Light Traces

5. Blues

5 Blues 41 Standing atop the high promontory that juts out into the water, it is almost as if one were at sea completely out of sight of land. There at the edge of the precipice, little or nothing can be seen of the rocky earth; under the intense light of the cloudless day, virtually all that is visible is the sky and the sea. The Aegean stretches beyond to the horizon, which bounds the visible while remaining itself invisible; or rather, it appears only as the line that could be–but is not–drawn where the blue of the sea meets the lighter blue of the sky. It is a radiant world, prodigious in its transparency and simplicity, offering a consummate vision of the joining of air, sky, and sea. The vision is entirely cast in blue, with only minimal articulation. Nothing is to be seen that is not blue; nothing is to be seen but blue. While offering a vision of the concurrent elements, the vision is of blue as such, of blueness itself. Sounion Attica May 42 LIGHT TR ACES Yet it will be said that there can be no vision of sheer blue, of blue as such, that blueness itself can never be manifest to our visual sense. It will be said that what can be seen is never simply blue and nothing else, that in our experience we never catch sight of a blue that is nothing other than blue, of a blue that is only blue, only itself. The belief–an age-old belief–is that such self-same, self-enfolded beings can only be said, not seen. When we speak of blueness itself or even when we merely think of it without actually voicing the words that designate it, it is then somehow present to us, as if evoked by our words or thoughts. And yet, its presence is quite unlike that of what we see around us, of the bluebird we see winging its way through the air to light on a limb of a nearby tree and sing its heart out. Blueness itself displays neither movement nor sonority. Its presence–if it can indeed be present in a sense that does not violate the sense of the word–is of an entirely different kind, an invisible presence that is, at once, both distant, in its invisibility, and near, in its responsiveness to our evocation of it in speech or thought. Nothing is more enigmatic: as color it is a paragon of visibility, and yet it is wholly invisible. Could this invisible blueness ever be evoked without any reference to the blue that we actually see around us? If it is wholly invisible, how could there ever arise any assurance that it pertains to the radiant blue that we behold around us? In some manner or other, this strange, invisible presence must be deflected back toward the visibility that would govern its very bearing; it must somehow be bent back in the direction of the blue of sea, of sky, of things, the very sense of which it is alleged to express. 43 BLUES Is it not, then, there amidst the visible that blue is preeminently to be found? Is it not indeed starting from the visible that we can come to speak of what is blue and thus to evoke this strange invisible double of what is preeminently visible, this unseen spectre of the very tissue of visibility? Though the word may regulate the range of what is called blue, what gives sense (in every sense) to the word is preeminently the vision of the blue that surrounds us. Yet because the word must be given its sense, what it designates is set apart from what one would like to call–but cannot simply call–blueness itself. Because it receives its sense rather than bearing it in itself, what it signifies must be differentiated from the blue that shines within a visible spectacle. The blue that is said never simply coincides with the blue that is seen. Blue is to be seen, perhaps most conspicuously, among things. In nature there are birds and flowers that are blue and through human fabrication a host of other things. If in observing such things we focus on the mere fact that they are blue, then we will implicitly have broached a difference between the thing itself and the blue that belongs to it. Our language has long since been shaped to accommodate and remark...