Blue, Again
From Bluets: “Stop working against the world, I counselled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the colour green. But I did not love the green nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.” And: “I am writing this all down in blue ink.” And: “I admit I may have been lonely.” I read Maggie Nelson for the anal, not the philosophy. All the ekphratic sentimentalism between Wittgenstein and Sedgwick.
In a blue text message about the colour blue, I described the whales I saw from the kitchen window, and how the Salish sea looks on a clear day. There’s a thickness to that blue, like if you plunged your arm into the water, it would come out coated indigo. In that text, also: the sulphuric smell of hot springs and algae at the bottom of a creek. A mountain in the dark. The rotting femur that washed up on the shore one fall, a tangle of speckled skin still attached. A heron, a juniper berry, a cornflower. The india ink aging in my arm. Black, silver, grey, and purple, all shades of blue. And because opposites contain some part of each other, orange is also blue.
In art school, I failed colour theory. My mom said, Greta, how is that possible, don’t you just study blue? Well yes mom, and red, yellow, cyan, magenta, green, purple, grey, and brown. Colour theory is about math, not affect, even though its the affect of colour that resonates. Like, I don’t remember what Maggie Nelson said about anal in Bluets, but I know how it made me feel.