Mosaic

Julie and I get lost on our way to Parc Güell. We wander through streets lined with citrus trees and anti-tourist graffiti before finally finding the path zigzagging down the hill to a cluster of Gaudí architecture at the center of the park. Between two staircases is a fountain shaped like a lizard, vibrantly striped in ceramic fragments: blue, turquoise, yellow, green, orange. Water spills from its mouth.

I buy a button from the gift shop with a sketch of the sculpture on it and pin it to my backpack. With the other pin next to it, a black-and-white chameleon eating a dragonfly, I’m developing a theme. Wikipedia calls the fountain in Parc Güell a salamander; other websites refer to it as a dragon or chameleon, so I’m left unsure of exactly what it is I’ve seen.

A park employee shouts at someone for touching the statue. I wonder if the spray-painted tourists go home, covering the park maps and making them useless, has a point. The structures here seem too fragile for the crowds around them, perhaps because they are all made from already-broken pieces.

The Carolina Anole is sometimes referred to as the American chameleon because of its ability to change colors. The cells in its skin are layered with pigments: yellow, brown, blue. But they aren’t true chameleons. They change colors as a social cue, not as camouflage.

I’m sixteen and sitting in someone’s garage. My best friend leans back in a lawn chair to stretch her arms overhead and her pink t-shirt lifts, exposing an expanse of skin perfectly tan from her family vacation at the beach. When we try to throw our own parties, I tell her you have to be the one to invite people, they’ll come if you ask as a way of admitting I resent her skill at fitting in. And I hate this casual, effortless way she reveals her body for a moment, how I watch while she does it and all the boys do too.

Memories from the rest of the year blur together, but every summer is distinct, crisp snapshots, the time that glowed on the dashboard clock of the car down to the minute. In high school I would invent errands to get myself out of the house, pretend that I needed to go to the Dollar General for toothpaste and instead browse the cheap lipsticks, which I would buy and then inevitably leave to melt in the cupholder.

At two a.m., wide awake from jet lag, I crawl out of bed to see my phone blinking with a text message notification. A guy from high school—one I kissed once in a parking lot—is asking if you were a type of artwork, what would you be and I think for a while and say I think I’d want to be a mosaic and he asks why. I say something that isn’t the real answer, which is that I like the idea of being both shattered and cohesive, and that I’m still thinking about Barcelona, how I’d felt walking down to the beach with Julie and two girls we’d met at a bar, wasted on strong mojitos and shots of cheap tequila. How I hadn’t been drunk enough to black out, but remember the night in individual pieces, images with the connections between them gone.

I’m driving west across Route 6 in northern Pennsylvania. For some reason I remember the night as bright—brilliantly blue. Maybe the headlights of the car behind me are glaring off my rearview mirror, or maybe I haven’t been sleeping much lately, but the muscles around my eyelids ache and so for half-second stretches of road I close my eyes. In the moment, it’s not that this feels safe, but that the danger of what I’m doing feels distant and abstract, like if I crashed someone else would feel it.

There’s a theory that Van Gogh might have taken a medication derived from foxglove, taken so much that it affected his eyes, made everything haloed and yellow-tinged.

I get new glasses with blue-light filters in the lenses. They’re supposed to help me sleep after hours of staring at a computer screen, to make everything warmer and less glaring. I’m always surprised when I take them off at how bright and harsh the world is when all the blue comes rushing back in.

I go to Washington, D.C. one spring, too early for the cherry blossoms, and sit on the steps of the art museum waiting for it to open, and when it does I abandon everyone I’m with to bolt for the Impressionist paintings as if my life depends on it.

Toward the end of his life, Cézanne started painting skulls. My favorite of these paintings is a watercolor, the outline of each skull indigo, shadowed. The skulls themselves are only the white spaces between the outlines, the places where the page has been left blank.

Part of how we see is color memory, our knowledge of what green or yellow are supposed to look like, so we can register these colors even in dim light, or when the light itself changes color. Perception is mostly interpretation, seeing what we expect to see. Only certain parts of the eye are able to see blue or red, but the brain fills in the gaps; we don’t even notice.

The bus driver calls La Ciotat the birthplace of cinema, citing L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat as proof. The famous 50-second clip supposedly sent people running to the back of the theater, fleeing the oncoming train. There’s no proof this actually happened, but the Lumière brothers did strategically place the camera so the train would increase dramatically in size as it approached.

The Lumières declared cinema an invention without any future, sold their cameras, and began experimenting with developing color photography.

Photographic film is covered in a gelatin emulsion containing silver halide crystals, which become metallic silver when exposed to light, making up the dark parts of a film negative. Unmodified, the crystals are only sensitive to blue light.

The Lumière brothers released the Lumière Panchromatic Plate in 1894, which could pick up light across the entire visible spectrum. Color photography would require multiple emulsion layers, each containing different colors of dye. In 1942, Kodak released Kodacolor II film, with twelve distinct emulsion layers.

We’re doing ekphrastic writing in my poetry class, so I look at a photograph of myself and try to imagine what someone else might see if they knew nothing about me, but my life keeps creeping in and then, as I write, becoming distorted, certain events blocked out as if by bright spots of lens flare.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, about Cézanne: he did not want to separate the stable things we see and the shifting way in which they appear. Cézanne’s paintings are multiply contoured, focusing on color rather than outline. Not that the paintings are shapeless but that the shape arises from the layers of color superimposed on each other.

At the end of the day, I wait for the bus in front of a building that looks like it should be part of an old movie itself, buttery-yellow with pale-blue trim on decorative balconies and a brick-red sign that reads Eden Theatre.

Julie and I walk through room after room in the Picasso museum, taking in his work in roughly chronological order. I expect his style to develop gradually, and it does up to a point, until we round a corner and suddenly I am looking at a room full of Picasso paintings that would be impossible to mistake for anything else, gut-punched by recognition and the sudden prevalence of lime green.

Martha Graham is sometimes called the Picasso of Dance for her revolutionary style, how she broke all the rules of classical ballet. The Martha Graham Dance Company is now the oldest dance company in America. In many ways I showed onstage what most people came to the theatre to avoid, she wrote. Contraction and release, the body constrained and then liberated, the effort of movement laid bare before the audience.

Graham spent a lot of time in the American southwest, fascinated by the geologic formations there, the power of nature suggested by strange shapes in the rocks.

Maple Leaf Rag, finished in 1990, was the last dance Graham would choreograph. She was 96 when it premiered. At fourteen, she moved with her family from what would eventually become Pittsburgh to Santa Barbara, California. In her memoir she describes the piece as another railroad, like the one that brought me from the East to the West many years ago.

Near the Wyoming-Colorado border is a massive boulder always covered in graffiti. It was the first landmark on that drive that I learned to identify, to remind myself where I am. The words and images on the rock are constantly covered up by new ones, the surface painted over again with something new.

In Colorado I hike to Emerald Lake in the rain, the air cool and full of the smell of damp pine. Part of me likes hiking in unpleasant weather; I have the sense that it’s somehow good for me. The lake is a deep, cloudy jade, walled off between jagged peaks still covered in snow, a waterfall shooting down a cliff, so white and frothy it looks frozen solid. I have to squint to tell it’s moving.

Lately I’m disappointed in all my photos, how I can’t capture these landscapes. There is no sense of scale. Up close, it’s impossible to fit it all into the frame. Far away and you lose clarity in the details. Everything becomes small and blurred and insignificant, like when you try to take a picture of the full moon and even though you can see its cratered surface with the naked eye all the lens registers is a pinprick of white on a dark background.

I go to watch a dance performance on rock formations in the national forest. The dancers are suspended from cables, dancing on a sheer cliff face of quartz and mica or dangling in midair. We’re sitting on smaller rocks below them, immersed in the performance. I have to keep turning my head to see it all.

One of the difficulties of photography is that three-dimensional space is converted into two dimensions, flattened, all depth and movement lost.

That’s a Kodak moment, my dance teacher would say sometimes, meaning that she wanted us to hold a pose for half a second longer, so the audience would have time to snap a picture before we continued dancing.

It’s April, warm and muggy, thunder rumbling vaguely when we get in my car. As it starts to rain, I go straight instead of turning right and cross a bridge to drive along the edge of the Susquehanna River until we run out of road and I have to turn around.

I like this, I say, meaning the river, the trees on the opposite bank still half leafless, reddish buds pushing up from the branches. Being able to see across the water, but not any farther than that. Like the river is a secret, I don’t say. Like the hills are hiding us from the rest of the world.

Gaudí’s architecture often incorporates trencandís, a Catalan word that means chopped and involves tile shards and broken china bound together with cement. In French the term for the technique is pique assiette—plate thief—in reference to the fact that these pieces are recycled, scavenged.

Julie and I are both in sleeveless sundresses, so they won’t let us into Sagrada Familia until we buy scarves to cover our shoulders. From a distance, the strange texture of the basilica’s exterior is almost repulsive, looking like a collection of stalactites dripping calcium and mud. It’s only up close that it becomes beautiful, strange blobby shapes turning to leaves and animals and the Virgin Mary as details comes into focus.

Inside it’s all unexpected angles, afternoon sun fracturing through abstract stained glass. Training my camera on one of the windows turns everything around it pitch black and shapeless.

I hear music but can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from; it echoes strangely in the space, off the ridged columns and pockmarked ceiling. Gaudí dealt in spatial uncertainty, a concept drawn from Islamic architecture. The space is both divided and limitless. It distorts itself around me like I’m looking through a kaleidoscope, like I might find myself falling upward into the ceiling.

I find the photos again a few years later. Julie is all in white, like a beam of light before it enters a prism. I’m in an outfit more colorful than anything I’ve worn since. My dress is yellow with pink and blue flowers, the scarf around my shoulders patterned in turquoise and green. I’m standing under an orange pane of glass that turns my hair red instead of brown, the light refracted, fragmented and scattering.