High Saturation

In wartime, choose colours

I was having a pizza at Giuseppe last night with my friend N., as I was telling her about my latest dream, she said, “I see you in very high saturation right now, Julia.” N. studied cinema, she must have spent quite some time on editing software to be able to read people like images through the colour saturation spectrum, from Black&white to high. Our conversation had rapidly drifted from the Quattro fromaggio to the politics of Israel and the way it cripples into people’s bodies and psyche. At that point, it weren’t words coming out of my mouth but fireworks with a twist of sparkles. An anger that refuses to give in to despair.

I wasn’t surprised by her comment: without consciously thinking about it, I’ve been wearing a lot of colours lately. E. says it’s called “the dopamine effect.” Wearing colours, she says, influences pleasure, motivation, and mood for you and the people around you. Humans always need to theorize the obvious instead of simply observing nature. “I am a dopamine whore,” I answered her shamelessly behind my orange-shaded glasses. From time to time, I do go into my Zen master vibe, but I’ve figured that fully accepting my colourful side is part of a larger divine plan. Freedom may be just about acknowledging who I am, moment to moment, through the shifts and transitions.

So here I am. Spring is blossoming, flowers are popping out, the sun is getting warmer, and I am entering the fire horse year like the forgotten fourth Destiny’s Child. M. says that colours carry a frequency just like music does. If that’s the case, Tel Aviv is a high BPM and I’ve been restlessly trying to bring the bossa softness to it.

In French, being "saturated" also means reaching an excessive level, where there is no space left. No doubt that Tel Aviv is, in many ways, a saturated place; enough to make you feel emotionally, psychologically and physiologically overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, emotions, impressions, reactions, the permanent buzz that engulfs us all. Every corner of South Tel Aviv has its homeless human, screaming, bleeding, peeing, hitting the crack pipe while you're ordering your oat milk cappuccino at 8am after the first alarm of the day. People sleeping bare on the road, no shoes, people suffering, people who haven’t slept for three weeks-slash-three years, with kids yelling at home, zombies with a solar plexus stuck in fear, good-hearted ones buried in a deep distrust for everything that has been constantly fed to them for so many years, for so many generations.

Tel Aviv is the city of the disillusioned. It is a place made by and for addicts who crave for more. More than what reality has to offer.

A wall of Florentine

In chemistry, saturation also refers to “the state of a solution where the maximum amount of solute can dissolve in a solvent at a given temperature and pressure. Beyond this point, adding more solute will not dissolve but will instead precipitate out of the solution, forming a separate phase.” The saturation point is thus the point at which everything may flip in a way that is exponential and that nobody, no computer, can reliably predict. And maybe that’s where we’re heading towards, in Israel-Palestine and in the world in more general. At least, that’s what O. believes: “soon enough, he said, the bubbles will burst.” While I do resist apocalyptic prophecies, the etymology supports him: the word saturation shares a common root with the word sadness, tracing back to the Indo-European root sa-, meaning “enough” or “fully satisfied,” later giving the Latin satur. Sad once meant “sated,” “full,” “weighed down,” before gradually shifting into its modern sense of emotional heaviness and sorrow. It think of that poem from Rumi:

“There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.

We are lutes, no more no less.

If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything,

no music.”

The Zen master in me is trying these days to reduce my bread consumption. In hebrew, the word for bread, lechem (לחם) shares a common root with the word milchama (מלחמה), war. What are we even fighting for? Letting go of the chametz, the sourdough, the puff, might deflate something in my ego and prepare me to, once again, leave Egypt Mitzraim (מצרים), the narrow place. Aren’t we all, in our own ways, seeking inner liberation ?

The truth is that when N. told me she was seeing me in "very high saturation," little wounded Julia showed up at the door. Little Julia, that beautiful middle child who spoke too loud to get noticed, who struggled to find her space in an environment saturated by stress and noise, and who got shushed into smallness until she lost her voice entirely. Low BPM fathers create high voltage children. It has taken me such a long time to unlearn. To embody that I am never too much saturation, never too much of anything in fact. It has taken me so long to find the timbre of my own voice, to show up just as I am: filled with fantasy, light, and an almost embarrassing amount of good intentions. And sometimes I get a slap in the face and come back down to earth. It also happens. So I pick up my feathers and my colours and we keep going.

Maybe this high saturation is just me trying to alchemise the excessive sadness I brush up against in the world right now, and the pain that I get to process every single day. Colours won’t provide shelters to children and civilians; they won’t stop men from pursuing more power; colours won’t solve climate change either. But it’s still a place of choice that I have, and that I take every day. It’s the lens I choose to see the world through.

Call me delusional but I am convinced that dopamine whores exist across time and space. In Teheran, in Beirut, in Sri Lanka, in the most remote village of North Korea, on the shores of the Black Sea, in Ukrainian bunkers, in Saudi mosque. These are my people, my tribe. And I’ll keep fighting for them: when all around collapses, we find the groove.

Colour is as much of a legitimate answer to war as tears.

To all the dopamine whores out there, colour fighters, I see you, I hear you. Thank you for brightening my life and for holding the glow for the dark and the sad, for the low BPM majority.

Shabbat Shalom, Eid Mubarak,

in softness and in colour,

Julia

Thank you for reading. I appreciate any support in this adventure