THE COLOR OF THE DAYS
When I was a child, I learned to read and write rather early. When I was 4, I
passed an entrance examination for school. The test was not on letters and numbers, but on geometric shapes and colors.
There was a blue circle, a red square, a green triangle, and a yellow diamond.
The diamond was very problematic for me. I had never seen a twisted square, and
did not dare tell my teacher, for fear of offending her. She taught me the word
«diamond». Later on, I learned that a square is a «particular» sort of rectangular I also learned that in the Middle Ages, one called every four-sided shape a
square. Hence the «Maison Carré» (Square House) in Nîmes, which is a rectanguLAr temple.
I also learned that temples don’t need an architecture, an outline traced with
a special stick, the lituus, by a soothsayer, indicates the sacred limits. Litus is the
root of Lithuania.
At the origin of writing, for me, lies soothsaying: the act of reading the world in
the scars of trees, animals, corpses.
Words and numbers have colors and textures, I would even say intensities of heat.
An adult or a mystic would have said «halo.»
In short, I was starting school and I was being taught how to read and write. Yet
the black circles and sticks on the page meant nothing to me. They were mute.
I had learned the meanings of words by way of their images and textures. Grammar remained a fabulous adventure, and the COD’s, and COI’s that we underlined
were beautiful little green, red, or blue boats.
I could not sense the relationship between words and things. By the same token,
I could not read a comic book or an illustrated tale, everything seemed too
confused, too «loquacious.»
The teacher decided that I had a psychological problem, because in the face of
such confusion, I decided to remain mute. At least for them. I still felt as if I were
in a permanent state of communication with the world. I spoke to trees, leaves,
animals, in an intense yet mute language. Everything made sense in a harmony of
forms and colors perturbed by the idiotic cries of adults.
They placed me at the back of the classroom with Sarah, a little girl who had just
come from Algeria, and later, a Laotian girl. The idiot savant and the survivors,
the group of the three mutes.
I was thus a strange stranger.
In order to find my way in their system for the division of time, I had, as a writing pad, my calendar, having color-coded their names for the days of the week.
MONDAY IS NAVY BLUE, strict and harsh.
tuesday is saffron oraNge, light and blessing.
wednesday is black, terrible and tragic = nobody ever saved me from wednesday.
THURSDAY IS YELLOW, QUITE PALE AND HARDWORKING, COLD LIGHT.
FRIDAY IS DEEP GREEN, WRM AND HAUGHTY.
SATURDAY IS HALF BRIGHT RED, HALF PEARL GREY, INTENSE OR BORING, DEPENDING ON THE
WEEK.
SUNDAY IS PEARL GREY, NEUTRAL AND EMPTY.
I REMEMBER ALSO THAT MY FATHER ALWAYS BEGAN HIS STORIES BY « I REMEMBER, IT WAS A
TUESDAY»...
COD : Complément d’Objet Direct (Direct Object)
COI : Complément d’objet indirect (Indirect Object)