Making Yellow Heavy

(My new novel, The Float Test, comes out in April and (signed! personalized!) pre-orders are available now with my beloved Greenlight Bookstore; please feel free to order one or three if/when you’re so inclined?? You can also get it on Bookshop here.)

“Ladybug,” Joan Mitchell, 1957

I had picked another bit of beauty for you but then my friend sent me a story she had written. I read it in the middle of the night and loved it very much. It’s beautiful, I told her. You know I don’t trust beauty, she said.

I did know this but had forgotten. More like, when I said beauty, I meant something that I think she also values—a sense of truth, precision, aliveness—but I had forgotten that there are attributes of the idea of aesthetics that my friend is wary of. I am too. Beauty can entrance, excite, but also, in the wrong hands, be largely empty at the center; beauty can also trick, distract.

My brother-in-law is a philosopher. I was obsessed with a particular professor in college who taught political philosophy and so have read quite a lot of it. Sometimes, when my brother-in-law and other members of my husband’s family argue, I want to scream, and sometimes do, but we all agree, it’s just that we’re all using and defining the terms differently.

This is, in many ways, my whole project as a writer. To watch people inhabit the same word differently—home, family, love, friendship, art—to see them try to sit inside it at the same time, to see their definitions come into conflict, butt heads, pick and worry at each other, to argue; to maybe sometimes find the overlaps.

When you nose around definitions of beauty, often, you get words like pleasure, symmetry, aesthetics, form. When you google “beauty”, a lot of what comes up is books on makeup, plastic surgery, feminism. These are some of the ways of inhabiting the word that I’m most wary of. But then, of course, in being interested in any word at all, it’s worth thinking about how all its various definitions, interests, associations, are all in conversation, inform and complicate and cancel one another out.

There are types of beauty, things that purport to be works of art, that lay claim to the word, that anesthetize and slacken our relationship to the world instead of sharpening it. Things that feel, on the surface, to be beautiful—their textures and their rhythms gesture toward it—but then they feel rotten, empty, absent when you get further in. These obscure and elide as often as others might reveal. But then, I don’t think this is beauty. These are impostors; pretty or pretending; maybe they have reached for but have failed to come close to, whatever beauty is.

There’s a correlation here too, for me, with regard to happiness and joy. (One of my favorite things that Zadie Smith has ever written is this piece on joy). If you squint, they might look similar, but one is flimsy; the other richer, perhaps equally as transient, but more sure. Smith’s description of joy that I think is so much in conversation with all this: “that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight”.

And to say here too, and further to my friend’s point, there are few types of art that I find more off-putting, am more wary of, than those that lean too heavily into the pretty or performative in the hopes that people won’t look too closely, in attempt to pass itself off as beauty, when, actually, it’s fake. Likely to the detriment of my ability to enjoy a good amount of things, I am endlessly wary of what I term in my head as grand or preciousness.

At MoMA, there’s a Joan Mitchell painting called “Ladybug”, from 1957 that I find beautiful, that I go back to look at all the time. Most of the colors are fascinatingly muted, a lot of maroons and dark purples, browns, and greens and blues. Not pretty at all. If you look too long at a section or a corner of it, you can feel deflated or worn out. There is also, just left of the center of the painting, this shock of yellow that looks clotted, that is thick and pops up off the canvas. It’s strange and surprising, looks, sometimes, appallingly out of place. It’s texturally more assertive, looks like it weighs more than all the other strokes. Because of it, the whole thing feels more alive to me.

“She could make yellow heavy,” the artist Brice Marden said of Mitchell’s work. I like, when I go to visit this painting, to stand back and then get closer. Look at the…I say to the children. The yellow, one of them says to me. We know.

Yellow by itself might be delightful; in the Mitchell, it is also surprise, terror—it has weight to it.

The last time we were there my sweet twelve-year-old reminded me, that last year, when we were at the Van Gogh exhibit at the Musée D’Orsay, we were told the story of Van Gogh eating yellow paint, to see if the vibrance of it might somehow cure the deep sadness he so often felt.

Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Joan Mitchell was a childhood ice skating champion. Her father was desperate for a boy and didn’t much engage with her until she was close to grown. Her mom was sick for the first couple of years of her life and she was raised largely by a merciless German nanny. But then Joan began to succeed, a regionally celebrated teenage figure skater, brilliant student, swimming star. When she was 17, she made it to the national figure skating finals. She fell and hurt her knee, finished a disappointing fourth and would never skate competitively again.

Standing in front of “Ladybug” at MoMA, I love to think about her slicing over ice, feeling powerful, but also thinking about what people see, whether or not they enjoy looking as she does, I feel it somehow in the work she makes. It’s such a particular sport, ice skating, aesthetically invested, form and beauty baked in, and also a constant sense of one’s embodiedness, one’s own power, strength.

There is a line for me, not necessarily clear or straight, between whatever it felt like, out there as a teenager, so many people looking, what it felt like winning, and the confidence to both render all those blues and purples, and then to clump that yellow where she did.

When I talk to students about stories, we are often talking about how to make the reader see and feel the weight and terms of whatever the character is inside of, how to make the feelings of the characters material, to teach the reader the specific impacts and effects in ways that feel particular and concrete. All we have is language, but in the shaping of the language—and herein might be where we get or make the beauty— we want it to have the weight of life.

To make yellow heavy, feels a part of this.

“Wood, Wind, No Tuba,” Joan Mitchell, 1979

At its best, beauty threads itself irrevocably inside of you; through pleasure maybe, which also, it feels important to say, is not inherently (I don’t think) wrong or bad or nefarious. Beauty also—at least some of the types I like—can frighten, discomfit, destabilize.

Either way though—and here, I guess, is why I still believe in it; why I love looking at visual art with people that I love, teaching brilliant books, neither of which feel dissimilar from the obscene pleasure (joy?) I take in watching people eat—beauty nourishes.

In her essay “On Style,” (and style feels like a complicated cousin to whatever beauty is) Susan Sontag says, “I have several times applied to the work of art the metaphor of a mode of nourishment. To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world more open and enriched.”

And this quote, from “Molly Fox’s Birthday” a (beautiful) book by Deirdre Madden that I taught this week: “Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you.”

When I told my friend I thought her story was beautiful, that is the sort of beauty that I meant. It was two AM, and, as is often the case, I was wide awake. I read her story. I fell fully into the world of it. She had, somehow through language, made the yellow heavy, and therefore the world and characters she built had stuck themselves inside of me. I returned to this world open, nourished, and enriched. Insofar as I want to continue to find beauty that I might offer to you, this is what I’m looking for, insofar as you seek it out, try to make it yourself, this feels like a solid enough criteria to try to reach.