I can't give you any new stuff today. The BlackberryJuniper universe has swung out of kilter for a while now, due to illness of Fluffhead and then me. So I am giving you some old stuff. Not that old., A year or so. They are some of my favourite writing exercises. Its such a simple premise. It comes out different each time you do it, you could try if you wanted. I have a real thing about the one I did for 'black' - I like the way that one came out in particular.
Colour works so easily for this...I hope you like them too.
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Blue makes me think of…
Cornflowers waving against a clear sky. I lie on my back in the grass and watch as a lone plane moves overhead, cutting through the cloth of the satin sky. The smell of the grass and the earth is overwhelming, even on this dry day. The cornflowers are on both sides of me, tall and stretching up to the top of the world, as tall as my outstretched arms. I wave with them, my twelve year old self as one with the roots, the stems, the sky.
Red makes me think of…
A silk and satin dress, on the figure of a curvy 40s star. She has hair styled over one eye almost, a deep brunette, shiny and perfectly waved. She turns her head, lifted high on her smooth neck, and looks over her shoulder at the photographers. Lips curve to a pout seen a thousand times on film, on teenage girls in mirrors, on Mata Hari, Mae West. This modern woman knows her legacy, and curls her hands around her slowly twisting body, resting them on her hips. She is half way up the stairs and has paused to turn here, just so they can watch the folds of silk move over her pale back as she turns. And so her thigh slowly lifts and one leg appears as the satin falls from her skin to reveal the slit in the dress. She uses the dress like wrapping paper, and slides each layer slowly off as she moves. Yet by the time she gets to the top of the stairs, having turned only that once, she is still fully dressed; the dress falls from her shoulders to the floor. The red dress and she swish and swirl, hips a soft pendulum. She disappears into the lighted hall and the doors click quietly closed. The photographers are left in darkness, the echoes of the camera flash causing them to blink. Miss McGowan has entered the building.
Purple makes me think of…
Violet sweets, Turkish Delight, all manner of sticky things dusted in icing sugar, that smell strongly and have lavender packed with them. When you pick up a segment you can touch your tongue to the top – is it a biscuit? – and you will feel the sugar stick and vanish on your tongue, and find yourself chewing small clumps (whats the word I’m looking for?) of lavender. These are wrapped in a purple box shaped like a triangle, and wrapped with a wide lilac coloured satin ribbon that shines. It’s softer than usual ribbon – more expensive, no starch to it. Your lover gives you the box, as you move closer to him. The room is lit with candlelight and you have forgotten the background as you lean into him and smell his hair. The scent of sugar also rises to you, dusting the tips of your fingers in imagination. “For you,” he says, and you feel your lips curve, as you wait to pull that soft soft ribbon, and have the first piece of sweet fed to you, with a kiss, or a nip.
Green makes me think of…
A lifetime down deep within the grass, nose pressed to the earth. Moving over it slowly, so slowly, waiting for the next piece of food – an ant, or a left over piece of picnic. The world above doesn’t exist. It’s alluded to but its so far away, so high up. The tips of the lawn grass are the tallest jungle, the clods of earth, huge mountains for me, with my cave on my back, to manoeuvre over. It takes time. My life is measured out in a series of green endlessnesses. Other green things bound past me, almost so quickly I miss them – a grasshopper and its impossibly straight limber legs land right in front of me for an instant before springing on and away. I have not been acknowledged. I was something else once. But now I ooze and slime my way along, sliding slowly through this green and fresh world. Sometimes a death comes, from above. A boot kills a friend without even noticing. A bird dives and pierces the shell, and pecks out the insides. Birds have the coldest and cruellest eyes.
Pink makes me think of…
A small pale pink leather choker I used to have. I wore it round my neck together with my pink top that looked a bit like the one from Charmed that Piper wore: it had a large scoop neck, long billowy sleeves that finished with big medieval type gathers a the wrist, and a cinched in waist. I imagined it made me look busty and skinny at the same time. The pale pinkness of the choker and the exact same shade of the top were broken up by the pendant I wore hanging from the choker: a deeply orange almost brown carnelian, carved into a chunky rosebud. It was heavy and would drag the choker down a bit. I loved the contrast of the two colours together and the way I felt so fully organised and kitted up wearing the outfit with dark blue jeans and brown boots. Then I would look in the mirror and just see me – a girl whose face is starting to jowl and droop with age; large pored skin prone to shininess and spots on the chin. The bustiness is also droopiness, and the cinched in waist shows the over-ripe curve of the belly. I was not pretty except in my head. Despite perfect presentation: all an illusion.
Orange makes me think of…
Vivid Hawaiian sunsets: film sunsets, complete with slightly sloping palm trees silhouetted black in the corner of the picture. You pan back and what you have is a postcard in my hand, that I picked up. I stand outside a newsagents in Baker Street, outside the station. I am wearing a moss green cagoule, as it is pissing with rain. A drop from my nose lands on the card – and gives the lie to the warmth and deep earth tones in the picture – those rolling black tinged faraway sunset waves. In another world somewhere. Here it is now, and I am freezing cold. I have been waiting for half an hour for him and it’s too late now. No sunset for me today, in the mind. I put the card back in the rack, after carefully wiping off the drop, and go back into the station, away from the puffs of cold air that come when I breathe. I buy a ticket home. I don’t think, deliberately. Later I will cry.
White makes me think of…
Small and delicate flowers you automatically want to smell when you see them – like crocuses. Some meadow flowers, they always seem to hang in bells. Tiny things, like homes to imaginary Victorian fairies. There will have been a little girl once. Her name would have been Ethel – and in those days, it wouldn’t have been an old lady name, it would have a current, even fashionable name. People would have heard the name Ethel and visualised a little girl with ribbons in her hair. They would have seen the white dress and the lilac ribbons and sash, the ankle socks, the soft leather shiny buckled shoes. They would have seen the frustration of her mother to see the small girl skipping away to the end of the garden and flopping down on her stomach to lay amid the meadow flowers. She listens to the voices of the bees, the tiny crackles of the crickets, the small squeaks of mice, and mews of cats that wander through. She examines the tiny white flowers carefully between finger and thumb and brings them to her nose to sniff. She sees, inside them, tiny curled creatures, that sleep. They occasionally wake, droopy eyed, to look at her, and then curl more tightly into themselves and rest once again. Her mother despairs of the small girl ever keeping a dress clean, even when visitors are expected.
Black makes me think of…
Discipline. I read in one of my esoteric books once that black is the colour of disappearing, of discipline, of control. Its not just gothy, or moody. Its powerful and calming and a backdrop for other colours to work on. Ever since then, whenever I wear it I feel as spacious as the entire night sky in the dead dark night of the countryside. I am spotted with stars, but deep and dark and limitless. I am also as compact and contained as a shiny black beetle. I am still, I move, I am perfectly deployed – weight resting equally on all my feet. I am ready, always ready. I am carapace, I am the thickness of tar – I clot, I cloy, you will not get over me. I am a thing upon which other things act out and display, but I cannot be removed or acted upon. I am steady, I am treason, I am a closed mouth in a dark room where the light has long gone out and no one waits for the morning outside the window anymore. They do not look up. They see only me, all around, everywhere. Dark. Live with me, love me and be me – for I am always here, with you. So be calm. You need to be calm. Discipline.
Grey makes me think of…
Women in the eighties and nineties, wearing dove grey business trouser suits, with tall stilettos underneath. Clacking and clicking their small feet through marble corridors as they storm (in their imaginations) the male powered world. They give no thought to the fact that they are so groomed and so utterly well turned out, that they are in effect, eye candy. Whilst the men are clean and tidy, and expensively – even vainly, in some cases – dressed; the very fact of perfectly applied lip liner and muted gloss, the echo of silver eye shadow on the brow to mirror the smooth and soft fabric of the suit…it makes them still tied to the kitchen, to the meek, to the slave. They raise their eyes and look straight at the man in charge. But what he sees is Business Barbie, and he wishes she would cross and uncross her legs again; that she would do it in a dove grey skirt, instead. Though he feels himself become a bit uncomfortable in the trousers at the thought of being stood on, ground in the cheek by that wicked looking heel. He feels that he would like to be the slave. But it’s only a feeling; a succession of images. And as she addresses him, giving her carefully controlled and much thought out presentation, even she knows that part of him is looking down her shirt to see if her bra is red…or black. She knows she doesn’t have his full attention in the brain. Why else is there a small smear of sparkly luminiser going from her throat down to between her breasts? It’s a subtle line, it just looks like light, to the men, but it’s a pointer. She takes their minds off her mind, even as she tries to engage them with it. It’s a farce. At the end of the meeting, as she turns and leaves the room, her papers held to her side in a delicate and costly leather case, they are watching the undulation of her hips, listening for the click of her heels once the door has closed. They all think one thing, as they let out their breaths and make those sniggering sly quiet comments. And none of it is about anything she has said. They know it and she knows it. And yet she is powerless to think of any better way to be. She dresses like them, yet with the power of woman. But all they see: is woman.
Creamy beige makes me think of…
Rain in Paris in films of the 1970s. A woman moves down the street, not exactly teetering in those silly high heels that show off her thin legs so well, but she is in danger. It’s windy; she is bending forward with her clear umbrella over her head, almost pushed out infront of her. The rain pitpats on it, a lovely sound. We hear her breathing too, almost gasping, to control the umbrella as she goes along, trying to get to the callbox. She is wearing a fawn coloured rainmac – an early Burberry type thing, mid calf, belted, big flappy collar. She is getting wet despite these measures; hair sticking to her face. But of course, it’s a film: she still looks beautiful – they aren’t rat’s tails; they are tendrils. The light is growing dim; the sky filled with clouds, heavy and darkening. She bumps into a heavy set man, also in a beige raincoat. There is a shock of recognition. I am aware I have changed the scene a bit. Now she needs to go to the callbox for a different reason. She must ask Udo Kier’s brother if it is ok.
Taupe makes me think of…
Fabric, again. Women who sit incredibly tall and ramrod straight, wearing simply cut dresses of the Grace Kelly style. These women are beyond middle age and into crone country. They are silver haired and perfectly coiffed; their hair goes up, in waves. They wear pearl necklaces and discreet and sparkly diamond earrings. When their sons bring women home to meet them, they sit with their court shoed feet neatly crossed, legs tucked slightly under and to the side, and judge. Judge. Judge. With their eyes, with the tilt of their head, the angle of their hands, extended, welcoming the guest to sit. They serve drinks – or get other people to serve them, whilst not acknowledging these people once they are in the room – and smile thinly, and without teeth, at the poor females. They know they exude great breeding. The final female, the one who walks off with the son, has dared to visit in jeans, not even really that clean. And she is thinking that only breeding could have caused a rod that bloody tall to be so clearly left inserted up someone’s arse. She smiles with teeth, and laughs with her whole head, and with a slap of hands on her lap, and the boy – the man, now? – smiles back at her. Their teeth meet in mirror image. The mother, for the first time ever, feels as though she wants to slump. She does not, of course. She looks down, though, at her taupe dress, almost suit fabric (gabardine?), and sees that maybe, as she occupied herself ruling the world as she thought it, it slipped by as it actually was. She only has this insight for a second, and then raises her head and calls for cake. Appearances are more important that reality. She closes her hands together on her lap, and looks at the dirty fingernails of this girl. She knows defeat when she sees it.
Silver makes me think of…
Curling skeins of silk, weaving themselves into a web, in my head, as I try and dream dreams that will make sense to myself and to other people. It’s the fabric of astral journeying, the fabric of imagination. It’s the colour of so many goddesses; of the moon in our minds. Not white but this, this silver. The sparkles, the mystery, the colour of idea and concept.
Gold makes me think of…
Large necklaces worn on sweaty necks. Necks with wrinkles; necks that deny those wrinkles. These necks are smoothed and stroked, patted with Dior creams, by men and women alike, all who are trained and seek payment for this adornment. Gold is the colour of people whose dreams of wealth have been realised and who feel, in the sense of great tradition, that to wear this around their necks, will save them from the Titanic ever going down again; they will never need to leap off a building when the next depression hits the market. It’s the colour of security for a certain age of person. It’s the colour of gypsy jewellery, of coined necklaces; of chocolate covered coins at Christmas. It’s a colour of hope, of deception, of promise. Very physical.
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