..The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War and Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion and the string green bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in.
Beets consumed at dinner will, come mourning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting the beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and thoroughgoing microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown.
At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of the universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by school, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institution, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.
The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown. You'll find that you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means:
Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.
