by: Maggie Nelson
I have enjoyed telling people that I am writing a book about blue without actually doing it. Mostly what happens in such cases is that people give you stories or leads or gifts, and then you can play with these things instead of with words. Over the past decade I have been given blue inks, paintings, postcards, dyes, bracelets, rocks, precious stones, watercolors, pigments, paperweights, goblets, and candies. I have been introduced to a man who had one of his front teeth replaced with lapis lazuli, solely because he loved the stone, and to another who worships blue so devoutly that he refuses to eat blue food and grows only blue and white flowers in his garden, which surrounds the blue ex-cathedral in which he lives. I have met a man who is the primary grower of organic indigo in the world, and another who sings Joni Mitchell's Blue in heartbreaking drag, and another with the face of a derelict whose eyes literally leaked blue, and I called this one the prince of blue, which was, in fact, his name.
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Some more thoughts from Saint Marty about obsession:
I am obsessed with Bigfoot right now. Like Maggie Nelson, I have been telling people that I'm writing a book about Bigfoot for about a year-and-a-half. I am actually writing. Have about 20 or so poems so far. Also like Nelson, I have been receiving Bigfoot gifts: tee shirts, pictures, books, photos. The one thing that I have not been given which I desperately want is the plaster cast of a Bigfoot footprint. Needless to say, those are hard to come by.
This is what artists do. We fixate. Worry. Haunt. Torment. Infatuate. A subject takes hold, and, for the next few years (or more), we are chasing the White Rabbit down the hole. Through the looking glass. Bigfoot is always on my mind, just disappearing around the corner.
His footprints are all over my life.
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