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- But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.
- A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.
reading this i cant help but hear the leonard cohen song
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Who, nowadays, watches the light stream through the walls of her “dark chamber” with the company of a phantasmagoric assistant, or smashes at her eyes to reproduce lost color sensations, or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.
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Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.
- Holed up in the north country for the month of May, a May which saw but four days of sunshine. The rest of the month was solid gray, drizzling or pouring rain, rendering everything green. Rushing and verdant. In short, a nightmare. Each day I took long walks in my yellow poncho, looking for blue, for any blue thing. I found only tarps (always tarps!) pinned over stacks of firewood, a few blue recycling containers kicked over in the streets, a grayish blue mailbox here and there. I came back to my dark chamber each night empty-eyed, empty-handed, as if I had been panning fruitlessly for gold all day in a cold river. Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the color 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.
ahhhh