time.