In her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir remembers from her childhood “the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruit-drops—green, red, orange, violet—I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me.” And as an adult she wrote, “I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.”

Algorithm: A set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.

There are some days when I subtract colour from the world, and I am left with nothing. And that solves many problems.

But then, I add personal thought back into the world, and that adds many problems.

If I am able to add colour back alongside my thought, that solves some problems, lessens other problems, and divides still other problems into smaller constituents, making them more manageable.

And then, if on occasion I am able to follow the rules and perform the steps that result in a perception of personal thought and colour coming to a yin-yang equilibrium, I cheerfully operate as if many problems are solved. But in this circumstance I am cheerfully confused; (until I notice the flowing blood from the harpoon in my thought, and the flowing blood from the other harpoon in colour).

This mixture—the blood of colour and the blood of speciousness—produces a vibrant, viscous, tangy clamor that is somehow perniciously compelling.

This mixture brings clarity; a clarity that with one hand plunges my thought into previously unknown depths of iciness, and with the other hand slits the throat of colour.

With the blood of colour flowing more freely, and the icy depths roiling to the surface, an expansive, exhilarating, and frightening vista of actuality and possibility is exposed. This momentary, volatile landscape is volatile; and momentary.

If I subtract colour from this world, I am left with icy thought; which quickly melts; and evaporates.

And then I must begin again; or not.

Each moment I must choose volatility; or settle for delusion; or fade into nonexistence.