The colour of a bruise healing

Purple as if from a dream

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
– Bertolt Brecht, motto to Svendborg Poems, 1939

The last drops of purpula gifted to me by shell dyer, Habacuc Avendano and waiting for the perfect project

I love my agent. And it’s not because Charlotte is the mother of the 1980s icon actor in whom I first saw a type that I could identify with called the weirdo, and could in a way be celebrated, though I hated that there had to be a makeover. And it’s not because Charlotte represents the estate of Audrey Lorde and Mary Oliver or that her work with Maira Kalman, Wendy McNaughton, and Lemony Snicket has made me see what writing for children could be. And it’s not that she is a powerful force in Black Lives Matters activism and has a biography as brave and bonkers and enchanted as any life I have ever heard of. Though all those things and a one sentence hint from an artist I admire named Tucker Nichols, did, of course, draw me to her.

I was talking to Charlotte yesterday trying to figure out a book I am trying to make work called, “On a Perfect Day,” and she said, “Will there ever be a perfect day again?” and I could feel her feeling this moment all of us are in right now. Not moment, but sea-sick overturning that the whole world is in. Charlotte talks with clear-eyed horror about what is happening in an America with racism and pandemic and existential division and the displacement of war in Ukraine and her ancestors escaping from Odessa with nothing, and where is home now, and she doesn’t make it all seem like doom. And she is opening her own home up to refugees, but I hear her supreme optimism and joy quavering. And in response to Charlotte, I started to say that it feels weird to do anything as an artist right now. And she stopped me gently and forcefully to say that it is artists who know exactly what they have to do right now. You have to write about The Perfect Day. We need artists to imagine what the world could be. And I saw that this is why I love Charlotte. Not because of all the amazing things she has done and how she does them, but because of the way she lives in the right now. And because she sees my spirit and appreciates it and (and this is the important part) she holds me to it. And so I wanted to do my job. I wanted to write something today that is true and magical that comes from the before times of 2020 that now feels like a storybook time. So here goes, a perfect day for Charlotte.

Two years ago I was at a dinner party of a kind of well-known philanthropic family. I got to know The Patriarch who runs what may be the largest poetry prize in the world over drinks and fancy cashews at a rooftop bar overlooking the fancy part of the city, and I felt like I was liking the cashews so much that he could tell how not-rich I was even just by the way I eyed the bowl on the bar. I kept pitching him various schemes. One of them was based on an idea I had for a statue that I had been tweeting from the perspective of, a statue that he had commissioned and fought City Hall to have erected in the park that I love because of the black walnuts. I did some work for The Philanthropist, which in the end paid me peanuts, and then I did some work with some of the people at one his philanthropic arms in Montreal, which was also ultimately one of those meandering freelance jobs that just never seem to end. And then I met his son who does something unexplainable involving Salesforce or The Cloud but in in some creative way, and then I met his daughter who I got the feeling had seen the sort of nightlife civilians only ever get to see hinted at in the background of papavrazzied celebrities in the midst of an affair and exiting a door early in the morning. I’m not even sure I’ve got that right, but she did have the faded grandeur aura of ex-VIP partier. Now she was tangentially involved in making books out of Instagram videos for Tom Ford based on the little stars that choppy waves make or something like that. Anyway The Philanthropist’s daughter had returned from New York to Toronto and had me and my partner to dinner with the whole clan, and it was there that I realized the most fascinating member of the family was someone I had not yet met. The Matriarch.

She was beautifully weathered with a sly smile, waterfall of silver hair, deep voice and the sort of silver arm jewelry that went beyond chunky to to be something Henry Moore might have designed. She had hung out with YSL in Paris in the 70s and was now mostly living in Mexico somewhere in high dusty Oaxaca country where she ran a prize in support of young female traditional dyers and we got to talking, and she said if you know about natural colour you must know about the purpula. And she said that word the same way she talked about Yves. I had read quite a bit about Tyrian purple and the deep sea snails that were all but wiped out by the Phoenicians to make sometimes just a band of purple cloth for Roman Imperial royalty. I did not know this other kind of purple from a kind of sister snail that lives only on a protected stretch of beach in Mexico. The Matriarch described a rich purple that got richer instead of fading with the sun and that was harvested not by killing the snail but by “milking” it, a process that only one or two indigenous dye specialists in the country were authorized to perform. She of course had a direct line to the guy from the longest line of dyers. You’ll have to get a ticket right away though she said. Proper purpula must be milked in conjunction with the full moon. Brian Johnson, director of The Color of Ink, had us tickets and camera operator and a place to stay almost before I finished telling him my story. We had many adventures some of which I hope you get to see, and it was on that trip that I first started to try to write what I was seeing and feeling because this was a trip that felt like an actual waking dream. What follows is the unedited diary I scribbled madly in my sketchbook the day after my time on the secret beach in search of the purpula.

It takes about 300-400 purpuras to dye one 12 oz. skein of yarn

We approached in a flatbottomed boat over black sea wobbled silver by the moon, and a surfer-drone operator who’s name is Isis wrapped in the hotel towel, points to the infinite sky and says, “stars falling.” The horizon is not stable. Isis was named by back-to-the-lander Italian/French parents and hit the road to surf as a teenager after her mother died, surfing her way down the coast until she was in Puerto Escondido. She says she wants to end up in Tahiti.