white, blue, red, brown

While I was riding the elevator yesterday with a few others a man got on pushing a shopping cart containing a tray of white paint and a roller. For a second I thought he'd start painting the elevator and everyone on it. I was going to tell him "Don't bother, I'm already white" but bit my tongue until the delusion passed. In reality I'm really not that white. Not white like Teotihuacan in its heydey, before the denizens deforested the area in supplying firewood for the production of the lime plaster with which they fastidiously manicured the city's surfaces.

Mr. Indigo, Aboubakar Fofana, who I met today at work, is not too white either. There was some kind of hubbub which I learned was someone conducting an interview with this Malian textile designer and indigo artist. He is described as the heir to his culture's ancient expertise in creating all manner of blue from the exceedingly honorable Indigofera Tinctura, so I think it's fair to call him the Prince of Indigo. He's very tall with soft skin and a few very soft, long dreadlocks, wears a large ring on his right hand in the form of two very pointy breasts which symbolize fertility. He looks like the kind of man who does not wake up but is born every morning. I needed to know if his hands were permanently dyed blue so I could add him to my growing internal gallery of men with blue body parts, including Barack Obama with his bluish lips and Lord Shiva with his throat dyed blue from swallowing poison. Aboubakar's fingers weren't blue, but his fingernails had streaky patches of blackish blue that were permanent, the Prince's stigmata.

I can't say where I got the red stain that's under the surface of the toenail on my left big toe, but it also doesn't seem to be going anywhere. For sure I never plunged the toe in the Gowanus Canal, not when it was Lavender, not now. But my fingers may be reddish by Monday if I follow my whim to dye this slipcover I have a color called "soft orange" or the other called "light red." It's going to take 20 cups of salt, a handful of soda ash, and a half a cup of procion dye. Unless someone can loan me some indigo, which I hear doesn't bleed. Instead it grows richer with age. Or maybe I'll just spare the local waterways any more questionable effluvia and leave the cover dull Sparrow brown, and imagine it's red.

By the way, the textile above is not part of Mr. Fofana's oeuvre. I think his pieces have a more wide open feeling.