Ways of Seeing: Blue
Seeing through Maggie Nelson's Bluets.
Dear Friends,
As you may know I’ve been hungry for seeing these days, hungry especially for color—wild, deeply saturated, mood-altering color. The urgency has sent me on art-pilgrimages, into galleries and museums and to the riotous greens of a botanical garden. And it has me looking up—as I always do when I’m lost—at the sky. Celeste blue. Blue of infinite depth. Ultra-blue.
This week I’m reposting a Ways of Seeing from 2023. For most who are receiving this, it will be new. For others, perhaps a chance to look up again at the sky which is always overhead. May it offer you some adventures with the color blue.
— Sal
Reading Blue
I love the way that books infuse your daily life with their moods and modes. In the last few days I’ve been re-read Maggie Nelson’s beautiful short book of propositions: Bluets. One of the effects of the book is to turn up the volume on all the blues around me. My life has been blue-tinted.
In Bluets, Nelson tells us that Joseph Cornell invented a word for his blue-toned works, “blueaille,” after grisaille technique where everything is rendered in grays. She quotes the poet John Ashbery saying that poetry “gives a kind of blue rinse to language.”
Nelson names the color blue a drug, a pharmakon, a substance that can act as either poison or cure. If you take in this color, what is its effect? I hope you’ll try some of these experiments and share the results.
Seeing Blue
Maggie Nelson begins Bluets this way:
1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.
2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.
3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.
Exercise: Blue
There are innumerable ways you can take the color blue as your oracle and quest. Here are a few suggestions.
As with all of these “Ways of Seeing,” the initiating impulse is to expand our possibilities for engaging with works of art and deepening attention. These exercises are perfect for time spent in museums, galleries, and studios. You can also bring them into the rest of your life and experiment with streets, libraries, parties, landscapes. Try them as writing or art-making prompts.
Interpret these instructions freely and intuitively
Fall in love with blue. See it everywhere and nowhere. Let the longing for blue fill your life. Spend your days writing love poems.
Let the world be blue-tinted, let everything you see be rinsed in blue.
Make a pilgrimage to something blue. Let the travel be long and difficult. Let yourself be changed by the journey.
When you encounter a work of art, seek out every blue. Look for the absent blues and fill them with your desire.
Take notes, make drawings and diagrams. In them, make this blue your own.
Share your results and reflections in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.
Where are you seeing blue?
Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is available from Wave Books and other booksellers.
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
have you read sheila heti's pure color? another book that made me think a lot about color, green in particular. it's a bit looser than your standard novel but i really liked it.
Loved “Bluets”. It’s fresh and subversive and made me see the world differently. It’s a gray day here so currently the only blue I see is the canvas on my husband’s boat.