f33l

The first things humans ever wrote down were debts. The oldest tablets we have are counts of sheep, measures of grain and records of who owed what to whom. Writing was invented by accountants, and everything written since, including every love letter and every confession, has been made with tools built for inventory. We should not be surprised at what happened next. A framework designed to make things exchangeable made feelings exchangeable too. We learned to itemize them, to present them and to trade them for sympathy, status and attention. We learned to say “fine” because it is the cheapest coin that settles the transaction. Somewhere in that long commerce the feeling and its price tag became the same thing, and whatever had no word, which was most of it, stopped being counted at all.

But the feeling came first. Before anyone had a word for dread, the body knew dread exactly, and it knew the particular gold of a good morning without needing to be told. Color is that older knowledge. It has no grammar to get wrong and no exchange rate. It cannot be argued with, and it cannot be used to lie as easily as a sentence can. Nobody has ever negotiated in ochre. F33L is a small act of going back. You open it and there is only a color. You move it until it is true, a little warmer, greyer, darker than you would have said aloud, and you keep it. There is no caption and no explanation. Nothing is counted, scored or compared, because counting is the ledger’s habit and this is a place the ledger does not reach. What you keep cannot be edited, because a feeling is a fact and not a draft. The tiles gather into a painting that no one can read but you, and that was always the right size of audience.

This is not a rejection of words. You are reading some now, and the irony is noted. It is a rejection of their monopoly. The claim is modest. For a few seconds a day you can set down the whole apparatus of explaining yourself and simply taste what is there, in the oldest language you have, the one you spoke before you were taught any other. It is private because a feeling shown to everyone becomes a performance again. It is free because the point was never to sell it back to you. If you choose to show one person one color, you will have said something no sentence has managed: this is how it is with me, right now.

Feel, in color.