blue Monday
how blue can you get?
Inside the body, oxygenated blood is dark red. Yet, as veins travel near the semi-opaque surface of our skin, they appear blue. The appearance of our veinal flow confirms a doubled existence–what we are certain life is versus what we see it to be. The human heart itself is a divided organ of circulation wherein left and right sides function nearly independent of each other as they conduct the music of oxygen rich and oxygen poor. In our very hearts, we exist divided.
I inhale blue air and exhale blue heat, dispersing the cold with my releasings. Droplets of water happen to me in grace, so very un-blue their praying hands, granting clemency upon me in herds as they lay their foreheads upon the earth, until I soak in blue humility, ensconced as we are in awe as if in the Sultan Ahmed Mosque whose white and cobalt blue tiles were the only continuous production of the town of Iznik for five straight years during the mosque’s construction.
Out the back window, quaking aspen trees bend in honor of the pond’s sky blueness, their boughs aching to lay down in waters as does the evening moon. But, by afternoon, their shadows cast muddy green upon the paling body until the clouded sky reflects ashen white ripples, revealing we’ve been bowing towards an illusion all along. When I was in Alaska, I used to submerge every night in the glacial lake upon whose shores rose a live volcano smoking its waft of blue in relaxation after the pleasure of such a view. When you free dive and the light slips away, color will slowly disappear from the liquid world–red, orange, yellow, green until your held breath echoes all around you in deepest blue before the black.
When I close my eyes, I think in shades of blue–slate to powder, cobalt to ultramarine. When one by one the population goes blind in José Saramago’s Blindness, is the whiteness of their vision loss part and parcel of the inhumanity that unfolds? Lapis lazuli, a metamorphic rock, gets its oceanic blue from the mineral, sodalite. Mesmerizingly blue, lapis lazuli was mined in the Middle East over 6,500 years ago and has long had an aura of status, religious significance, even godliness. In the Mesopotamian myth of Inanna–goddess of love, war and fertility…all the important stuff–and her descent to the underworld, her return is sometimes attributed to the lapis lazuli necklace she wore around her neck. Her husband and sister were not so lucky, though their half year imprisonment in those depths endows us with the cycle of seasons. Is it the expansive thought that blue grants that caused kings to deem it a royal color? The U.S. Postal Service, the Marines, and United Airlines bring us their blue assertions of fidelity, reliability, and stability. You can trust us; they announce in blue. The rest of us communicate through our throat chakra, glowing out blue when we balance inner and outer energies and reminding us that our voices exist not in our bodies but in the expanding ether–wispy, ethereal, haunting nothing and everything of existence. Like the pure blue Yves Klein claimed to have perfected. Can blue spaces support the healing of our rupturing human experience?
For me, blue remains a longing, a slip of time and space that recedes back into oceanic deliverance. And I miss you blue and bluer in a saturnine seclusion where the moon never reaches atmospheric blue. I miss you in the azure of the sea, beneath its lapping waves, crystalized in the weeping dome of the sky blue and black. I miss you through the blue note–its gliding descent, its blurring of note from note, its slip around representation. I miss the way you called me blue eyes, even as such eye color was considered barbaric by the Romans, these pigment-less orbs through which I imagine the world and reflect it back to you in blue. I miss you every blue day of my blue life, where my tears fall colorless and empty, where my cold hands ache blue, and where my endless seeking turns me out repeatedly into the blue night. I miss your voice across the blue misty valley–as close as the soaking rain from whence I returned one day to your concern confirming your love for me, as distant and secret as the mystic blue:
The Mystic Blue
D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
Out of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,
Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping
To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel
Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel
Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,
The rainbow arching over in the skies,
New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea
Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously,
Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea
Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death we see.
If you could see me now, my Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, you would see I always knew “we’d never meet again.” And through the absence, I want your love “blue over blue over blue”:
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
this is how i want you to love me
blue over blue over blue
wet til the paper buckles
dark so the owls come outblue
and at the edge a mountain
that knows no country
respects no borders
don’t care when i forget
my own name
your love so jangles my blood
now the sunrise be sudden
What of this melancholy blue, this pensive weight that brought the name to the blues itself–the hallucinations, those blue devils, produced by withdrawal from addiction… or did it just derive from the blue notes that dominate the genre — those flattened thirds and fifths, those worried notes sung at slightly lower pitch than “pure” notes? The blues may indeed be overlays of blue upon blue, or blue over blue, like an icy skin, the blue-ness of our isolation and separation.
How blue can you get, baby?
The answer is right here in my heart.I gave you a brand new Ford;
you said, “I want a Cadillac.”
I bought you a ten dollar dinner;
you said “thanks for the snack.”
I let you live in my penthouse;
you said it was just a shack.
I gave you seven children,
and now you wanna give ’em back!Yes, I’ve been downhearted baby
ever since the day we met;
our love is nothing but the blues baby;
baby, how blue can you get? (BB King)
The blues carry weight, the kind of blue that weighs down the heart, deadens or sometimes sharpens the senses, saddles the body and turns your feet to lead–“heavy boots” indeed. I heard B.B. King play once when he visited a college I was attending. I had stumbled across his music years earlier and after listening alone in my room for so long to him and Lucille, the presence of the audience felt like a violation of my previous intimacy with his music. How blue can you get?
Picasso’s Blue Period expresses a somberness of this sort–this heavy, sullen time in his life whose onset may have been the suicide of his close friend, Casagemas.
Bruises proclaim and memorialize the initial injury in shades of blue. Tears falling from our eyes feel blue—dark, navy blue implying oceanic depths, fathoms beneath, swimming in blue, blue that will ultimately alter to pitch black beneath the aphotic zone.
Yet, these ‘blue lips, blue veins’ can transform…as in Regina Spektor’s “Blue Lips” where we continually distance ourselves from the knowledge tree:
Blue lips, blue veins
Blue, the color of our planet from far, far away…
Blue, the most human color
And thus we move “into the blue” and things appear “out of the blue” and blue gains that ineffable quality–transparent and otherworldly. In The Glass Menagerie, the character Laura is nicknamed “Blue Roses,” a nonexistent ideal, there being no genes for blue roses despite centuries-long searches for them. Or perhaps she is like a rose whose real color is eclipsed by the dewy blue of morning, of quiet, watery moments evaporated by the sun as in the Depression-era song “Dear Ones, The World is Waiting for the Sunshine”:
Dear One, the world is waiting for the sunrise.
Ev’ry rose is covered with dew…
And blue moves from a weight to a distance, from a misperception to something conspicuously uncanny, perhaps we will vanish “into the blue” or long for the time ‘before the wind’ when we could
“Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic” (Van Morrison)
And the calm of blue arrives, the ocean diving deep into black, but always hovering within the blue and near the shore where we dip our toes in tentatively, the blue washes over us as turquoise and azure, gentle and filled with light. The sea, the sky, the distance unconquerable, the mountains that sink into and rise in a blue mist that fumbles heavenward, the “color of our planet from far, far away,” the “most human color” that pulses within our veins when we peer at our own physicality and calls to us from the twilight sky filled with stars that echo back our voices and past and time itself as a reminder of collective blue tint, tinged, as we are, with each other’s atmosphere.
Until language overtakes–blue evading semantics and naming as in the Thai language, the color blue was once สีน้ำเงิน which actually means silver (perhaps referring to the silvery blue effulgence of the ocean) and has morphed into สีฟ้า which means the color of the sky. See-gaan — สีกาล — is the color, dark blue… where gaan means time. Can we grasp the blue we seek? I spent the better part of a year after college working with Satin bowerbirds in New South Wales, Australia. The male birds will decorate their mating bowers with shells, shiny items, and anything blue they can find, though it appears the reason is more self-referential than a love of blue itself…cue the iridescent blue/black plumage that longs for its echo.
In painting color is not at all straight-forward and nothing is as it first seems. Blue is considered a recessive color, echoing that sense of distance, the earth from space, perhaps the way we sense but have trouble grasping our shared humanity.
The decentralized and loosely connected German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) derived its name from one of Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings of the same title.
Kandinsky theorized at length about color, connecting it with music and harmony: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
And so, our blue quest returns us to music. In his manifesto, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky wrote about the scent and feel and taste of colors, but also expressed his belief that colors had particular psychic effects and corresponding “spiritual vibrations.” Precisely because of blue’s recessive tendencies, its movement away from the spectator, it possessed (according to Kandinsky) deeper spiritual properties… a closer approximation of the spiritual itself.
“Yellow and blue have another movement which affects the first antithesis — an ex- and concentric movement. If two circles are drawn and painted respectively yellow and blue, brief concentration will reveal in the yellow a spreading movement out from the centre, and a noticeable approach to the spectator. The blue, on the other hand, moves in upon itself like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator…
The power of profound meaning is found in blue, and first in its physical movements (1) of retreat from the spectator, (2) of turning in upon its own centre. The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper.
Blue is the typical heavenly colour.
The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest.
[Footnote: Supernatural rest, not the earthly contentment of green. The way to the supernatural lies through the natural. And we mortals passing from the earthly yellow to the heavenly blue must pass through green.]
When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human…
When it rises towards white, a movement little suited to it, its appeal to men grows weaker and more distant. In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all — an organ.”
… the human organ too? Have a blue Monday. Contemplate the blue, think and love and ache blue, bleed blue, seep into and fall out of the blue, and find your mystic. All fade to black.
Your fellow seeker,
Katie