Does it sparkle?
Does it just appear, like the sudden scent of saffron when one turns the corner at market?
Can you hand-pick it, like a wild strawberry, and must you wear protective gloves to do so?
Are we groomed for it, to find it, to procure it-- but in vain, only in vain, like the purposeless truffle pig? Will it drive us to despair?
Is it moxie, an energetic know-how, a certain gumption, a willing-it-to-be-so?
Is it delay of gratification-- forsaking immorality, leisure, ethyl alchohol, slovenliness, scandal, saturated fat, intimation-- for some later acquired virtue, some obfuscated fuzzy feeling of warmth + attainment?
Is it simple?
Am I cognizant of it, when it kisses me?
Is it someone leaving the light on at the end of the night-- the realization that somebody cared that you would be digging in your purse, combing for your key, a little tensed for shadow creatures-- and left a reassuring "I look after you, when you're not here" to guide you from one side of the door to the other?
Is it explosive and other-worldly, the sensation of "what a soft and worthy and lovely place the world is to live" that sears inside the cathedral-goer, the sunrise-spectator, the museum-peruser, the connoisseur, the balletomane-- is it inside something so sweeping, the small spark of recogntion of oneself as particulate belonging?
Is it razzle-dazzle?
Is it achievement? Exhaustion won from worthy toil?
Is it worth fighting for?
Is it polarity?
Proximity?
Animal magnetism?
Can blood, bones, muscle, fiber, tendon, ligament, tissue, cell, organelle, nucleic center, neorological tag-you're-it, house enough space for it? Will my body know how to metabolize it? Can such alchemical modalities as those belonging to me create something so intagible? So literary and pure?
Is it even pure?
Must it be a cut and hewn pile of rock before it's a diamond on my clavicle?
Does it come with a bangin' soundtrack?
Can it be stripped to its chemical sensations-- just the right concoction of acetylcholine, balanced by controlled release of soaring oxytocins and seretonergic calm & a big fat deluge of dopamine?
Is it extracted from another person, from that right-in-front-of-you realization of love, a touch, a passing-in-and-through-and-between understanding?
Is it beautiful? Is it sweet?
Is it a macaron?
Is it cheap and base, expected to be had, and nothing to be proud of in pursuit?
Is it for the enlightened, the forgoing, the meditative, the Spartan, the holy, the Others?
Is it apotheostic?
Is it even meant for this lifetime?
Should I give up my search?
Is it just the serotonin-induced control over life that comes from a good sleep + a satisfying serving of carbohydrate?
Is it direct ingestion, or is it observation, or removal, or is it intimate acquaintance?
Is it careful? Prudent? Wise?
Is it luscious, luxe, monied?
Is it too much, the act of too many truffles or none at all, from extremists at heart (like me + Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)?
Is it buried? Can I catch in in my butterfly-jar?
Is it a butterfly, suga, bebeh?
Will it trace a path up my finger, like a little ladybug? Is it a ladyfinger? Is it a little love-buggy? Is luck be a lady? Do little ladies eat ladyfingers with dainty fingers and get bugged while tracing the path of love? Am I bugging you, love?
Can it get inside me? How do I give it to someone else, if I don't know where it is in myself?
Does it have a formula?
Does it reject, select, discern, discriminate? Is it cruel? Will it dump me?
Is it good for me?
Is it bad for me?
Doctor, what will it do for my health?
Is it more like a parent's touch, a friend's, or a lover's?
Will it scramble my eggs in the morning, read me stories under sycamore trees, play with me 'til I get tired, draw my bathwater, lay out clean pajamas, read me a story, tuck me in, baby do, look after my dreams + keep the scary ones at bay, and then scramble my eggs again in the morning?
After it wakes me with the sound of coffee brewing?
Will it do to me what you did to me? What I did to you?
Is it a star, or are stars even stars, archaic bits of plasma stuck together with rock that they are, their shimmer just a flicker, a dream, a romanticized mirage?
Can it be created?
Can it be saved? For later?
Does it already exist? Is it just an abstraction?
Is it real, like the putting on of (faux) fur, and the feeling of it against your skin?
Is it responsible, remembering to floss its teeth and address its stationary personally?
Is it me + you?
Can I only find it in myself?
Can you find it form me? Can you tell me where it is? Can you tell me what it is?
Can you be it for me?
:: Consider, for instance, how we might define a very simple subjective experience, such as yellow. You may think that yellow is a color, but it isn't. It's a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light a wavelength of 580 nanometers. If an alien friend... asked us to define what we were experiencing when we claimed to be seeing yellow, we would probably start by pointing to a school bus, a lemon, a rubber ducky, and saying, "See all those things? The thing that is common to the visual experiences you have when you look at them is called yellow." Or we might try to define the experience called yellow in terms of other experiences. "Yellow? Well it is sort of like the experience of orange, with a little less of the experience of red."
...
Philosophers like to say that subjective states are "irreducible," which is to say that nothing we point to, nothing we can compare them with, and nothing we can say about their neurological underpinnings can fully substitute for the experiences themselves.
...
The musician Frank Zappa is reputed to have said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and so it is with talking about yellow.
...
[It's one of those] you-know-what-I-mean-feeling(s).
...
Emotional happiness is like that.
::Daniel Gilbert, PhD
That's a lot of yellow, a lot of neurochemistry, a lot of zaniness to describe one fuzzy little feeling. But I have a little secret.
Are you good with keeping secrets?
Good.
Me either.
So here:
When you put these clothes on...
It's yellow.
I can't articulate it, but something happens.
Rock-candy hearts melt, frozen pickle-pucker faces thaw a little, systolic pressure does a little cannonball, warm light beams internal.
It does something to your face.
...
And you feel happy.
One formula of many.
I recommend trying it out-- trying it on-- each yellow morning.
<3> your happy atelier,
Divine Raggs
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