The painter & the writer
The difference between a painter and a writer is the materials they use, not the process they create. The goal of an artist and a writer is to depict a rich and colorful picture of the story they want to express. To achieve this, the painter starts with the composition, and the main shape then uses his brush to draw and depict every vivid detail of the character. I also want to understand and analyze the text in this way, so I colored the main ideas of the text "Let me begin again" by Ocean Vuong, then observe it to discover the dance of the colors in his text.
Since this text mainly describes the son’s memories and feelings about the mother, I will begin by coloring the notions of the mother with the color red, and the notions of the son with green. I will experiment with the passage where the child has a panic attack and calls the mother on page 2.
“Aboveground, I sat on a hydrant and called you. “Ma, I saw him,” I breathed. “Ma, I swear I saw him. I know it’s stupid but I saw Phuong on the train.” I was having a panic attack. And you knew it. For a while you said nothing, then started to hum the melody to “Happy Birthday.” It was not my birthday but it was the only song you knew in English, and you kept going. And I listened, the phone pressed so hard to my ear that, hours later, a pink rectangle was still imprinted on my cheek. “
By observing the position and role of the colors, we can see how the image of the mother beside the child is and how it affects the child. In a panic, the son calls the mother and uses the word "Ma" twice to call her. And then the mother calmed the child with "hum the melody". The amount of red and blue seems to be in balance in this passage, blue and red seem to go hand in hand.
Here's another example on page 2:
“The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made.”
We can see, two colors go together, harmonize “my lips to your ear, my hand on yours,” and then it creates a third color, yellow is "we" representing the shared memory of the mother and son. And through that, I extend to the analysis of the whole writing to see other colors fusion between mother and child.
Note: There are some exceptions, such as the butterfly image in blue, the image of the corpse purple.
Figure 1: Source
When we look at all the text in color, we can see that most of the text is covered with blue and red, and only occasionally appears yellow. It may be a sign that although the son writes and thinks a lot about the mother, the shared memories between the mother and child are not much. The yellow color seems to be sporadic, squeezing between red and blue colors.
The color visualization of words is not only useful for having an overview but also can be used to look deep into one paragraph. In the following example, I colored in red the nouns and adjectives related to the description of the butterfly in a paragraph on page 4.
“ I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, in that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.”
The red words are an adjective or noun to describe the image of the butterfly. We can see that, in just one sentence, these descriptive words are compressed into the butterfly image, thereby creating vivid detail about the butterfly image
Ocean Vuong also built many different layers of meanings for those words. For example, when looking closely at the word “flying”, This word has many layers of meanings built throughout the "Let me begin again" text, because the author has used many different phrases and concepts to describe the butterfly's flight. The following are phrases related to "flying " that I found in the text
beginning their yearly migration south
they will move, one wing beat at a time,
their wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight.
Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.
their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing,
butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.
When we look deeply into that color of the word “flying”, we find countless layers of color hidden under it. “flying” means sapping into flight, it also carries layers of the color of “migration”, “survivor” and "fireproof". When looking at these color layers, we can see more clearly Ocean Vuong's various layers of meanings. This analysis shows Ocean Vuong's masterful technique in drawing shades of action.
* I must admit that this approach also has many downsides, although assigning a color to text makes it easier to highlight and distinguish ideas, however, words are often multiple and diverse so assigning a certain color to a cluster of words are quite limited. And the second downside is that color assigning doesn't really aid analysis and interpretation, because the color doesn't have a specific meaning. So the interpretation of a text in color seems to have more of an aesthetic value than an analysis value.
Although it doesn't have a lot of value in text analysis, I was happy to try this out as well. Because I like to quantitatively analyze text or find its assigned value to measure the association between words. Hopefully, I will have a chance to learn how to do this in the field of computer science.