The Yellow World (13 page)

I also didn’t want to talk about this very much so as not to condition you, make you think that you have to talk about a particular topic. Topics will arise, don’t you worry. The yellows bring them with themselves.

I think that everyone has their circle of people they can talk to, who make them feel good, who have something special that ties them together. These are friends who should be turned into yellows right away.

It has nothing to do with sex; not everything in life has to do with sex. I imagine you’ll have boy yellows and girl yellows. The beauty we’ve been talking about has nothing to do with
your sexuality but with details and marks that appear and that you can’t understand at first sight.

There’ll be a bit of everything, like there is at each age as you grow up: There’s no fixed rule.

(Although there are always exceptions.) You don’t have to think about rules; think about lists.

Whenever you think of a concept, someone else perverts it, or uses it, or changes it. It is we who will use the concept of yellowness and we who should know how to use it.

So the answer is that if you discover such a thing, you’ll realize it stands against everything that the concept of yellowness stands for, and you’ll know what to do.

Maybe where you’re at right now you don’t need yellows, and if you don’t need them then maybe you won’t find the marks. Give yourself time—it’s not something that you’ll get done in half an hour; it might even take you a whole year.

I think that everyone should keep his marks secret, which is why I haven’t said what mine are. I don’t think you should make them public. It’s as if that would make them lose a bit of their value. When you’ve gone to all the trouble of finding out what the marks are, then you should know how to value this effort. And it should be
your
effort, your own personal and private effort.

You could tell them to another yellow if you need to, but I don’t think you should need to.

You don’t always have to ask someone if they want to be your yellow. You can carry on like you’ve been doing for the time being—meeting yellows and not seeing them again—but the good thing is that you’ll now know that those people were yellows. You’ll be calmer and feel happier.

There’s no point: The nine or ten marks that made you think that a particular person was a yellow won’t be the same ones that made the other person think that they were your yellow.

Of course you can introduce two yellows, that’d be great, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll be each other’s yellows.

Far from it. Friends are there, but some of them evolve and turn into yellows. It’s just another rung on the ladder.

Here’s a list of relationships. The order doesn’t mean that any one is better than another.

In my ideal world the best thing would be to transform your friends into yellows, to overcome the twenty-three barrier.

All types of change are complicated. Jealousy is something natural. How can the person you love understand that you’re sleeping with other people? Only by understanding the concept, understanding that in the yellow world you need to see your fellow yellows sleep and wake up.

I know that I could write a hundred questions here. But manuals of instruction always have twelve, the twelve most important questions. So, like I said, if your question isn’t here then rejoice—it’s not one of the typical ones, it’s something new.

“Living” is coming to its end.… This is a brief summary of the things you have to do to find your yellows. A little list to guide you into this new world, this new step in your friendships, this new way of understanding the world.

Do it. Change your world.

First gather all the yellows. Without knowing it, you’ll have had five or six before now who you didn’t know were yellows. Put them in a list. You don’t need to ask them; they were and are yellows. You can even call them and tell them.

Think about the word
beauty
and make a list of marks. Get rid of all the ones that are marks of sex or of love. This list is the basis for everything.

Use photos, pictures, smells, and even the list of yellows you’ve already got. They will surely be the basis for your yellow marks.

Search for your yellows. You can find them at work, in the street, in a train station. Let them in and enter into them as well.

All you need is a single question: Do you want to be my yellow?

The most important thing is conversation. You’ll see how everything flows so smoothly, as if they are open to you and you are open to them.

Let yourself be filled with the essence of yellowness. And above all go for physical contact, without fear, without jealousy, without any type of shame.

It depends on you. They could be yellows for your whole life long, or they could turn into friends, into lovers, into whatever you want.

And remember, it’s the yellows who renew you. They change you, so every couple of years try to go back and look for your marks again.

Above all, enjoy yourself. This is the basis. Enjoyment.

How better to finish than with a new definition of yellow?

Don’t be so crazy. Best behavior. Stand up straight
.

Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t cough. Don’t breathe
.

Yes, don’t breathe! Say no to every “no”

And relax: die
.

—Gabriel Celaya

Although I’ve focused on life, I have to end, like Celaya did, with death.

This was another lesson I learned from cancer. I lost my fear of death and this is something I thought I would forget about when I started to live without cancer, but in fact just the opposite happened. I am still not afraid of death and this has a great deal to do with the years of fighting against my illness and such continuous contact with death. As I said, a lot of my friends died. But they’re all close to me, and 3.7 of them I’ve got inside me, deep within.

At a lot of the talks that I give, people ask me how you lose your fear of death. How can you manage to do it? Do you have to have a mortal illness? What does it mean to lose your fear of death: Are you braver; are you more impulsive; have you lost your fear of everything?

People want a quick fix: Do this and you’ll lose your fear of death. Quick fixes don’t exist. Lists of pieces of advice exist, lists of possible things that you can do. But as with
everything, you have to internalize them, believe them to be true, and, little by little, put them into practice.

In these talks I usually explain the importance of talking about death. You can’t lose your fear of something if you don’t talk about it. You have to believe that it’s something natural, something that you’ll go through, nothing negative.

Death is not bad. Death dignifies everything, gives it an end.

I have written lots of screenplays and teach screenwriting, and the first thing I tell my students is that in order to be a good screenwriter you need to know how you will end the film, how it will finish. A good ending can give you a good film. If you don’t know anything about the ending, if you’re scared of it, then maybe the film will never finish. Lots of times I’ve thought up endings that deserved a story in front of them; sometimes you find them and sometimes you don’t. But you can’t do anything without an end.

Life is the same. You have to speak naturally about your end. Speak of your death and the deaths of people around you.

It might seem complicated, but in fact it’s quite simple; all you have to do is put it into practice. In the hospital we Eggheads spoke a lot about death: We all knew that we might die soon and that gave us a strong desire to talk about it. To know how it would take each of us, to know how other people would like to die, to know what you thought about your death.

I feel my heart start to beat more strongly when I talk about this—this is a good sign. You shouldn’t confuse emotion with sadness. I feel emotion; it makes me happy to think
about those kids who died. I’ve never felt pity or sadness for them; they didn’t deserve it, they didn’t deserve for their memory to be connected with either of those two feelings.

There are people who tell me that it’s not easy to ask someone how they want to die or how they want to be remembered. I always tell them that the best thing is to start at a distance and get closer by degrees. I like asking new friends this question: Which death has affected you the most?

Just this question about death opens up paths, you discover so many things.… People are happy to talk about jobs they’re going to do, girlfriends they’re going to have, or journeys they’re going to take. And maybe they won’t go on those journeys, maybe they won’t get those girls, maybe they won’t get those jobs. But they’ll definitely die.

Talking about the death that has hurt you the most is most likely to make you talk about a death that you haven’t yet overcome. The most painful deaths are the ones that haven’t been accepted, the ones that are remembered the most.

What should you do if someone tells you about a death that hasn’t yet been overcome? Just listen, ask lots of questions, and nothing else. It’s almost as if they are telling you about a journey or a new experience. And above all, don’t feel pity for them. How absurd pity is! It’s completely useless.

I think that death marks you in a way that life cannot. There are people whose father or mother died when they were little. These kids talk about their father or mother in a special way; they have been marked and they have had to do things that otherwise they wouldn’t have done. Death is important
for the legacies it leaves; it adds the finishing touch to things.

You always have to think of death as something good. People celebrate life, celebrate baptisms; they should celebrate deaths like this as well. It would be a part of the memory, of the dignification of the deceased.

I know some people think that I’m being frivolous about death when I say that it’s something good, because surely they’ve been through the painful death of loved ones and don’t find anything beautiful in it. But what you have to remember is that in itself death doesn’t exist. When someone dies they turn into someone you have known. Memories of them remain; their life is divided among the people who knew them. It’s as if they were being multiplied in lots of people.

Don’t connect death with pain. Don’t connect death with loss. Connect it to life, connect it to a dignified end. Don’t think that you’re going to disappear, don’t be afraid of disappearing. It’s something that you’ll do sooner or later.

I think that the more you speak to your friends and family about your own death the more prepared everyone will be. I’m not talking about making a will, just simply asking people to do things you’d like them to do when you die. In the hospital the Eggheads wanted a huge number of things; for example, one of us wanted, when he was dead, for all the rest of us to go to a concert in New York. Desires from beyond death, beautiful wishes that I’ve tried to carry out. Wishes that were full of life.