Organs of Little Importance by Adrienne Chung

Author:Adrienne Chung [Chung, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

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1. There are memories of specificity and memories of multiplicity which bleed into one another like an endless film reel, flickering to an unknown rhythm. Ghosts tripping the wires, the vague dread of standing at the curb long after all the other children had gone home. I can recall clearly looking down the open road, how the sky at that hour so quickly darkened from blue to black.

2. Darkness is the balm, that which softens the world’s hard edges. Out the window, our stalks of amaranth shot up like jeweled bullets.

3. There is a name for the color seen by the mind’s eye in perfect darkness, that off-black of an almost-absence. They call this Eigengrau:

3.1 An austere life of hard rules and dry complexions set to minimal techno and a strict schedule of sandwiches on hard, dry breads.

3.2 He said this was his favorite color.

I said, You’re a pretentious fuck.

4. In 1999, a man named Nicholas White was stuck in an elevator for forty-one hours with no phone, watch, or water. Consider that humans can expect to live about three days, or seventy-two hours, without water. At forty-one hours, he was more than halfway to death’s door. Whatever happened to him inside that elevator led to the loss of his relationship, job, apartment, and all of his life savings.

5. Do They Know That in China:

5.1 a yellow movie is a pornographic movie and—

5.2 only members of the imperial household could wear yellow, the color of royalty, and—

5.3 the first emperor was called the Yellow Emperor and—

5.4 the last emperor, Puyi, was carefully raised with only yellow objects surrounding him as a child? In his memoirs, he recounts, It made me understand from my most tender age that I was of a unique essence, and it instilled in me the consciousness of my “celestial nature” which made me different from every other human.

6. For the seven days following my abortion, I boiled seven dates in milk nightly until their bodies distended and dissolved into a curdled ambrosia, tinged yellow by a spoonful of turmeric. Alone in my apartment, I stirred this sludge with a wooden spoon and drank it with the formless conviction that some would call hope. I’d wanted something more—something esoteric, something pagan. Looking back, I wanted something magical.

7. At some point, I’d begun to see blue where it did not exist as it was. First I saw it in burgundies because I knew that the mystery of its purply scarlet was born from a tinge of blue. Then I saw it in whites simply because I knew it was there. I saw it in black when it shimmered to a near navy in sunlight and in the striations of wood because I imagined that once a blue-eyed woman cast her gaze on it. I saw it in the concrete slabs downtown, which hid hundreds of people inside wearing blue as if blue were something they could take off.

8. Cavafy asks,

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

9.

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