An Ode to the Colorless Green Ideas Sleep[ing] Furiously

In early December, I came across an article documenting a study that tested Noam Chomsky’s assertion that we have an innate grammar in our brains (as opposed to one we can only parse through extensive communication).

As part of an experimental psych class, I had to run an experiment whose results strongly suggested we can learn subconsciously learn a new (meaningless) grammar after just several minutes of repeated exposure. While that concept is wholly fascinating with what it can perhaps suggest about how we iteratively learn/adjust to ‘new normalcy’ with enough sufficient exposure, that’s not what appealed to me most about the article.

The study’s researchers used a phrase Chomsky coined, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” as an example of a sentence that is grammatically sound and yet nonsensical. I wanted to play with the icky-and-yet-pleasant sticky strings of that nonsensical grammar.

The following piece was written as an experiment for the inaugural meeting of a writing group; one paragraph is edited from the the group’s feedback (thanks, y’all. )

An Ode to the Colorless Green Ideas Sleep[ing] Furiously

Along a glass sky, my sweet currants dance amidst wind’s windows. My round thoughts pierce grown sidewalks, furry with regret. Across the way, men bubble about, floating up and bumping into another. Their wrists are enveloped with bracelets to keep them tethered, and each one grows two new hands dictating the direction propelled. Then they lose themselves, in mind and felt.

Their mirror minds refract the colors I once liked into colors I can’t see. Shadows, dark with insistence, demand I frame the portraits they drew of me. My flight is lost in my own me. They call my walk “left”, then “right”. They struggle for right and towel me off when I left. It is soft and blue comforting. They mean well with a soar and I know I shouldn’t breathe afraid if my weather weathers my rock lungs.

I stop and go because of friction, and because of friction I am here. My hair grows into a carpet and I nap on it when I tire. We roll together to the dark and to light. The flames that grow there are clumsy and I fall. In such season, I can only plug. In, beyond the paint, there is water. Plants that grow from the fire that was flattened with the slabs of water that were put in. Neat rows and tamed leaves.

I hunger. I fill. I convert. I release. I force what I take to join me and know it fair. One day I will join too and it will also be fair. I saw bubbles joining and they were fair. Some were more rainbow than others and bigger, too. All they took with them in all the colors that they made, they had to return. They had the colors only for a short while light. Then they were eaten as flowers.

These gardens play together, except when they sneeze. They were the only ones who could say bless you because we could see the sneeze. Before them, the sneeze wasn’t separate. To the sneeze, it was entirely itself, till it was sneezed and so vanished. We could see before and after, side by side, and purred assumptions of the unassuming.

With skipped footsteps, we could climb forever. Our motion knew no drought. Our seeds could grow tired and soon we’ll have to let ourselves shovel home. Where do you stand to be all the ways home? From inside, you never know all the paths your lost thoughts could bring.

The road was fleshed and curvy, and we lost ourselves on it between moon and sun. We traveled home together, never, intensely, and all at once. Our hands were vague in each other’s suggested grip. We thought the words but slept through feeling. I wanted to touch your touch but all I had were letters in my fingers. This logic conducts my heat and never shares it. It cooks my thoughts and ferments it for tellers. I don’t want to wait till I am flowers to show you. You could feel them if you put your fingerprint on my tongue bumps and let fly your hair to perch on my brain folds. If you traced my shapes and rubbed your grooves on mine, you could hear my forest sing.

I have to open myself. All defined, I use words and think in letters. Once I knew my dewed thoughts. I dream a lucid existence where I can taste any direction and, yet, awake, I am stuck. Breaking free of others does not break me free of me.

First I have to pick myself apart and regrow, dirt to nails. I will be naked for months and feel my needs and drape them in meiosis thread. Some circles and fabric canals will be familiar because of common shapes, but each loop will eat its tail with necessity and grace. These corners preclude my look around them, and all I have are straight lines and bellowing waves. I can see it in birdsong and hear it in the sun. I know it not in my body but only where I am from. Then, I know where to swim but first I need to taste the water.

It reflects and ripples the same color that I know. It changes shapes with courage and then back again unstoic. It wafts and it wavers and floats, following a direction winding and unwinded, in all directions and on dirt. One by all they turn to one and all and I among it looking to leap in. In simplicity, it bounces without tension but I am still combining them. Once we are whole again, I know what I will see. Till then, there is much clamor behind, composing while I suture. The babble cooks me and I narrate because I am not raw. If I were raw, I would choose to only