Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

God appears, splits, and manifests as three art critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling in its arms.

Perhaps God shouldn’t conceive of creation as an artwork, the next time around; then he will do a better job with the qualities of fairness and intimacy in our living. But is that even possible—for an artist to shape their impulse into a form which is not, in the end, an art form?

It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.

She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

One sunny afternoon, when Mira and her father were standing in the garden, he promised that one day he would buy her all sorts of mysterious, rare and marvellous things, including pure colour—not something that was coloured, but colour itself!

Pure colour was introverted, like a shy little animal.

Just because it’s love, does that mean you have to like it? Do you have to want it forever, simply because it’s love? Maybe Mira has no heart.

That people had placed these bright, sparkling, colourful souls everywhere, on every tree and on every doorstep; they reassured her that people knew that all around us, in the air and in the trees, were the colourful, sparkling souls of the dead. These bright and twinkling spots of light shining out from the darkness were all of their ancestors, now her own father, and all the people who had ever been born and died.

Right, there’s a kind of vanity to thinking you’re the only decider, or that making good decisions will keep you alive, because your cells are making decisions, too.

My basic premise is that in life, you live forever, because as soon as you die, you don’t realize you’re dead, so you’re kind of always alive, so the thing is, you shouldn’t worry about yourself.

The plants will be everywhere in the second draft of life, and they will have a sublime slowness, and a happy peace. The ruthless plants will make way for the gentle ones, and none of life will be so ruthless in the second draft of life. They will decorate the earth and all the crumbled buildings and all of existence.

But for us to imagine ourselves in their place would be utterly horrifying to the humans, who would not want to be living that way: life as an eternity of enjoying plays! But the plants have learned, over millions of years, how to be the audience of creation. They know how good it feels to be the open, accepting audience of the show, which humans could never be, and wouldn’t even understand, for our purpose comes from being its critics.

I’m sure there is a beauty to being dead, and to being just love, and whatever was best about you being all that’s left.

Are you sad to be living in the first draft—shoddily made, rushed, exuberant, malformed? No, you are proud to be strong enough to be living here now, one of God’s expendable soldiers in the first draft of the world. There is some pride in having been created to make a better world come. There is some pride in being the ones who were made to be thrown out.

Mira knew that humans made art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing God likes. Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.

as if life was not a constant falling short of the many tasks that God, and others, and even we, have given ourselves.

That was why she needed that ugly old seashell; because it was the contour and shape of her insides. It was a reminder of what a human self was, and what a human life was: not a beautiful glass lamp just this side of being broken, or a lovely gold ring with a single dent in it. But a battered old seashell, formed over millions of years, made to endure.