Intimacy

Blue in Green Intimacy

41 BLUE IN GREEN INTIMACY 1. In your capacity as spirit in an afterlife, you’d have no limbs. Here spirit is a remission word, so she can fasten a pot of his pink snapdragons to it. The body contains spirit, moves it along. Blue-gray branches of windlight break apart and come together all along the river, quick glimpse incarnations of at loose spirit ends. Thick green trees on the nearby promontory are echoed in the river by muddy surface trees, displacing some of the blue-gray water stretches. She sees the trees as form and not detail, afternoon preface to industrial buildings on the opposite shore becoming silhouettes at dusk, a little later. The buildings will be backlighted by changing colors in the sky and foregrounded by the buildings’ white and yellow shore lights, every night a stranger. She hopes channeling expressions of less than holy river values won’t be enough to disqualify quiet attempts at spirit making. A particular spirit may be of use to one person and no use to another person, for example, Miles on horn, river glow. Likewise my use of birds on the deck dispersing empty little seedhomes. Her body needs spirit to need body and spirit, eke out motion, risk, birds of a feather, blue-green river flow. Birds of a feather not always good at social-mirroring, turntaking. 42 Depending on circumstance, an individual spirit may be larger or smaller than the containing body, as in measure to measure your scale of response to lupus, Huntington’s. Biological limits on one measure sizing up another measure are conditioned by random variables, so her body is alternately an enabling and disabling mechanism. 2. A light-adapted eye generally has its maximum sensitivity in the green region of the optical spectrum. Did Miles know this; also that in some languages green and blue are not distinguishable. Even so, an artist’s primary colors are not the same as a poet’s complementary colors defined by light mixtures. The man and the woman encapsulate differences for depicting spirit in a containing body: water, wind, color temperature. Sometimes he is blue light, sometimes he is green pigment, at other times, he switches between media. My affect is shallow, because of medication for calming purposes, so in applying man body, woman body to a spirit canvas, “I give you what I can,” under-emotionally. Ordinarily his colors are cool colors in his relations with her but not cool in relation to his context with others’ colors, flip-flopping associational temperatures, the way the hottest stars radiate blue light while red radiates from the coolest and you won’t see this. Yet warm blue colors in him come with her once each week regularly. She lets him mistake warmth as sufficient for “being with,” naming by negation the way she had long ago mistaken him. 43 Black, when added to a color, decreases mismatch on the man and the woman’s compatibility scale. It lets him take on hues captivating to a transitory female: blue, green, black, brushed by riverhome. 3. Today I valued earwigs, dust mites, cultures with spirits who inhabited everything. Miles did know this: modality. Fortunately, the brain is not able to discriminate modalities with input from only one modal register. Alone, “with” has no substance, but when joined by an object inflects a range of associative registers, as when a beloved comes to you with heart in mouth, with no holds barred, with the sun on. She perceives spirit through this syntactical effect but names it eccentrically. Spirit: membrane potential, thud, body tamer, inner radio. Whether visible light is absorbed or reflected by nearby objects you see one another with those objects, as if handing spirit through instrument. She sees him through tugs piloting the ships dropping off mounds of coal, rock salt. The size of one’s spirit shifts in the way windlight shifts perceptibly or imperceptibly, as with warming actions on mood, lice, chlorophyll, scattering a material person through scales of augmentation, diminishment. Usually I am more blue than green because of uncertainty for when to start, when to stop with compassion, generosity toward who is this stranger. 44 Green:To stand your ground with; let down your guard with. Blue: See another through disease, failure, petty behaviors, within a companionship. Compare spirit to blue or green light you can’t hold but can be held with. Then...