What is erotic is the human ruin, and the contamination of pity by a delight in destruction.

—- Michael Wood

After I had left for good, all I really needed to do was to describe the place exactly as it had been. That I could not do, for that was impossible. And that is where poetry might begin.

— Larry Levis, "Eden and My Generation”

I.

YELLOW refers to the primary color between green and orange in the spectrum. It is a subtractive color complementary to blue. A few variations include: lemon, “ROTHKO YELLOW”, YOLK, SAFFRON as in the dress of Fragonard’s “A Young Girl Reading” (1776), many others.

2.

Light-absorbing CAROTENOIDS provide the characteristic yellow color common to autumn leaves, corn, canaries, daffodils, and lemons, as well as egg yolks, buttercups, and bananas. Carotenoids eat light.

3.

When the Sun nears the horizon, sunlight has a slightly yellowish hue due to the ATMOSPHERIC SCATTERING of shorter wavelengths like green, blue, and violet.

4.

YELLOW OCHRE was one of the first pigments used by humans to make art. The YELLOW HORSE in France’s Lascaux cave is 17,000 years old.

5.

A SYLPH is a playful spirit of the air that is also one of the posthumous forms assumed by a deceased coquette. The word comes from the Greek silpho meaning BEETLE LARVAE.

6.

“A rose by any name other would smell as sweet” — a line of poetry that has become a cliche. Like “roses are red, violets are blue,” the repetition of romantic symbols rely on cliche. “THE ROSE” by Ben Lerner plays into this idiomatic language while invoking his grandmother’s name.

7.

In an interview, Marguerite Duras spoke about her "FILM OF VOICES" that sought to give weight to women speaking. The voices shape space in relation to sound, but they also hint at a sort of disassociation. The voices of women "are linked by desire" for each other, Duras said, even though we "do not know we exist", and do not realize that others hear us. 

8.

"This GLOSSOLALIA disseminated in vocal fragments includes words that become sounds again," wrote Michel de Certeau, bringing resonances to include "the reminiscences of bodies lodged in ordinary language and marking its path, like white pebbles dropped through the forest of signs." In the POETRY OF THESE “QUOTED FRAGMENTS” sustained by the energy of their own dissatisfaction, their unfinishednesss and incompleteness, what persists is the sense of possibility inherent in language and human relations. Fragments gesture towards continuance so that the text, itself, evinces what de Certeau calls the "resonances" of a touched body— "ENUNCIATIVE GAPS in a syntagmatic organization of statements." Certeau likens these gaps to "the LINGUISTIC ANALOGUES OF AN ERECTION, or a nameless pain, or of tears," which is to say, "the expressions of remembering," and the body awakening to "indebted speech."

9.

Elsewhere in Duras, SILENCE intones the instant when he touches her. It marks the UNSPEAKABILITY of the thing that has happened. "Cries and tears: an aphasic enunciation of what appears without one's knowing where it came from (from what obscure debt or writing of the body), without one's knowing how it could be except through the other's voice," writes Certeau. These "contextless voice-gaps," the seams in "citations of bodies," imply the existence of another dialogue. And this implication, or the act of suggesting, ratifies and insists on the existence of the secret thing.  

10.

I suspect we are all imagined by our readers. I suspect we co-create each other from RESONANCES and ECHOES. The key to both is the play on recognition.

11.

Ancient Egyptians used yellow ochre or the brilliant ORPIMENT (a.k.a. arsenic trisulfide) in their tomb paintings. Like poets, they free-associated a relationship between yellow and the imperishable, eternal, indestructible mineral, GOLD. Gods had skin and bones composed of gold. A small paintbox with orpiment pigment was found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun. In Egyptian art, men were always shown with brown faces, women with yellow ochre or gold faces.

11.

The early Christian church associated yellow with BETRAYAL and JUDAS ISCARIOT, so it was used to mark heretics.

12.

Like the romantic composers who borrowed colors to evoke tone, J. M. W. Turner used yellow to create moods and emotions. Turner’s painting Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Central Railway is dominated by glowing icterine clouds.

13.

CHRONOSYNCHRONICITY is the presentation of all stages of a person's life in a single piece of art. Everything at once; synchronized time. Samuel Beckett often plays into this temporality. John Berger wanders in and out of time in his essay, “THE COMPANY OF DRAWINGS”.

14.

NOTHING is a motif in the writing of Donald Barthelme who borrowed it from Samuel Beckett who borrowed it from its plethora, namely, EVERYTHING. Bartheleme’s “NOTHING: A PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT” opens with YELLOW CURTAINS, or their negation.

15.

Tony Wood described “KONSTANTIN MELNIKOV’S SONATA OF SLEEP” in an issue of Cabinet. There is “A GOLDEN BEDTIME STORY” about the painting Melnikov’s son created to recollect the golden bedroom of his childhood.

16.

Psychopaths are great charmers, said Charles Baxter in “ON DEFAMILIARIZATION”. But understanding what made John Ashbery’s poetry great requires a sort of respect for cliche and capacious deployment of defamiliarizing techniques, as Baxter explains.

17.

In response to Donald Barthelme’s most avowedly ‘political’ piece of writing, William Gass wrote his own short version of “THE BARRICADE” that serves as an informing idiom in Barthelme’s.

18.

Greg Gerke plays misunderstanding and overdetermined expectation in “ISSUES” & “CAREFUL”.

19.

The image above is the beginning of “THE CONNECTION” by Daniil Kharms, which continues as a list story.

“PHILOSOPHER!” is a fantastic interpellation, and interpellations call the reader out of the familiar with an ABRUPT direct address. Unsurprisingly, the word abrupt shares energy with RUPTURE, which is exactly why abrupt things feel threatening and why they should be used as often as possible to make the reader uncomfortable.

20.

Genre differences remain at the forefront of many literary spats. For those who are deeply invested in the micro-spat, William Knelles has written “MICROFICTION: WHAT MAKES A VERY SHORT STORY VERY SHORT”.