Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

She felt so alone in those days. Not that she minded. 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.

It was important to know what you thought of things—what you believed the world to be, and what you thought it should be.

He said that the painting had some of the qualities of art, but that there was something missing, the essential thing, the spark that says more than here.

What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence—for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God? The artist who cannot do this paints irrelevant forms without life.

There is no compass in his soul, so his vision becomes chaotic. One can sense the envy in his heart, yet he doesn’t even know what in other painters to envy! Unable to pull off beauty, he hides behind an ugliness that he calls beauty, and his canvases turn out shameful, and so the critics shame him, for he makes us ashamed.

There were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people. In the beginning, we were so innocent of this fact—of how much we could be hated, by people we thought would like us, or by people we thought wouldn’t care. But there was so much more hate than any of us had the capacity to understand. Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see—a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.

And why not? Happiness was not meant to be ours. The love we imagined would never be ours. Work that could occupy our hearts and minds forever—this also was not meant to be ours. We would never make the money we hoped we would make. Nothing would be as we hoped it would be, here in the first draft of existence. People were finally beginning to catch on. Our rage made perfect sense.

Here in the first draft of existence, we crafted our own second drafts—stories and books and movies and plays—polishing our stones to show God and each other what we wanted the next draft to be, comforting ourselves with our visions.

But spiritually, there had only ever been one age. Heartbreak was no less heartbreaking. Lust was no less lustful. We remained as proud and hungry and fearful as we had ever been.

Some people experienced a delightful sort of rest in becoming very small, very inferior, and very irrelevant, in the face of such chaos and change.

Yet in the midst of all this, one could still see, on one’s bookshelf, books that were hundreds—even thousands!—of years old, that were relevant today. Yet none of the books which were twenty years old were the least bit relevant anymore.

For art is not made for living bodies—it is made for the cold, eternal soul.

But she didn’t think of herself as a person back then. She didn’t think of herself as someone who another person could see, evaluate, and finally judge. She simply wanted what she wanted, and she didn’t think about how her desires would reflect on her.

Everything, other lives, and the thoughts of people who were not themselves, were all so equally far away. All that touched them was each other, and the books they read, and the music. Did any other kids exist? They certainly didn’t think so.

She got up and turned off the overhead light, then returned to sit before it. The red and green stones shed its light upon her dark face and the white walls. And she loved her meagre little existence, which was entirely her own.

Seeing Annie for the first time, something in Mira recognized her. It was like their relationship already existed. It wasn’t this way with most other people. It was Annie’s apparent pre-existence, which seemed impossible to explain, which distinguished her from the rest. And it was strange for Mira to think that, for other people, Annie was just someone passing on the street, that she was nothing at all.

Even if they never called them on the phone, there would always be an umbrella over them, if it rained. They could get wet if they wanted to, but if they wanted to stay dry, their parents would come.

They didn’t know that this was where their courage derived from, or that their imagined striking out was no more bold than an evening stroll down a well-lit street. They could go home if they wanted to. They had parents who loved them. Mira had a father who loved her so much, nearly to the exclusion of everyone else. While Annie had no one, she was completely alone. That was why they were drawn to her. Mira and her friends admired her deeply. She was who they were pretending to be.

As the past cooled, it changed states. It had once been a solid, then it became a gas. Or it had been a gas first, then it became a liquid, and she was left holding the muck of it in her hands.

But there was no asking anyone on earth, for we haven’t been created to know it.

and she knew that her brain was a small and useless, earth-bound thing that would never understand, and that she would never be able to properly reconstruct what she had just experienced.

For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

It seemed to her the week her father was dying that nothing mattered but art and literature. That while people passed away, the soul of a great artist would stay; that what they made would never die, so they were the ones we could hold close forever. Art would never leave us like a father dying. In a way, it would always remain. Artists manifested themselves in art, not the world, so humans could encounter them there, forever. People could return to books at any time and find them right there, those burning souls, their words as bright as the day they were written.

She saw how great art was, as she lay in his bed, and how faithful; how faithful a book was, and how strong, a place you could be safe, apart from the world, held inside a world that would never grow weak, and which could pass through wars, massacres and floods—could pass through all of human history, and the integrity of its soul would stay strong.

She never knew that through her entire life she was walking in the spirit of everything, and that the whole world—trees and breezes and leaves and air—was just as alive as her father had been.

Trees and the sky were not a backdrop to life, but they were equally life.

She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed itself into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.

She didn’t see what purpose it would serve to make the best of something in a world that felt stripped of any arrows, any direction, any sense.

If she had known that she was the size of a leaf, she would not have bothered with those aspirations. She would have done her best to remain small.

So all I’m saying is that maybe we don’t have the technology yet to see God. No! Well, we once didn’t have the technology to see cells or atoms. But humans had an inkling, even before we could see them, that such things were there, that small things made up big things. But they couldn’t prove it, and humans have always had an inkling of God, too. You must admit, we don’t understand completely how the universe works.

But it was not easy for the plants to learn how to sit there. For what reason are they tasked with being the audience of creation? Oh, for no reason. Oh, because God is an egoist. Because he is an artist. Because even though creation is flawed, God is secretly proud of its aspects, and loves his work being noticed.

You have love in you, but that part is extra-human, and that part is in the plants, and the animals, and the clouds, and the seas, and everything. What is lovable is not humans, but life.

Look at the ones who are winning: they are the walking dead. The part that wants to win is made through evolution, and the part that wants to criticize is our important function, from God. They are both at an angle to the loving part, which gets smaller and smaller in time, as the killing and winning part is grown.

That is true when someone dies—that you often only think about the loving part, but in that way you are just thinking about life, which runs through plants and trees; the loving part which is part of everything. That part of us is the best thing about us, and because it is the least individual thing, it shines through us so beautifully, when it shines. It is easy to remember that part, which is equivalent with life, when the person you love is dead.

Don’t think that in death you go far from the earth; you remain down here with everything—the part of you that loved, which is the most important part. That part of you will patiently be here as the earth changes colour, exhausts itself, breathes in fresh life again, and revives.

Two are meant to find each other, and they do. It might be a million hot years before you are made to live again, but that is not so long, and it feels like nothing to wait.

They are kindness and family get-togethers, for instance. They are everyone being in the same room. They are an openness to other people, and keeping the fixers out. The fixers are coming from the world of psychology, from those who know nothing about the traditions and don’t care, and would smash them if they could, and would institute a whole series of reforms. They don’t know the law of a person being brought to earth after a million hot years, and that they are brought here for a simple reason—to follow the family traditions. You don’t even have to ask what they are. If you are asking, you have no faith. Doing causes the knowledge of it. The family was set up by whatever force brings one to live a human life, finally after a million hot years. It is not a coincidence who we encounter here, or who is put inside the family.

A family isn’t made for no reason at all. The reason is because a human life, which we are brought to earth to experience about every million years, allows for the structure of a life with faith. A family emerges from the mystery of life; it emerges from the ether.

I will hopefully see you again in a million hot years. Is that how it works? I don’t know. I only got a glimpse of that faraway place. I have not heard enough of its gossip.

The thing she had been trying to tell them was that psychology was the wrong thing to look into; that what they had to return to was looking at the surface.

Annie wanted to tell her, and she did, What happened is that you went into a leaf. Annie told her everything she saw, without trying to talk her out of it. She didn’t say, You can be in a leaf for as long as you want to, but she also didn’t say, You shouldn’t remain in a leaf. She just told Mira what she saw; that Mira had gone into a leaf. You are seeming very green these days, and very still, and I wonder where your feelings are.

Why did she want all those feelings again, when feelings and people had become so difficult? But feelings and people were not so difficult.

sometimes a person is meant to move forward in the world with the one they love at a distance, and that the distance is there to make it more beautiful. To find the right distance from everything in life is the most important thing. To stand at the right distance, like God standing back from the canvas—for you can’t see anything if you’re too up close, and you can’t see anything if you’re too far back. So that is how she sat with Annie, there in the chocolate shop, across from her at the table. From across the table, Annie had managed to pull Mira back into life—back into this human life.

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.

Our lives are full of misery, but what about the thrill of being here together, in this terrible time, knowing that life will not be so terrible once the next draft comes? They will be missing something that we have in this life, which we cannot even take joy in having, for we do not believe a world will ever come in which the particular suffering of ours will be gone.

Will there be any begetting in the next world? Will there be any romance? Or will people just hang around forever and love a universe that is so pure and so good that no one needs children in order to know what love is? How strange and sad our world will seem to them then—if they even find out about it—that we once had to create people with our own bodies, in order for there to be, among the billions of people already living, someone who could love us, and someone we could love in return.

In the next draft of existence, everyone will love everyone, and they will consider our lives and think with a shudder, Until they pushed a person out of their dirtiest parts, they had no one they could truly love, and no one who could truly love them—except for their own parents, who also pushed them out of their dirtiest parts. How crude and bizarre our world will seem to them then! How small, tragic and imperfect, when they consider what we had to do to find love. Yet we can see what’s beautiful in it. We can see the beauty, in a way they will never understand. They will not understand it, in the next draft of the world, which will be so much...

The second draft will be like a mature love: long-lasting, decent, steady and right. It will not be like a first love: short-lived, painful, directionless and all wrong.

Of course, in one’s teenage years, few are recognized as a bear, for they haven’t yet chosen who to live for.

God doesn’t want the criticisms of the most dynamic parts of culture coming from someone in the middle of life, so the heart of culture is made invisible to you. But when God blinds your eyes to culture, he opens your eyes to everything else. But what else is there? Seasons, birds, the wind in the trees. So don’t go chasing your old forms of sight. Instead, learn to see newly. Right now it may feel like a loss of sight, or like you don’t understand the things you do see, but there is still a lot to see here. God doesn’t care what you think about a band. God has put a hole in your head so things like that fall out of it. Yet you keep trying to put things like that into it! There is not a hole in your head for no reason at all. There is a hole in your head for certain things, and not for certain other things. Find the things that don’t leak out and fill your head with those ones.