The bluenesses of different eras recall different dreams of what sadness, thought, and hue finally are. The moods of the past may not be read perfectly, but they may be seen as motion, deep beneath an ice-clear lake, or the body behind a frosted sliding shower door. The blues of one painter are the pale turquoise of regret, or orgies ended; another’s blues are modernist, stark, mysterious, eye-entangling, and unyielding, like the gods of Lovecraft or the gazes of those who spurn us.
Ranking blues chronologically by their authoring spoils the fun by breaking trust with the great writers.
Ranking my favorite blues chronologically by their supposed authoring, as I have done just now, to see how they stack up in my head as I return to them, allows us to envision different cerulean heavens, many varieties of squid-bruise sea, and all manner of sad personages, casting mournful or perhaps hilarious sturgeon-faced gazes out onto unresponsive expanses of pampas and heath.
To the chrono-palette:
When Hoja remarked that my powers of imagination were all too limited, I remembered the mustachioed French turtles in our lily-pond, the blue parrots that talked with Sicilian accents, and the squirrels who would sit facing one another preening their coats before mating. We devoted much time and care to a chapter on the behaviour of ants, a subject which fascinated the sultan but which he could not learn enough about because the first courtyard of the palace was continually being swept.
—Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, set circa the seventeenth century.
Pamuk’s blue is the childhood color of imagination; the house is colored green; the grass is red; the yellow sky eggily holds up a black sun; etc. Like many great authors, Pamuk supercharges his novels with even more interesting but impossible to write fake books. Here, our blue is the sadness at never being able to read Hoja’s elaborate bulldada animalian encyclopaediae.
Rain, sun, two whole days of impenetrable fog, night winds whistling, winds far and near, nights of blue crystal, crystals of ozone. The graph of temperature against the hours of the day was sinuous, but not unpredictable. Nor, in fact, were their visions. The mountains filed so slowly past that the mind amused itself devising constructivist games to replace them.
—César Aira, An Incident In The Life Of A Landscape Painter, set circa the nineteenth century.
The games of Kandinksy, whom Gass quotes: Blue absorbs where yellow diffuses happily into oblivion; the one, a cat; the other, a tiring dog. This montane landscape is gray-brown to us now, sparsely green, but to the men who walked it before Twitter, the stones revealed depths of frozen flesh and layers of color, whole canvases used again and again by matrices of indecisive, chameleon crystals and minerals reflecting each color in turn, patient as their immobility could ever warrant.
Scolding and demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that shut and spread like a Frenchwoman’s) all had folded itself quietly about her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple.
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, set circa the World Wars.
Dame Woolf here writes, in part, of the blue of quiet transformations. When my (blue) cat realizes I am leaving for the day, his gunmetal fur ripples as his body twists to leave the sill, abandoning cat-yoga to rush for the door and out into the fatal void-world where I live. (Just as I might try to leave earth in a spacesuit of duct-tape.)
The blue of the sky. Trees leant against. Bird stutter and the whisper of grasses. The Dead Father playing his guitar. Thomas performing leadership functions. Construction of the plan. Maps pored over and the sacred beans bounced in the pot. The yarrow sticks cast. The dice cup given a shake. Shoulder blade of a sheep roasted and the cakes in the bone read. Peas agitated in a sieve. The hatchet struck into a great stake and its quivers recorded. First-sprouting onion caught and its peels palpated. Portents totted up and divided by seven. Thomas falls to the ground in a swoon.
—Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father, set circa a dreamy, olden-timey now.
The blue of prophecy darkens the sun-colored supposedly free world in which we live. (Our world is darkened otherwise by the industrial blue of leadership functions, networking, thing-fetishizing, and so on.)
What pretty names, he thought. Indigo, sugar, ginger, cotton. The reddish flowers of the indigo bush. The dark blue paste, with copper glints. A woman painted indigo, washing herself in the shower.
—Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, set circa now.
The shower again. A prismatic turn toward indigo. The thickness of paste. The painting of the self to reflect, what? The blue everywhere else, or the blues inside?
Or finally the thick landscape of blues, tangible, practically taste-able, that William Gass writes of—the realm of blues-set-beside-non-blues, to bring out their quintessential bluenesses—sadness, awareness, the rain, sex, and time?
So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith.
—William Gass, On Being Blue, timely, timeless.
