Prompt 301. Just Married

& Maggie Nelson on the fingerprints of God

My mom, Anne Francey, and me on the opening night of our joint art show

Hi friend,

Earlier this week, I sat on the floor of a cavernous gallery at Artyard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, where my joint art show with my mom, “The Alchemy of Blood” is—as of yesterday!—open to the public. My finished paintings were propped against the walls all around the room, and I was studying them, meditating on their shapes and Book of Revelation-esque symbols. When I painted the original studies from my hospital bed two years ago, I didn’t feel the impulse to interpret them. I simply needed to get them down on paper—to exorcize, transmute, and defang the apparitions haunting my fever dreams. But this week, I had to come up with titles and descriptions for them, and to do that, I needed to distill the thread of intuition that had unspooled in watercolor—to try to understand why I did what I did.

For example, of my roseate spoonbill painting, I thought, Why of all the birds was I drawn to this vibrant pink one? I could have picked a raven or maybe a vulture, which might have felt more appropriate for my state of mind. Then I realized, it’s a bird that lives in the swamps of the Gulf Coast, where my husband Jon is from. And he wore a pink suit in the music video for his song “Freedom”—and also at our wedding, which took place on the eve of my admission to the bone marrow transplant unit. The bird is so big that it extends beyond the frame, and that mirrors what the world was seeing—his rising star, his well-deserved accolades.

My gaze moved to what lies below it, to the neon-yellow kiddie pool dangling by a chain from the bird’s rounded beak. It hovers above turbulent waters; curled inside is a figure of a woman, bald and naked and seasick-green. Suddenly the logic clicked into place. I thought, I should’ve been on a honeymoon on a tropical island, but instead I was sick and stunned, tempest-tossed in turbulent waters. I didn’t know if I would survive or if my days-old marriage would weather that ocean of uncertainty. The roseate spoonbill painting suddenly had a name: “Just Married.”

One by one, I worked through each painting, decoding and deepening my relationship to them. The work of painting was done, but this was a new kind of work—to understand the what and how and why of my subconscious mind. Words like “sacred” and “divine” are so loaded, I’m hesitant to invoke them, as someone else’s understanding of the sacred and divine may be very different from my own, which is not at all dogmatic, but is more nebulous and mystical. What I will say is that the source feels greater than my own understanding, from the impulse to make them, to the symbols contained within them, to what they have become.

There’s a book called Bluets by one of my all-time favorite writers Maggie Nelson with a very simple premise: a list of meditations on the color blue. And yet, the meaning she is trying to make is anything but simple. As she writes in meditation #3, “How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.”

Bluets has been a touchstone for me in all my work—writing, painting, and otherwise. I love how bold it feels, and also how trusting—to follow her curiosity, to allow it to unspool—and how it builds into something that's highly sophisticated and even ground-breaking, genre-wise. I also love how the book itself feels like a prompt, as in, “Write about a color.” For me, it has always felt so freeing. 

So today, with Maggie’s permission, I’m sharing the first thirteen entries from Bluets (though I highly suggest you do yourself a favor and get a copy and read the whole thing). May it allow you to follow your own thread of intuition, and in doing so, see the imprint of the divine (whatever that means to you) in everything.

Sending love,

Suleika

Some items of note—

• Mark your calendar! We’ve scheduled our next meeting of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers. It’s happening Sunday, June 30 from 1-2pm ET. Our beloved community manager

  Holly Huitt
  has a prompt in mind for understanding what makes a person tick. Hope to see you there!

• Each week in our Isolation Journals chat, we share a small joy that we want to hold onto—we call it our chorus of collective gratitude. This week I wrote about a new secret off-menu cocktail at my local called “the Lentil.” To read all about it, click here!

• Just a reminder: If you didn’t get tickets to the opening events of “The Alchemy of Blood,” my joint art show with my mom, Anne Francey—don’t worry! The exhibit will be up from June 22-September 22, 2024, at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. More info here!

Prompt 301. from Bluets by Maggie Nelson

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.

4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

5. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: “These last months have been terrifying. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has suffered during that long agony, is indescribable.” Mallarmé described this agony as a battle that took place on God's “boney wing.” “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth," he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. “Fortunately,” he wrote Cazalis, “I am quite dead now.”

6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.

9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty.

10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

11. That is to say: I don't care if it’s colorless.

12. And please don't talk to me about “things as they are” being changed upon any “blue guitar.” What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.

13. At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose.

Your prompt for the week:

Compose an ode to your favorite color as a numbered list. Free associate; see what stories, images, or memories the color evokes. If you can, try to stretch your list to thirteen.

If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

Today’s Contributor—

Maggie Nelson is the author of four poetry collections and several works of lyrical prose, including The Argonauts, which received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Bluets. Of Bluets, the poet Rob Schlegel writes, “The result not only defies easy categorization, but also leans toward Walter Benjamin’s famous declaration that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” Nelson is the recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge. Photo by Catherine Opie for The New York Times

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Beholding the Body, an installment of Dear Susu where I answered a question from a reader whose chronic illness has caused a growing gap between her mind and her body—and a rift between her and the wider world

• Show up & the Muse Will Too, where I wrote about maintaining my creative practice during an unexpected hospital stay and meditated on what it looks like to swim in the ocean of not knowing

• Survival as a Creative Act, a video replay of my studio visit where I talked about allowing yourself to pivot—to try something new—and gave a behind-the-scenes glimpse of my painting residency

Our Isolation Journal No. 1—

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