Beautiful Losers

Struggling with Rosemary's Difficult Beauty

I have been working with rosemary all week. And it feels medieval or medicinal or storied. And maybe the Egyptians threw it into graves, a sprig for memory or love or green that did not go away. But everything everywhere was vague. Apocryphal. And anyway, even among legends there was not much to say other than that it grows everywhere and is part of the sage family and kind of vaguely associated with death, with Shakespearean references thrown in here and there in ways that are not particularly fascinating. I have always wanted to work with it because it is so easy to get ahold of, and Sasha Duerr gets so many beautiful colours out of it. I keep seeing silk dipped into a bath of rosemary, it sometimes going purple or yellow or teal or khaki green, and maybe together this would be a holiday palette (I have been writing an article for CBC about holiday palettes) and I figured it looks and smells festive, and it did fill the whole house with a piney bitter-warm high note. A hint of turkey stuffing and smokey breakfast potatoes. And I think after a few frosts, the rosemary plant has a warmer sweeter almost mesquite smell, and a full sprig on the yellowy fingerling potatoes dusted with coarse beach-evaporated salt and good olive oil at high heat in a blackened cast iron pan and then taken out after the potatoes are done, is especially delicious these days. But the colour was not that. Not smokey. Or hinting at medieval stories. Or particularly deliciously complex.

I asked my editor when I wrote Make Ink if we could have a chapter dedicated to failures and it just never made it into the final edit. Maybe because the dream of colour, the surprises of colour are a better sell than the weak, watery, tea-stain colours that are not different enough from each other to do much that shows up on paper, or explains the amazing place where the colour came from. So what to do. Keep going? Go back to sleep? Keep stirring? Try changing the pH, or adding some sort of alum salt. Or Copper (I tried that, it got a little more interesting). Or iron (I tried that it got a little sadder, darker but not a rich dark green that I was hoping for). What is the problem? Should I lower my expectations? Expect less? Move on? Or except this. The warm living room with the cold milky light pouring in from the cold day outside, scraps of paper and a pinkish stain inside the microwave and the plant outside full of broken braches and the faint faraway scent rosemary. Which is the faint scent of my trying. Again and again.

There is something about embracing failure that always feels like some silicon investor bro type that has the privilege of failing again and again while everyone else suffers from his experiments. But still, there is sometimes something I love about those bottles of ink, sometimes whole pots of ink that I have made that never felt quite right. Something beloved about these gentle let downs. Not because they would lead to future success but just because of the trying that keeps trying without ever getting there.

In the Colour Lab today I will show you what I tried and what kind of worked and maybe you will have ideas. Maybe you have worked with rosemary in some different way. Maybe you would like to join the conversation about the beautiful losers of ink.