Towards a Black Orange
By Michel Vachey, translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier
We can call something white, speak of a white city, we know that white is rarely uniform, that it connotes its varieties. But we cannot just speak of green for example. So many greens! The invasive green of vegetation, of Mother Earth. The green of chemistry. Even mineralogy transits between science and earth, the inert and the living. Verdigris evokes organic rot. Iron sulfate is an antibio, non-friable emerald magnifies the finger and the ear. Green of certain skies, green not terrestrial but cosmic. Green robe of the witch according to Michelet, green of the devil’s beauty. Green of soft silk and breakable glass, green paradox of a hard transparency, of a thin wall that lets one see. Hard to paint with green; all the colors are hard. As for the grays, they all have one color, and every color makes it. With gray, Braque builds form-spaces, the one thing I took from him—quite astounding. In a city, it’s always the reverse. Braque is not a decorative painter but the most secretive urbanistic dreamer—and there is no secret. Neither in a painting nor in a city. I do not propose anything, I say we don’t start from scratch, my impression isn’t a program, is even less a critique; I abstain when I cannot applaud. One must replay the whiteness, the flatness, the impossibility of a center, must play out the singular resistance of emptiness and of nothingness without wanting to refill it with the beautiful or the social. It’s up to the walker to be sound.
B — Enigma where Violet was my favorite color, purple or mauve, he had trouble telling them apart, or rather, he used the terms badly, the bad terms. My dearest wish, to meet a frail and pallid woman named Violet—was that name old-fashioned?—or a young maiden, in such case a frail and fresh-faced maiden in a dress, lightly perfumed, smiling with a sort of over-refinement, even to the point of exertion. Then came this fashion color “Parma”—boutique windows, bathtubs, etc.—which fortunately died out only to recently be revived in the clothing industry. Evidently, always this egoistic feeling of usurpation whenever a thing “becomes popularized,” aristocratic or dumbly possessive reaction to which one abandons oneself soley for an instant, unless it’s to be an inveterate snob with fake eccentricities based on the rarity of the antithesis. He didn’t hate fashion, sometimes lovely or original, sometimes hideous; he also noted in it an acceleration of renewal, transgression, the combination of materials and forms to where even the fashion self-destructed and came out démodé. Which means that on both manufacturer and customer side some would have but one course left to them: to rely on taste and quality at a high price. Never mind, for a very long time, “without waiting for fashion,” he wore a nice mauve cotton seersucker shirt; the collar and cuffs were entirely worn but he had just found an identical one at a thrift shop—incalculable luck! What piece of nostalgia had he bought? He dissembled with constancy, like everyone else. In reality this violet and mauve fashion swept over him, his taste was too deep-seated, too tinged with sweetness to be altered, time emitted a small purple flame, his own soul was violet, perhaps the color of its absence. No, he had a soul, even if it was only an impression of all that isn’t it.
A — It’s time to say a word about natural orange: the splendid pain of captive fire in the eyes of wild animals and certain fish, the fiery color of wallflowers, the yellow-red and red-yellow of flowers, poisonous berries, heavenly mango, open-sky ochre. To me this orange color created by men is revoltingly ugly, highlights their invasive triumph, the irredeemably false aspect (as one speaks of a false note) of all social scattering, the mediocre tyranny of a success. I sincerely believe that orange is forbidden in human works except for a single case that I alone know: a red car body of which I keep an orangish memory. The most beautiful red. My father had repainted the car in order to sell it; at that time most cars were black, more rarely gray, sometimes dark blue. Cream—possibly. Never red. The fact that my father was the owner and painter of the vehicle is not the whole point, I had no particular attachment to this car that stayed in the garage. When my father sold it I remember it was then and forever sold, which struck its little air of nevermore but without sadness, because the color was no more mine than the car was and one doesn’t imprison a shade. Only someone had managed to slip into things some type of orange that was completely unlike it but which, through harmonics and dissonances, contaminated my memory. At first, children’s shovels and rakes, basins, garden hoses, all the plastic junk. I am the fire-raiser of the 1Méharis—I did not like their hue. I understood quickly that it was useless, in any case people kept on with the bus stops, the Air France flight attendant suits, etc. I will have to try something else, to see things differently, rather to let go, to wait for the time, the time that it takes, wait for the black orange.
1 Camel corps whose members ride méhari, a type of dromedary used for patrols and transport.
About the author and translator:
Michel Vachey (1939–87) was an experimental French artist and author. He was a founder of the Textruction movement, which sought to blur the line between image and text, and his writing likewise probes expectations of genre. His work includes novels, collages, and hybrid story-essays. Archipel plusieurs, a 450-page collection of his poetry and book art, was published by Flammarion last year.
S. C. Delaney has translated, with Agnès Potier, Tony Duvert’s prose collections Odd Jobs and District (Wakefield Press). His work has been featured in, among other places, Asymptote, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Fiction International.
Agnès Potier was born and raised in Paris and now lives in the Pyrenees. She is currently translating, with S. C. Delaney, the uncollected and unpublished texts of Michel Vachey, some of which may be found in The Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, and Kenyon Review Online.
