LOVE LETTER XYZ 1/3

COLOUR

 

• The colour of CODE?

 

I call it love-letter. Love is both a feeling and an action - some say that love doesn’t exist without being actioned upon, that love only shows itself through action - and letter is both the sign and the object prod•used - a combination of produce and use - to convey that love, hence writing and sending becomes the action of love. Love in action. In reality it is an encryption project, or rather, a project of en- and then de-cryption. In that sense, it makes a lot of sense, that the writing for the visually impaired, also referred to as Braille, is unreadable by normal means, for people who have non-impaired sight. Something else has to occur, in order to enter an unknown place, from which through effort a new perception can take place.

It’s not only a code in the most basic sense of the word, a substitute. It’s a deferral of senses. In that way, it’s not only a new language to be learnt by ordinary means, it’s a whole new sense organ. I refer to it as the call to love. 

Even though love + letter may apparently be understood within a traditional framework, and by that I mean that one can be substituted by another. That means, if we think of the direction of the love+letter as outward, a feeling is exchanged for a thing which becomes the sign for the feeling that we give to another. What happens to the sign, is also an analogue, a metaphor, and a symbol, and thus grounded in affect, if it is to turn into a change of perception, it must upon the act of giving and receiving by the other, also turn inward and downward in ourselves. 

Affect is for most of us, i.e. we act in affect, a finely blended soup of disparate ingredients, which just like onions and carrots, feels as if they come from the external or exterior or who we refer to as the other - of which colours like enby yellow and hateful burnt brown might be huge and heavy elements. 

This also contains, not only affects, but sense formations such as fragments of images, some moving, some still, and some frozen. It contains colours too, of which mine is a deep passion red. I cannot say it contains many shades of red. It contains mainly one, but upon drying turns into many. The shade of red that has penetrated my creative expression, and not at my free will - personally, I envision my work full of various colours, mixed like in some of our most revered paintings through time. Yet not mine. My colour, the basic one, is a deep saturated hue of blood red, which as time passes, develops itself into various nuances as it turns from wet to dry, from unshoned to shoned upon by rays of light. 

 

• Experiencing sensory confusion and impair - who did I write to? 

   

My choice of code was accidental or coincidental. All the largest decisions of my life worth mentioning, were if not accidental, then sudden. By that I mean how I ended up in England, on a hunch after meeting some new friends on a trip to Southern Portugal. I needed to speak but felt prohibited by my perception of the other, and what I had to say in writing felt so profound that I didn’t want them to just gulp it down only to forget about what I wrote. I wanted them to invest effort in understanding the true meaning behind the dots. This way, the possibility of simultaneously developing a desire for love conveyed through action would be enhanced.

And it had to be hidden from plain view too. It felt sacred. I began with Morse code, which is beautiful for auditory almost musical coding. Had I been a musician I would have most definitely written my thoughts through tones of music in such a way that each dot and line would have their own sound, and when combined into the letters of the Morse code, it could be also deconstructed - taken apart, reorganized so that each tone could be turned into a specific colour. 

However, music, one could argue, is already a code for affect, like the colour and texture of paint is. To me, though, I would want to transcribe each combination of dots or lines into sounds. I would want to write it for cello and violin. And I would want Jacqueline du Pré, the greatest British cellist ever to have lived, who was married to another wonderful musician, a pianist, Daniel Barenboim. I would want her to be the lead, had she been alive.

The person I wrote to was an enigma. It was a man who was a few years older than me, but not much. and fitted perfectly into an unshaped area that had existed inside of me for a long time, and which reminded me of a large gap. It felt like a cut into a canvas, like one of Lucio Fontana's red works of a canvas cut into with a knife, purveying for a brief second the metaphor for the immensity of the universe, if not of the structure of the human mind. Through this gap, which developed into a function of threshold I was able to meet him. That he was a him and not a she, became apparent in the way of setting boundaries. They were heavy, brutally clunky. And almost physical in the way they took place in my stomach and like a belt around my vocal cords. As I couldn't speak, I took refuge in the written word in my private space, and code on the outside.

 

• When forms and content merge

 

It sounds as if this was a movement of control. It was a movement of despair, and utter helplessness. In the face of a white piece of paper, day after day, a certain kind of paralysis occurs. Despite my efforts to break the surface of the white paper and unravel the knots in my stomach and joints, the words that felt coherent in my mind seemed nonsensical when spoken or written. It started with the dot over the miniscule of the letter i. If read phonetically, the i is both that through which we see the world, and that which is the child of the capital I, the miniscule, and which refers to a fully grown person inhabiting and embodying their own identity.

At first of course, I got curious about the dot. As I researched the history of the dot, it took me into mathematics of Pi, and ancient Greek philosophy. It took me into Pointillism, performance and action art and Minimalism. And it took me into the experience of feeling blind. I was able to see alright. Yet I felt blind to myself and to who I was, and what was my reason to be in the world. Somehow, writing my letters in Braille, that no visually impaired would be able to grasp due to the lack of the visceral aspect of Braille needed for the fingertips to absorb the structures, and only accessible to visually paired, with a translator or a sign sheet, which meant that only the most stubborn would access the meaning. However the aesthetics of the work was widely praised, and I felt I had entered a domain that was mine.

The mundane feelings and coming of age complexes at the age of 42 was deeply out of alignment, making an image of that which inside of me was both frozen and in movement, with a quicksilver speed kind of pace. The dots, placed in a tight structure, with an ink paint inherently independent, fixed me in a creative compulsion. An expulsion which gave me direction to slowly grow into an adult version I of my previous teenage i.

To be continued next week.

 

©️ Camilla Howalt