Rosemary Carroll
We’re Here To Sell Rocks
The Oracular Power Of Color
This is an excerpt from a lecture series that was written in response to the mass expansion of formulaic cookbook esoterica, instagram witches, and poet preachers. It seems that everyone has a quick-fix snake-oil description of how to make magic or visionary composition. Performed by Bett Williams and Rosemary Carroll, this lecture series infiltrated all kinds of poetic, esoteric, trad, military, rural, and avant-garde spaces, including Tilted House’s Rubber Flower Poetry Hour! Below is a sample from The Oracular Power of Color, which implores a lighthearted love of working with color, rather than a how-to bible-thumping approach of material structuralism.
BLUE
Blue is useful in transfiguration, expellation of demons, indicating direction of gold and the mapping stars.
Blue can indicate distorted uses of privacy, giving away of power, not caring for the baby bird needing to be held close to the chest. Or held in a dear pocket with clay and straw next to the barn.
Symptoms of misuse of blue include indignation, shock, exhaustion, shakiness, and confusing story with archetype. For example, a person who has misused a powerful blue image may think of themselves as not belonging in a space or needing to adopt other people’s stories about them. Blue can lead to the delightful confusion, similar to the psychological ploys gifted by Marijuana, that one is entangled in and obliged to a confusing web of social control with specific actions, expressions, and behaviors necessary to move forward or exist.
People who can benefit from powerful blue poetry & images often describe themselves as lying or pandering.
Blue transmits that ways of seeing, access to new physical and energetic formations and systems, can be achieved through technologies and are easily accessible to all beings, especially rocks and humans.
For example, if I were to give a recipe on how to make a blue bath, say epsom salt, blue pigment, cold water, high desert, Mabel Dodge Luhan Portal, body heat, fish vertebrae, moldavite, pine, juniper, frankincense…
And you were to repeat in order would you come by similar results or is there a necessary secret element? personality? technique? power? transmission? essence? flourish? that is needed?
THE ORACULAR POWER OF BLUE ANSWERS THESE QUESTIONS
GREEN
Green is a place. Green is a place arrived at through fucking. Dripping with generation. Green is a place arrived at on the back of a winged long body. Green is money weed greed. Green is cans of spinach, pop-eye and other monsters. Green is a sacred grove while licking her cunt. A forest of macaw feathers. A nod to iridescence itself.
Green is indicative of process. Green is indicated when a break-down, a melting, a nausea has occurred.
Green is trickery. Green light from a glass bottle shines on your lover’s arm. Green is the moment when your LSD cult has to reckon with scarcity…is it God’s love or the weather?
Misuse of green is grand larceny of this place and this is called planet earth 2022.
Grandmothers’ green baths hold the whole contraption together by a thread.
ORANGE
Orange vibrates high and burns away the excess without inflammation. Orange is heat and power of the sun without the blood-boiling smoke of fire.
Orange can help bring clarity to doors and windows. What needs a screen? What needs a new frame? Why did you build that useless window in the hallway? Who cares, it’s time to vibrate beyond structuralism and resonate with the coming of the new.
Orange is indicated after blue, with the coming of gold, when multiple creative endeavors are being simultaneously held, when there is confusion at whom to sit at the table with.
Use of orange can invite confusion into power dynamics. Fugitives may hide in the arroyo, under the deck or in the sauna. Friends may think they are holding up a mirror to you but instead, it is a shabby seedily sourced rock glaring with demotion. Dogs may lose sense of whom to follow. Jesus becomes a woman. Butches seed toads downwind.
Use of orange may lead to losing followers on instagram but gaining followers in your newfound LSD roller skating cult while you sing the lyrics of your new favorite song by the band Sapphic Inclinations “Every Sound On The Earth Has A Reason.”
Use of orange may lead to being asked to be a guru. This is where you pause and consider. Is this an intelligent operation? I am stunned by color. The plants are asking me to speak. Is this shimmering blue apparition LSD? The power of romance? The power or blue? The power of our love?
Orange opens these strange doors and asks you to step in, step up, and step through.
Which door will you choose?!…
Rosemary Carroll creates writing, choreography, and installation blending the rhythms of oration with the rhythms of the body. Her writing can be found with Ugly Duckling Presse, Contact Quarterly, The Poetry Project, and Ignota Books and her choreography at Grace Exhibition Space, Franklin Furnace, and Movement Research. Rosemary has been a heavy equipment operator at the South Pole, Antarctica, and a journalist in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In 2022 she was the choreographer at wo/manhouse 2022, a Judy Chicago and Through the Flower installation running for four months in Belen, NM. Find her at @love.rosemary.carroll to follow her current project INTERPRETIVE DANCES FOR SASQUATCH.