The Phone Booth at the End of the Beach
‘Let’s go see the petroglyphs!’
Drawing Blue
Hallucinogens reveal the lie of certainty; please don’t try this with students under 18.
“Draw blue,” I said, laying back in a hammock and watching them try, using sticks in the coarse Caribbean sand. You might imagine — as I think I did — that the best approach would be to draw something inherently, enduringly, blue. The sea. A blue jay. A morpho butterfly. Blueberries. As it turned out, this was not the best approach. The closest renderings were entirely abstract. I have no memory of what those renderings were. If I took pictures at all, those pictures are on film somewhere, in a box of slides, waiting to be sorted. It was that long ago. But I do remember that some of the abstractions managed to feel like blue in a way that the representative drawings in the sand did not. How do you evoke a color without a color? Do particular colors have a symbolic meaning that can be transmitted without language? Synesthesia is the interweaving of senses that we consider distinct. We presume that, for reasons of biology, hard borders surround each of the senses. And once we have …
