I Hung A Blue Towel On A Rack In The Bathroom

I hung a blue towel on a rack in the bathroom. Such a dark blue I thought it was going to hop off the towel and beat up the wall. A dark, obsessive blue. I’m reminded of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain Cézanne so obsessively painted, which is located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of southern France, between Aix-en-Provence and Pourrières, and is a famous deposit of dinosaur eggs, chiefly titanosaurs. The mountain was formed through a geological process called "folding" where tectonic plates collided, causing the earth's crust to buckle and uplift, creating the mountain's distinctive ridge structure; this occurred over millions of years, with the rock primarily composed of limestone and dolomite from the Cretaceous period. Cézanne died of pneumonia which he got from painting Mont Sainte-Victoire in the rain. He passed out in the field and was taken home by the driver of a laundry cart. He died a few days later. Still painting. Painting obsessively. A dark, obsessive blue. He said blue gives other colors their vibrations, and creates a sense of space. According to Rilke, Cézanne used at least sixteen shades of blue, a barely blue, a waxy blue, a listening blue, a blue dove-gray, a wet dark blue, a juicy blue, a light cloudy blue, a thunderstorm blue, a bourgeois cotton blue, a densely quilted blue, an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue, a self-contained blue and a completely supportless blue. 

Blue is a newcomer. You won’t see blue among the earthy hues of Ice Age art. Blue is hard to produce. By the time blue appeared on the scene, people didn’t know what to do with it. It symbolized nothing, not even the beyond, which appears so natural to a modern eye. It’s first rapport was with textiles. Linen. Wool. Silk. Cotton. Everybody loved red. Blue was foreign. A muted indigo blue dye was first produced from woad, a flowering plant in the mustard family. Egyptians made blue by heating a mixture of limestone, sand, copper, and alkali to a high temperature. They used blue in tomb paintings, on wood, papyrus, and canvas, and to make faience beads, inlays, and pots. Blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed, wrote William Gass in Being Blue. It is the dark inside of sentences. The cardigan I got for Xmas is a dark navy blue, like the towel in the bathroom. I remember a night in Kansas when I was about 3 years old being struck by a blue in a neon sign. I can’t remember what it said. I couldn’t read. But it was a near a railroad, and made me feel blue.

Do colors truly exist? Yes. Colors are wavelengths that occur in our eyes and nerves. But what I think of blue and you think of blue might not be the same hue. This is where qualia come in. And Vermeer and veneer and cafeteria booths upholstered in burgundy vinyl. Without qualia, nobody would think of lighting a candle and playing the Beatles. Nobody would build a city like Paris, or host the Olympic Games there, unless they’re a complete idiot. I find qualia galore in tired old bistros like the ones in Lisbon where Ferdinand Pessoa hung out. Every city has one. Especially Seattle in the heyday of its grunge culture. The techies had no use for them and they disappeared. I look for qualia among the crows. And among the trees and what the bark can tell me as it talks to my hands. The smell of dirt can vary from field to field, as does the taste of coffee, and cognac, and Kandinsky. The creak of floorboards in used bookstores and the smell of thought. 

Think of blue long enough and it does begin to feel like consciousness. And space. Space and consciousness are both blue and it’s hard to separate the two, like the horizon line I stared at for hours from a vantage point in Kauai far out on the Pacific, where it was apparent the line was imaginary, and indistinct from the blue of the sky. And as the day began to blend with night the blue darkened into a spectral hue of transformation, definitions of day turning eternal and black.

The moon was full and intense in a halo of cloud haze. The crashing waves were phosphorous.

Would you like anything? A glass of water? You’ve come this far. We see the sparkle of consciousness stream from the balcony and join the moon in a penumbral coolness. Shakespeare walks toward us, holding a skull full of paint.

 

The Pillars of Creation, a small part of the Eagle Nebula made of cold hydrogen gas and dust, are purple, blue, and teal, along with greens and reds.

Miranda, Uranus’s closest and seventh moon, is a carnival of disparate features. It looks cobbled together. It’s a Frankenstein of collision and deformation. The monster was an alien being of miscellaneous parts. The life within that animated its tortured existence was a nucleus of blastoderms. Embryonic tissue gone haywire. Imagine a life pulled in different directions. Conflicts of instinct and conformity. Conflicts of impulse and inhibition. So that behavior is an uncoordinated mess. Villagers in pursuit with torches and pitchforks. All of it reaching a crescendo of flames as a castle burns down. What could be plainer? Civilization sucks. Freud identified three measures for adapting to the difficulties of life in a social environment: powerful deflections, such as shifting blame on other people; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make people insensible to it. This is the misery Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote Caliban into existence. Who threatened Miranda with his bestial desires. And wreaked havoc with his grumbling. This is the spirit that drives our speech. Especially when its encountering something new. Like a blind violinist. And a goblet of wine.

How is the Milky Way a way? In what way is the Milky Way a way? Because the band of light stretching across the night sky resembles the appearance of spilled milk, which is reflected in the name’s origin from the Latin “via lactea,” meaning “milky way.” Where there’s a will there’s a way, because will is milky and when it’s spilled on the table destiny gets wet and the children scream and the cat runs to another room. The first planet Galileo saw was Venus. Galileo saw that Venus exhibits phases like the moon, which could only be explained by milk. Which reminds me of barns. And the ancient practice of milking a cow. And The Barn in Scotts Valley, California, in the summer of 1966, the Merry Prankster bus parked outside, Ken Kesey and Neil Cassady talking, in jeans and T-shirts, at the entryway, people upstairs dancing to a rock band, everyone flickering in blue light like an old movie. That was a way but it wasn’t a milky way. It was more like discovering Venus, in the mythological sense, riding in on a half shell, like Botticelli painted her, a naked beauty with a graceful modesty and a disarming artlessness.