colorless green ideas sleep furiously —
what we wear impacts how we think and how we remember.
There’s a phenomenon known as “enclothed cognition.” It’s the scientific way of saying what we wear impacts how we think and how we remember. — Eika Veurink
1.
There is a green, not so much neon, not so much moss, slightly kelp. It’s a sharpness that invigorates, that forces the day to bend at 3PM for a coffee break, a broken carb to enrich the afternoon’s value.
At that 3PM cafe, I am missing a friend, drastically. Dramatically. It’s the kind of missing where you long for their bad habits. The way he overspends on Our Legacy before budgeting out groceries for the month. The way he lusts, forgets that people are vessels of love. The way he softens his words for me to seek out his own awareness, to let him know that I am beside him. But he is an ocean away and I am here, instead, with another friend who hears me out, a fixed anchor in this collaborative missing.
Miss with me, I say.
We are tired, but this chartreuse is bold enough to keep the day moving.
2.
This green has found its way through the trending grapevine. I saw it first on the designer of Kijun, a Korean womenswear brand, where he had this green apple sweater layered with a chocolate brown leather trench. He plays with the idea of the office girl with enough Diane Keaton quirk to pass as someone who lives in Manhattan, but still splits a $15 kale salad and martini with a girlfriend.
I was embraced by this green a year later, in a tight embrace, a biting winter. Wool, a bit of polyester, the fuzz, leftover Christmas blush, above my upper lip, itchy cheeks.
I’m remembering now, I wore this green sweater to Sokcho, too warm for late spring, but it guarded me from mosquito bites, bad sun. If you scroll down a few posts from my Instagram feed, you’ll find it, love it as much as I do, did.
This green still follows me throughout the months. I’ll see it, believe it to be something like a prayer, and makes me ask,
Who am I praying to? What do I believe in? Do sequential orders of the same color add up to a posture? A position in a poem?
How have I been folding my lazy limbs into stanzas and line breaks to conjure colorless green ideas that sleep furiously?
3.
In a sleepy neighborhood, Post Territory Ujeongguk is a small unassuming gallery that hosts an adequate space.
I was taken aback by Jiro Ueta’s 2g. You see a fridge with a small pile of paper pigs, multicolored and childlike. When you open the fridge, more pigs flood out. It’s as if a child has crowded them there to protect them.
It is said that 2000 pigs disappear in Korea every hour. In the bellies of men, in school lunches across the land of the morning calm.
I imagine a child eco-conscience of the world trying to save this animal in the form of paper, in colors, cramming them in a cold fridge that neither stinks nor rots because a child doesn’t know that milk can spoil or that eggs go gray. Higher powers like a mother know best, protect a child from this, and so, allow imagination to run free, build a cold fort, a sanctuary, for these pigs.
I don’t have imagination. Rather, it visits me, like a heat wave that splits a breeze.
4.
“The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content. So when we watch characters in films sit at dinner tables or drive around in cars, plotting to carry out murders or feeling sad about their love affairs, we naturally want to know at what exact point they are doing these things, relative to the cataclysmic historic events that structure our present tense of reality. There is no longer a neutral setting. There is only the timeline. I don’t know really whether this will give rise to new forms in the arts or just mean the end of the arts altogether, at least we know them.” — Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney (p 42–43)
5.
Is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost? Will anyone think about me this Sunday? Has my greeness drifted in between eavesdropped conversations? Am I my shirt?
Do clothes make the man? Yes, they do, for the one I’m looking for.
6.
A recent griefbacon newsletter expresses green as infatuation that begins with a houseplant on Instagram. It turns into collard greens and then the Green Knight. Green-ess as youth, a pasture for “people who are new to being people.” It’s coming of age. It’s ivy-league. An Irish Spring green. A retreat.
And I can’t help but think America is headed for another Walden moment, another shift to hide our heads under trees and think of good things, good soil.
What should sprout?
Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney, a writer who retreats to a big drab house, green all over, I imagine.
Leave Society by Tao Lin, also about a writer who tries to envelop himself in eating green, in green Hawaii.
7.
This green has followed me, and even manifested itself in my mint iPhone 12 mini. In Korean, it’s considered a sammu green, a cold radish eaten as a side dish complimentary and refreshing, meant to cleanse the palette.
I feel refreshed. I can’t help but admit to friends how well I am. Finally, I feel like I’m in tempo with my writing and my lifestyle. It took four years to get here.
I can’t help but tell my mother that the grass is greener on the other side. I want her to believe it, believe with me.
8.
I’m wondering how long this green will follow me, if it is a single strain that will line itself in my daily life. If it is inherent. If it is playful. If it will comfort me. It’s on the lips of my Stan Smiths. It’s on my Baggu towel. It’s in my weekly brussel sprouts. It’s a reminder of something that I’m still trying to figure out.
9.
I look up from my age and see birds scoop the sky over me, but in their quickness, I only see their shadows, and I look down at my green shirt and wonder if, years after, I’ve caught your attention, if I’ve created that green light somewhere in the distance that blinks every so often to drag the dust off memories and let us rethink our thoughts, archaic torsos.
This wash of a shirt, 100 percent cotton, is a collaboration between Tekla and Stussy. It is my first Stussy piece and it’s sophisticated yet homey for the streetwear brand. Perhaps it’s because of the pajama collar, the way it lengthens, lounges, waits to be slept in.
I wait for the clouds to move, thinking that this will bring the birds back, but they are long gone and all that’s left is a clear sky.
I want to do a lot of things differently.
