Dolor (Drained of Color) is a series of distilled emotional artifacts composed as haiku tweeted in real time during a clinical depression episode. Unlike retrospective reflection, Dolor exists in the raw immediacy of lived pain: terse syllables, stark imagery, and poetic fragments that resist elaboration because the experience itself was dissolving articulation. The work does not smooth suffering into narrative, nor does it seek aesthetic distance—it places the body of feeling directly into language that is brief, sharp, and unresolved.
This project emerged alongside and through the interruption of Geology of Heartbreak—a long-form memoir-like investigation of subducted memory, emotional rupture, and affective transformation. While Geology of Heartbreak maps the tectonics of memory and identity over extended psychological terrain, Dolor inhabits a present moment of affective collapse. The haiku form—traditionally reflective and compressed—functions here as a minimal structure for maximal pain, a linguistic spine that refuses to collapse even as experience does.
Where Geology of Heartbreak charts emotional states as processes of erosion, shift, and metamorphosis, Dolor dwells in the liminal state before integration—the point at which emotion is too immediate for interpretation, but already preparing to be remembered. In this sense, the two works are linked not by genre but by temporal scale and interiority: one excavates the deep past across geologic time of self, and the other bears witness to the raw, unlayered pressure of suffering as it occurs. The haiku’s spartan cadence becomes a record of feeling’s gravity, a momentary outcrop of consciousness before it is folded back into the larger narrative of recovery and reflection.
CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 07/12/2021
