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.

People born from the bird egg are interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning. They look at nature from on high, in an abstracted way, and consider the world as if from a distance. These people are like birds soaring—flighty, fragile and strong.

A person hatched from a fish egg is concerned with fairness and justice here on earth: on humanity getting the temperature right for the many. One thousand eggs are the concern of a fish, whereas the person hatched from the egg of a bear clutches one special person close, as close as they possibly can.

You have only to look at the exquisite harmony of sky and trees and moon and stars to see what a good job God did, aesthetically. So those born from the bird egg are the most grateful of all. Those born from the fish egg are the most upset, and those born from the bear egg aren’t too happy, either.

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?

moulted

They believed the future would be set in the moulds that they had made. It was important to know what you thought of things—what you believed the world to be, and what you thought it should be.

tisane.

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?

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. On good days, we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart.

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

With a few people in one’s life, too much happens emotionally—more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply igniting in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the very first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains. Mira felt this way about Annie. It wasn’t that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one—and isn’t that rare! Why is it so hard to meet in this life?

They could not imagine what her life had been. They longed to be like Annie—so independent, so free. There was something romantic about having grown up without parents, but the idea also scared them. A mother and father was all that they knew, even if they weren’t living with them now. 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.

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! Colour itself came in hard little circular discs, and was shiny like a polished stone or polished jewel, but with its colour deep inside it. It showed its colour on the outside, for its outside was what it was all the way through. But unlike a gemstone, it didn’t emanate colour. Its colour sat there, turned inwards. Pure colour was introverted, like a shy little animal. Mira had never seen pure colour before, but she guessed there was probably lots that her father knew about, and could show her, and give her, besides these discs.

So Mira craved to live a cold ice bath of a life, once she was out in the world, without him. It had been hard to be held so closely by the most bearish bear, and anyone who approached her with the same total love immediately made Mira feel scared. She was more drawn to the fish, who divided their attention democratically among people. So the overheated Mira went looking for a freezer. She wanted a love that would cool her down, to the temperature of the living. She longed to be held by the coldest hands. If she was loved in a way that warmed her up, she feared she would be too hot to handle art, to help pass it down through the centuries.

A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face. Did God think of this when he was making the world? Why didn’t he give everyone the exact same face? Perhaps it will be like that in the next draft of the world, and people living in that time might not even imagine that there was ever a draft in which everyone had a different face. Although the thought might disgust them, it will not lead them to thinking about how much time our various faces wasted. They will not think about how some faces ruined the lives of people with less beautiful faces, or how having a beautiful face could ruin the life of the person who had one.

They soon began drinking in different cafés, exchanged a few letters, then stopped. For they had all taken it as a sign—that all it took was for Matty to fall in love for their whole world to slacken and fall apart.

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. And she thought, All that time, all that stupid time, I should have been with my father.

It takes a certain discipline to be dead. She never had much discipline. Her father, in the leaf, displays utter discipline, or maybe he just doesn’t want to go back.

I mean, a hundred and fifty thousand people die in the world every day. That’s a huge number, and life goes on. It’s not a big tragedy, so it’s not worth worrying about. Yeah, and I mean, what’s the alternative? Well, there is no alternative. That’s what I’m saying, what’s the alternative? What those programmers want to do? Download your brain into the computer so that you can be a program? And then they come and unplug you or something? I know, it sounds like a horror show. I can’t believe this is something people want. Well, it’s because they don’t understand the fact that you live forever, and when you die, you don’t regret it. You don’t sit up there saying, Oh man, if only I could be at the ball game, why can’t I be at the ball game. Right, that makes no sense. And they say that Christianity solved it because you can live forever, but you might go to hell forever, so that’s really sick. And something that goes on forever? Who’d want that? Who’d want to live something over and over again, or to be stuck being a farmer for a thousand years? What do you mean, being a farmer for a thousand years? Well, let’s say you could live for a thousand years. But why a farmer? Well, if you happen to be a farmer, but whatever, a teacher, a mechanic, a chef. Why do they even want to live forever? To look at photos of things they’re not even a part of? Who cares? Or to be friends with two hundred people? And get one hundred or two hundred things on your feed each day? What kind of life ...

Something happened to the soul of Mira’s father the moment the life left her, a reawakening to what he had known in the moment of his own death; that everything on this earth is forgiven. He was not a bad father, and she was not a bad child, and there could be no badness between two such people who loved each other as they did. They had loved each other and so all was forgiven, for this draft is not just a place of blessings where things are supposed to go well. Getting through it is enough, and they did. They got through their entire lives to death. And the final moments are the true ones, and the true ones are the truest of all.