Memories of Blue

A box, a string, and a pearl

Hans by Joan Mitchell, 1981

Two years ago, I was struck by a coincidence about the color blue. It was a melancholy coincidence, one that carried me to recollections of an old love, and its broken desires.

I was re-reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, trying to understand the feeling of falling in love with a color. I was staying in a house where there was a Yves Klein on the wall (probably not an original, but it does not matter). It seemed like blue was trying to tell me something. Drawn into that electric color on the wall, I kept looking at other blues by Klein on my computer screen. My fingers on the pages of Nelson’s book, I hushed myself into desires entangled with theoretical reflections, introspection and subdued excitements.

And then I heard it – the blue in my life before Klein, before Nelson. The memory of a gift. The only relics of a long drawn-out love. A little rectangular box, painted in an approximation of the Klein blue, IKB 73 (or that’s what is in my memory), with a stroke of a lighter blue paint on top. Wrapped around the box was a thin blue string, the same blue of that lighter brush of paint. The promise of a bright, bright sky. Before I learned that he had taken that string off of his wrist and made it a part of his gift to me, I had wrapped it around my own, and kept it there over the years, on and off. I loved the bright blue of it on my skin.

Time passed and two years ago, I moved away. The string is not with me, I don’t even remember if I made it disappear or kept it with the rest of the gift locked in an old wooden box. Did I cut it when I took it off, or was I more gentle (which would mean hopeful)?

I am yet to understand the feeling of falling in love with a color. I haven’t returned to Nelson again after the melancholy coincidence. A part of me is sad that the memory of that blue string, or the blue box does not stir such powerful pains and desires in me anymore. As if the sound of those desires is distorted beyond repair. All I hear is muffled notes, a melody playing backwards under water.

…

Two years later and I encounter blue in Rebecca Solnit. The blue of distance. She tells me that in the fifteenth century, artists started painting the sense of distance with the color blue. Horizons and far away mountain ranges like deep waters and sky.

“The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.”

There is a whole science behind that.

Solnit’s poetic exploration of the blue of distance seemed to fit perfectly with the residues of my past desires, wrapped with a blue string, and tucked in a blue box. But it felt as if I have been actively refusing to take the blue seriously. A thing of the past. I chose to think that too many people have obsessed about the color blue already.

But in all of these remembrances of the blue, and the problematic idea of not talking about a topic because it already saw attention, I was forgetting something. A blue before Nelson, Klein, or Solnit, before the blue box and the string.

As a child, I used to go to a school that worked with a double system: morning and afternoon students. Each year you would get assigned to one or the other. When I got the morning schedule, it would mean waking up with the sunrise in the winter and then having the whole afternoon to yourself. When I got the afternoon schedule, it meant sleeping in and leaving school in the early evening, just right for dinner time. I remember more the years when I was an afternoon student. How I loved the time right before dark. Sometimes my dad would pick me up, and we would ride in the car back home together. Headlights of the cars around us always felt premature. But dusk did seem to make things appear nebulous, a filmy darkness that softly enveloped the crisp silhouettes of buildings and naked trees. A contradiction in vision and color.

Over the past five years, I had thought about the color blue, or the books about blue, but it never occurred to me that my fascination with dusk also meant a fascination with blue. Dotted with yellow lights from windows, or with small black figures of birds on telephone wires, the blue of dusk has been the most ordinary marvel of my life.

I surely must have mentioned my fascination with the color of dusk to a couple of lovers in the past. Maybe during an evening walk where we shared some clues about ourselves, or as I attempted such an intimate sharing, thinking that this special love of mine for the dusk was something that this lover had to notice, had to take note of. Because it was important to me. Like I was diving into the bottom of the sea and bringing out a clam in which the soft white of a pearl lay. Holding it out in my hands —wet, nervous, and out of breath. But I never wrote about dusk, nor about its quotidian revelation of a sublime blue. Maybe it felt too special to write about. And now...?

Now I write about it with the faded nostalgia of an old love. How did I forget about this love? How did it never occurred to me, as I wrote about blue strings-turned-wristbands, blue pieces of paint, books on blue, that my long-lost love (the love I in fact abandoned), my dusk, was also blue? Yes, mine – as if only my eyes could soak up its vertiginous flavor, and nobody else. As if my existence was a secret between me and the fleeting blue of dusk.

I tend to consider myself attentive —careful and ready to be seduced by the things around me. I notice smells, colors, breezes. But somehow, along the way (which “way”? When did I embark on this path?) I seem to have forgotten to look up to the sky. The blue unable to find a place in my dulled perception. It doesn’t matter whether the sky is almost always gray where I live now. The blue of dusk finds a way to reveal itself. If only I had looked.

…

Under the blue of dusk, a child waits for his adult companion by a car. Arriving home from somewhere. A somewhere where every image is new; makes you think things. Maybe boredom marks the sound of the child’s step out of the car: your small feet in a lace-up shoe making a crunching sound as it lands on the gravel in the parking lot. Or maybe it’s a rainy evening and you listen to the soft splash under your sole. As you push your hips towards the door and let your legs dangle from the open door, you hear the sound of the front doors shutting —one follows the other in an unpredictable syncope (maybe your mom was in the front seat). The sound brings the anticipation of clinking cutlery on the tablecloth and the smell of onions and salça in olive oil. The steam of the pilav rising like a mighty cloud, encircling your mother’s head like a crown as you watch from the frame of the kitchen door. Maybe you bring the plates to the table.

I wonder how impossible it is to hear the rhythm of those evenings again, whether the blue of dusk changed its hue. Or if my eyes acquired a curtain of blur as years pass by. When did I stop feeling that excitement in my gut at the sight of the blue of dusk? It’s not like excitement as a feeling left me. But somewhere along that way, colors have been severed from feelings. No less saddening. Now I simply note the blue of dusk, if I ever do.

But maybe Solnit has something for the likes of me, after all.

“The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with years of travel.”

Maybe I am yet to notice another shade in the blue of dusk, a shade that has been invisible to the child with the lace-up shoes. The good thing is that dusk allows you to hope. It is a quiet doorway between day and night, refusing the weight of both and making a world of itself.

Still. Suspended. Over there.