On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass

Author:William H. Gass
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Half-breeds belong to the blue squadron. Sometimes they are called 'blue skins,' as Protestants once were. Blue Boy is the popular title of a painting by Gainsborough, the name of a prize hog in State Fair, and the abscess from a venereal disease. Under the vilifying gaze of fluorescent light, the heads of pimples turn blue, as do the rings around the eyes, and the lips grow cold. Although the form, 'blueness,' signifies the quality of being blue in any sense, it usually refers only to indecency: les horreurs, les betises, les gueulies. Will it profit us to wonder why? Jackson Pollock painted Blue Poles, the name of any magnet's southern dart.

Earlier he'd covered a canvas he labeled The Blue Unconscious.

Here the color is sparingly used. A group of Germans got itself called the Blaue Reiter, and Piero della Francesca did indeed make the Virgin's mantle blue in his Annunciation . . . in his Nativity, too. Nor did the Lorenzettis neglect her, Giotto neither, though he colored his pit-of-hell devils blue as a soul dismantled. Con-tending that art is a product of pain, Picasso passed through such a period, painting The Blue Room, Woman in Blue, and many others: stem-like bodies on which long faces gather like solidifying smoke.

'For our blues,' Hoogstraten says, 'we have English, German, and Haarlem ashes, smalts, blue lakes, indigo, and the invaluable ultramarine.' It is of course the sky. It is the sky's pale deep endlessness, sometimes so intense at noon the brightness flakes like a fresco. Then at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us, not like dew but settling dust or poisonous exhaust from all the life burned up while we were busy being other than ourselves. For our blues we have the azures and ceruleans, lapis lazulis, the light and dusty, the powder blues, the deeps: royal, sapphire, navy, and marine; there are the pavonian or peacock blues, the reddish blues: damson, madder and cadet, hyacinth, periwinkle, wine, wisteria and mulberry; there are the sloe blues, a bit purpled or violescent, and then the green blues, too: robin's egg and eggshell blue, beryl, cobalt, glaucous blue, jouvence, turquoise, aquamarine. A nice light blue can be prepared f r o m silver, and when burned, Prussian blue furnishes a very fine and durable brown. For our blues we have those named for nations, cities, regions: French blue, which is an artificial ultramarine, Italian, Prussian, Swiss and Brunswick blues, Chinese blue, a pigment which has a peculiar reddish-bronze cast when in lump-form and dry, in contrast to China blue which is a simple soluble dye; we have Indian blue, an indigo, Hungarian, a cobalt, the blues of Parma and Saxony, Paris, Berlin, and Dresden, those of Bremen and Antwerp, the ancient blues of Armenia and Alexandria, the latter made of copper and lime and sometimes called Egyptian, the blue of the Nile, the blue of the blue sand potters use. Are there so many states of mind and

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