Orange

I lived in a beautiful house for the last two years and now that house is being sold by my landlords. Certain inevitabilities follow from such events, including the moving of hundreds of books, various tchotchkes, clumsy furniture, and innumerable scraps of paper with details that I can’t bring myself to discard: words to look up in the dictionary (“caesura”,”caducous”), things to do (“see if check is still cashable”) and observations of moments who’s original time, place and full contexture are now lost (“blue & coral cotton shirt; lisp”). Moving such things at once and en masse shakes the memory and other stable notions. It is that can of orange soda you were carrying in your backpack that bubble fizzes with some agitation when you finally snap the tab to take a sip.

The room I’ve moved into in the new house is painted orange in a couple bright and varied ways. So much so that even with my eyes closed I sense its solar color penetrating my eyelids and making the darkness bright.

And maybe this is auspicious.
I was stacking a set of photobooks I bought on Japan, each one in the series premised on a color and also a mood or sensibility that color is thought to manifest. Coming across the book on Orange I noticed its Title – “Orange: When you feel something has just begun.” Considering this undecided and liminal space of post-school/pre-Next Step I am presently in, orange might be the sense of things that I need. The words accompanying the picture on page five read, “It could be a bandana, socks, a coat; it could be a pin. Orange has come to change the gears of your mind.” Let us see.

And while I rankle a little at moving house and feel suddenly as if someone has switched the right and left lenses of my eyeglasses in a prank, thank god whole peoples & traditions thrive particularly from such itinerancy. If it weren’t for the Roma/Gypsies and their never ending migrations from India to Iberia, there would be no Flamenco, and so no Flamenco guitarists and dancers to be found just by chance in Sven’s dining room last Saturday night.


I have to be honest, I have had a crush on Flamenco for many years now. There at the party I could flirt with it openly as it filled the air all around me, wine in one hand, my heart in the other. A girl at the party even happened to be from Spain and impromptu sang a Jorge Luis Borges poem from a book she pulled from the shelf. Are we everywhere like this? dancers, guitarists and divas? As hopefully so, as certainly so.