The Color of Time

Or, Houston, its marathon, and Rothko Branes in a Python Dictionary

By Gabriel Marc Johnson

RP5 = {}

Mark Rothko’s color studies are polar states stamped onto canvas: that is, mass and energy. He seemed to have figured out that color is exactly that, matter and movement: pigment and reflection. The experience generated in viewing these is real, emotionally and physiologically (elements on the same continuum, varied by level of consciousness). If a day in the life of Leopold Bloom requires at least a thousand pages of transcription, today’s days would need a recursive algorithm written in an interpreted language like Python to handle such a payload of ones and zeros. If I were to say, fly to Houston for the weekend to run its marathon while also taking time to experience the Rothko Chapel, would the incipient words prove capable? Let’s see (what the machine can generate).

RP5[‘V’] = “

Airplanes are bullets through the heart of time and space. If you feel nothing gleaming out your window at 30,000 feet, Marinetti will kindly chuck you out of the pilot’s windscreen, so as to delight in the tumble thwap thump of your tea kettle as it pinwheels away, no Nigel to hold your ankles. It’s an awesome experience, that of a commercial flight. And the whole time you’re up there you should behave like Louis C.K. suggested on Conan a decade- years back. A ballroom of hapless astronauts, just ordering drinks, finger smudging black mirrors. The cloud layer creating perspective for the puppy-planes below, paddling through the skyways, bellies tickling over the knuckles of the stratocumuli. What would Newton have done with this view? The same as Einstein? A thousand years ago this was considered heaven. And now just an interzone between terrestrial moments. The irony.

Human technology chasing heaven farther and further away. I’ll always retain a healthy awe of being up here: Man’s will subduing gravity. Falling from this height, at 16 feet per second squared, if one’s mind were steadied such that the entire experience could be absorbed completely, the end would suspend itself on the event horizon, and your consciousness dispersed throughout. Vesna probably mentioned something. The fear of flying doesn’t stem from this thought, of course, but rather the loss of mechanical agency for one’s own end. And all of this nebulizes into one carbonated intellectual rush every time I fly, manifested through the minor combustion my bottle of still water produces when I open it for the first time at cruising altitude. It’s just water, I blithely intone to the middle chair. I’ve always wondered why commercial airplanes aren’t equipped with enough parachutes for each passenger, or any for that matter. Respect the airborne.

But now we descend over East Texas, and smoke willows volcanically from the fields below, stuffy poofs of swarthy grey pushing through the relative moisture. Are they allowed to openly burn trash in Nacogdoches? Like I saw a Mexican man years ago do at a construction site not far outside of Houston on a plump summer day, accelerating his pre-frontal balding pattern with excessively direct heat and greasy smoke. Even in January the ground below looks like it craves fire. It doesn’t get any better as we drain down closer and closer to Hobby. So much open area for a big city, most of which is thatch patch of a sickly peanut-butter brown. Why here?

”

RP5[‘HG_0’] = “

The kids are fighting at the bus stop, mere meters to the right of the arrivals exit. A pack of 20 or so, with professional-grade gloves, dancing and papping each other a pair at a time. My ears are still pressurized, so I take it all in through a twitchy viewport, leaning on a guardrail. The ineluctable modality of the present and inevitable boredom of violence. That’s my bus, so much cleverer. And up the GUT of the settlement I trundle, one detached manor block at a time, until the conductor pulls over without announcement and Beefheart screams silently in everyone’s ears, side one, track one, until the man crosses the street to one of the beats. The bus door sucks open like a can of beer and we keep chugging towards the wards, no aesthetic drag to shape the motion, velocitize the time. With spirit echo still finding its way back to sea level I say to myself, sure let’s pick up that bib before expo closing, we can make it.

Ersatz is a good word. The George R. Brown Convention Center of Le Centre Pompidou. Seattle got the balance right with the Summit Building, though. Through East Downtown and up the back door. Easy place to get into, the Houston one, dismissively. A canyon of dusty echoes have chased away the pigeons normally found vaping the salty carbon dioxide issued from clustered densities of sloppy folk. No food for you here, y’all; to the sandbar, you bums!

Looks like everything’s set up for Sunday. Aluminum trusses cheeseboroughed tightly and bannered tautly enough to give off that official feeling. Twilight hums over everything else, the urban prairie of parking lots and expressionless arterials; between the empty megalithos and megavitros; even the blue-shifting tron of racetruck squads can’t be eared up very well. Pedestrians are unwelcomed here, is what they mean by that.

Exit in through the outdoor. Americans can’t get enough of selling things to each other. Pshah, as if the market has feelings. Marketing does, though, wink-wink. The available goodies at pre-marathon expositions has seemingly narrowed out of existence. No one knows where anything is, me especially. Draw-string bag and bib, and shirt. Where’s the shirt? Hey, do you know why the packets don’t include the race-shirt? After???! Someone really would wear the shirt without having completed the run? Lot of fish in that bowl, evidently. It wasn’t above the D.J.’s pay grade: he had the answer. Well, I got what I came for, and a little less. But those are the breaks I suppose, I suppose, I suppose.

Main Street saloons. Swing doors receded deeply behind the edifices. No bother: if you were me you couldn’t be bothered, either. I’ll take Grey and find a spot on the left or right, optimism says. I pass the neon root canal sign and burp out a chuckle. The skyline from here looks like a hologram of itself. Maybe they turn it on when the sun goes down, give the physical dimension a breather. If I’d gulleted some airport food before escaping on the bus, I wouldn’t be on such a food prowl presently. But so goes the situation. I ate, don’t worry, and then found my room, esquina Bailey/Cleveland behind the Bobcat apparently abandoned mid-chomp into the raked through chipseal.

”

RP5[‘HG_1’] = “

The world spun under my feet 1500 miles west and now the tom-toms of my precious ears have uncorked as the submarine hatched open and the synthetic sheets slip down the sides like Gregor’s carapace. Too much toothache in that whiskey, I sense, uncertain of the notion’s audibility. Peewee’s Jambi genie appeared from the dark staircase last night asking questions, questions about the check-in, the marathon, and my impression of her 6-mile-a-day claim. Fair play to all of it, I reckoned, as the glow recoiled diaphanously back down. I laced up my sneakers thinking, yeah that was a good answer. And the downstairs looks like a party supply store display room, cheap reflections throughout. Shake out run through thin air and cool breezes. A stick figure animating naively over a two dimensional circuit board. Midtown’s surface cement burdons miasmically below every heal-toe swing. The metronomic topography flash-thumps out of the corner of my fish eyes. Shaken, but not stirred, I’ve returned to the fence-sized crayoned heart and have 30 minutes to scrub myself of the transport, both big and small. I can hear the crunch of time as schedule anxiety cinches up. I generally enjoy that tangy feeling, don’t you?

I chose the stay location for its rational advantage: center nuts on the golden hypotenuse of my three destinations. That, and it was cheap; this value goes unrecognized by the locals who are not accustomed to peripatetics. Vegas blocks, cinder blocks, the kinds of sidewalks on which cyclists commute with abandon. West to Montrose and down. A convertible slows enough to present a stringy coconut with glasses and sweater sleeves flailing superfluously. The cliché of this neighborhood prevails deep into the sinuses of kitsch. Left with no choice but to ignore it away like the infinite majority of ego- jousts Americans construe as socializing–regardless of race, creed, station, mythology, or indeed, recreational preference. The itinerary only respects what’s on it. Number one is just past Alabama.

Usually, January here is mild in a relative sense. Humidity and temperature keying in more civilized scores. Forecast suggests tomorrow’s barometric pressure at 50 percent, at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Tough, but manageable, the thinking went for the last 10 days. The window walls of the Starbucks are permanently tinted in defense of the perennial heat. Stuck in line between three pairs of opened-toed sandals and a tatooeyoed homey–surprised at such aesthetic endurance as with the country club look still so prevalent among the East Coast toffs. It all still exists, persists, truly.

Sul Ross, yeah, sounds like a good street. Alpine, Texas, Amtrak station, “SR” white-hot branded on the face of a dry bluff and a college face confirming. Entering the University of Saint Thomas here. The religious significance, but I don’t think of it in that light. So it wasn’t allowed on their property, that’s the word. Heaven’s Gate have anything to do with all of this? Their annual neewollah party could be the common denominator, ginning up the black hole for all of this to collapse into, or maybe that’s how they considered the Chapel. Not enough conspicuous dimensional development from the looks of it all, too many well-known knowns. The lady on the balcony doesn’t seem troubled by the unbearable lightness of being; the stogie and the garb say it all. It’s never too late to quit, I announced to her, with the confidence of categorical imperative and a black dry fit 50th anniversary Seattle marathon long sleeve. It takes a village, at any age.

PURSUANT TO SECTION 30.6, PENAL CODE (TRESPASS BY LICENSE HOLDER WITH A CONCEALED HANDGUN), A PERSON LICENSED UNDER SUBCHAPTER H, CHAPTER 411, GOVERNMENT CODE (HANDGUN LICENSING LAW), MAY NOT ENTER THIS PROPERTY WITH A CONCEALED HANDGUN.

PURSUANT TO SECTION 30.7, PENAL CODE (TRESPASS BY LICENSE HOLDER WITH AN OPENLY CARRIED HANDGUN), A PERSON LICENSED UNDER SUBCHAPTER H, CHAPTER 411, GOVERNMENT CODE (HANDGUN LICENSING LAW), MAY NOT ENTER THIS PROPERTY WITH A HANDGUN THAT IS CARRIED OPENLY.

The gun you’re displaying can’t be concealed. The gun you’re concealing can’t be displayed. Fun, Frosty conundrum. En español me dije, también. Pero eso no me ayuda. If only morality could be enforced with such grace. The gun concierge is just before the gift shop, to the left of the restrooms. And no open containers, and no cameras. Greece guns, for all to believe in. Pray on that. It’s a chapel, after all. An octagon with a Greek cross, lit naturally from the top now, a lone neutron star. A camera obscura crackling with fireflies, burns streaking out as they splat onto the branes, fueling the static. The building’s footings depressing the juicy subterranean firmament like a derrick tapped into an itchy reserve. An ecumenical marvel? Or cosmic satire? The only difference between comedy and tragedy is the outcome, unless empathy doesn’t work for you.

”

RP5[‘Chrominance’] = “

Walking in on panels sharing secrets with each other. They’ll let us stay, but only if we appreciate the conversation. Tenderly dark, spirit-lit penumbras gently tugging on the light in your eyes. The shared pool of energy only rippled by the steamed up ushers leering atavistically, executing their fiduciary duties on behalf of Congress for Cultural Freedom. Dark, not as the absence of energy, but its magnetic comfort; sink in for a spell and get in the mood. Behind these panels lie all the information needed to read eggplant and sing dark matter in any key bright enough to make it work. We will sit and throw concentration at the pitch as if we were its source, its projector; the fish in the water looking up at the moon, conscious that one day it’ll get there. Traditional perspective methods promoted during the Italian Renaissance coupled with Buddhist rendering of the square. Soulages’ outre-noir revealing an entropic curtain for you to Etch-A-Sketch a moment out of, a phenomenological screen.

Creating form is the essence of intuition. Designed for hard perceptual work, these brane slices aren’t the autostereograms of glazy mall memories, matured for a pretentious chin. Physically intellectual like a marathon go, the smucker is in the grind; the struggle a lot of fun. A spotlight in no-man’s land. We just aren’t equipped with enough cones for it to be easy. The few on the floating periphery of our jelly sockets pop to Young’s zero with the ping of a tuning fork as the frequencies sync up and noodled pulses wriggle their way through color, slinking between conical pixel apertures into the cochlear funhouse and relax in the synesthetic higher energies from whence it big banged, the genealogy of light, the sound of gravity. It feels the way déjà-vu could, and should. An inchoate mental stingray trolling amoeboidally the contours of the cerebral cortex for a coherent data path. Time as a material feature. I’ll perform a mime-sketch for you sometime.

The same vague proprioception being issued from the dense bench to hands and cheeks as well as the wrought iron paving stones to flat feet, the previous mental pang matches. All legs tickling the earth’s surface, dart-spoking to a common hub. We will dig to the center of the universe together. Emotion is to intellect what art is to science. Any attempt at objective impression is far more virtuous than the head-to-toe of subjective conceit. Sincere in the abstract, the smile in everyone’s voice. The silhouette of the father-daughter glowing at the south panel.

The Goths, the Huns, Scythians, Wells’ Mediterranean glide, the Hanseatic, the Iberian nose, the Lowlands, William’s lands, Chuckie V, the Seaboard, Monks Mounds, San Jacinto, the wildcatters, Kennedy’s Rice, westward to the moon-shot with crumpled tin foil and emptied siloes abandoned to the random land below. Greed for adventure, chest strings pogoed, commandeered through novel-sprung souls, kicking back the vitiated ground vectored in mythical file formations, accelerating the spin. Wheels rolling, fins paddling, wheels rolling, prairie mounts neighing, rigs sucking: blast off! All success is tragic.

Monopoly of the present. But this isn’t about the present, Professor Schama strained, this is about the forever. The eternity, I would add, in our eyes; the blackbody of color; the Kantian motion of reason. Objective Impressionism, for was he capable of insincerity? The humor here is monumental. An undeniable humor in every breakthrough of human understanding; a simple formula to predict a natural phenomenon, laughing zestfully when something is really good. Feynman grinned endearingly through his explanations. So space-oil cheekiness shouldn’t distract from the object, not with the right attitude. Seagram’s wouldn’t last, neither the Harvard project. Sired of noumena, posterity here is questionable without the posthumous. Quand même, lifetime-sized drama in 5D, mournfully funny through itself and its viewers, you ought to pry.

”

RP5[“HG_2”] = “

The foamy daylight resists the castle door, lumbering in like dry ice smoke. Retinal calisthenics from the gong inside keeps this comfortable, eyes widened nicely. Frames skip soothingly like 8 millimeter stock parallaxing the orphan obelisk. Flutter those scissor sticks through the ink bump of this flatland blueprint, bulging ear-to-ear focus on the run-up, on the carousel, estranged these quicksilvered years of pandemia. Truck broke down returning from the Space Center a few of them back, the altruists were pretending, offering pistol peace of mind we saw no need to consider. Sat flatbed middle and under the inner cab chat and the window cracked outer scream of TIE fighters circling belts and loops, the notion’s beginning began: one day soon that’ll be enough of that. The family village surviving on a prisoner’s diet of bread and asymptotic shares of emotion, the goat song attached to the sun. Yet another man yelling at another man so I break on red and skate under the bridge, starve the arena fire of oxygen. The Great Articulator and First Lady rendered on a northside wall, maybe as practice. Abandoned lots, parking lots, rebellious weeds won’t acquiesce until the local culture of the MLS and MBL updates its axioms.

The veranda’s cant is probably for drainage purposes; its steps too: the right stringer hangs in tension above the concrete pad designed to support it. Shivering on the inside, the amber rubbed out of me, we plate baked salmon, yellow and green courgette, packaged fruit medley and banana bread. At our feet, little parrot pups work in catechism, letting rip their interminable evolutionary grievances, jamming up interlocutor frequencies in a way which appears preferential to the house, providing bailout every clause or two of attention. Allow not the hypnosis of ambiguity to take hold. It’s a moral check-in, is all, the shore of it, still able to squint inclination balloon-bobbing out past the breakwater. Keep the compass needle sharp and true enough to efficiently burn through the shamble field; my, the fuel needed.

Entertainment is currently the thickest social common here. At length DFW Sierpińskied the loneliness this dénoues, after all the popcorn and candy; and then death, if you’re kinked by good Philly smart rock. Sport, the cerebellum of the show, as both etymology and racket smashing confirm. Nash’s invisible hands fly the same colors, perhaps only for a season. It’s the sole available playing field, and for now the Seahawks and 49ers are screenside. Pete’s goal-line record survives in collectivity stronger and healthier than the memory of the latest active gunman of terror. Until the next one scores. The single hard thought proffered on this trip concerns the evolution of sport injury, analyzed thoughtfully in nominal and real terms, efforts any hum-drum concern would die for. Curious how the Solow model didn’t mention any of this to the NICs. Play is serious business to these people, just watch the game.

Saturday night tacos on Main Street are filled with brisket, overpriced, delicious, and eaten over anecdotes without climax. Cross-table talk though, of the great immunological leaps put up by Laureate Allison, harmonist and zeitgeist of the future; no reason to beat death to Baghdad--uncomfortably, to boot, thank you very much, poison therapies of the barbaric present. Relevance for the expression was there, but every clock has its own tick and tension and hands big and small enough to handle Babylonian numbers indefinitely. Think of all the atomic clocks ticking in each of us. Shanghaied upon the sea as clearly aforementioned, slinking out and getting on with it, the invariable mystery. These are the ways of the clan, and this is the way out, and to the full night of pre-marathon rest I’ll never get.

”

RP5[‘PG4D’] = “

A tin of coffee and chicory root in the play-Café du Monde closet-cum-breakfast-nook, hidden behind baskets of munchies and primetime television-era sweeteners. See a man about a horse before, a different man said at Hayward Field back on Cascadian time, and hot mud fills the Sherpa of record. He got the kind of sure, one-day response that blushed him long-in-the-tooth-cohort like, without much need for it, as the present habitually eventuates mockingly with breezy giggles. New York, Missoula, but hopefully no depth charge booming up one of today’s whistle California-stops. Not much spirit peaked from one cup to the next; the juice had expired, leaving a gnawing mental gurgle to accompany the visual floaters and pituitary rice crispy pops peacocking behind like just-married cans or clay-court drag brushes.

Sketchy sweat, then, through chunky air the elastic roads mirage forward breathlessly. The golden hypotenuse slipped out an egg; the citadel is a hill of beans, isn’t it? Or a can, anthill or a farm, actually, wide-angle suspended such that participants are scarcely noticeable. Ionic like a Brocken spectre, Terminator villainous, here we go hand off to the nice volunteers worthy of genuine smile eyes and radiated appreciate you’s, to the nearest accepting corral. Parched already, paper water cup filled with half a gulp set down, freeing up hands for thigh and calf drills. You just knocked my over my water cup! Oh, it’s not mine, she addles. Shrill Раско́льников with me, together, all that boggy angst! Tranquilized, they forgot their English. The interruption nettled well into the course until superseded by a more formidable bonk.

Always follow the theta axis at times like these, when each square thumps by featurelessly like a carousel slide projector loaded with a single industry’s civic vision, not of skullduggery, mind you, simply because theirs was the only on offer, the best out of a field of one, the single concession stand return. Kid gloved to the face each of these snoopy quads of Styrofoam stuccoed edificial gaud and grammatical adventurism [sic], impelling an inward trek to stave off the vertigo. Eight miles in, caloric bulbs on the skin’s surface hitherto pollinating the buzz field with inner brack reverse course, locusting implosively to the gimbal ring, under the quixotic assumption of charge. Philadelphia was a bundled shiver six weeks ago; blood gelled up in response, and stayed that way, apparently. First the bubbles roil up the cauldron something fierce, exciting the foghorn. Treble and the bass, hands clapping and cloy exhortations remix ungracefully until the labored lounging. Then they go after the carburetor, saturating all that inside shine. The panels fed on my light, which in liquid form is oxygen.

”

The feeling, the shape, the tone, the color, and then the brane.

print(RP5.values())

***