“Blue Hour” - musings on the colour blue

 

“Blue Hour” - musings on the colour blue:

In this, our world, blue is not such a common color. In fact it is a rare one. Yes, the sky, should it be free of gray clouds, is blue and then it is an overwhelming sight. And yes, so are waters, rivers, oceans when the blue sky is reflected in them. But as a naturally occurring pigment it is rare. In consequence only a small portion of plants bloom in blue and only a small number of animals use blue as their distinctive coat color. They all have to revert to tricks of chemistry or physics of light (structural, reflecting, refracting, light-bending surface of butterfly wings for example) to achieve this special blue look in the eye of the beholder.

Apart from means of appearance for us humans the color blue has developed, as did other colors, a very specific transcendental meaning. 

Blue is both invigorating and soothing. It harmonizes, it is symbol of the invisible, it delights and makes us happy with its richness and manifold nuances. Blue is a metaphor for expanding our boundaries. It gives wings to our spirit and it makes the soul loose itself in reverie. It is a color closely related to the feeling of longing and sorrow, of dreams, melancholy and magic. Blue is the color of contemplation, the color of internalization. 

The color blue even enters the realm of time in the Blue Hour, Die Blaue Stunde, a very fine hour, an intake of breath, a time, a small break between day and night, an exceptional condition in the everyday banality. It is an hour of secrets and enchantments, a time where borders begin to blur.

Blue is a mirror of the mysterious dephts and infinite distances… the color of the outmost locations and of the last straight lines which are closed to life…“ (Ernst Jünger in „Das abenteuerliche Herz“, The Adventurous Heart)

“We love to contemplate blue“ said Goethe, “not because it advances to us but it draws us after it“.

Goethe was just one of so many others who fell under the spell of this very specific light-wavelength of 435 Nanometers, which our visual senses interpret as BLUE.

Countless painters have payed homage to the color blue. There is the Chagall-blue which we often see in glass stained windows, there is the blue period of Picasso, there is the German expressionistic artist group Der blaue Reiter, there is the painting of Kandinsky which gave name to that group. Kandinsky praises blue as a heavenly color. French artist Yves Klein created a blue which hence is called Yves Klein-blue. 

Derek Jarman, in his last film “Blue“, already the mark of death on him, said that blue “is always hope“.

Blue plays an important role in religion, it symbolizes heaven, the all-embracing and protecting sky. The cloak of Mother Mary, the Madonna, the queen of the skies, is blue. So is the coat of Odin, German god of storms and wars. Blue is the color of godly might, not only in Christianity but long before that for example, in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

There are gems which play an important role in the rich symbolism of blue, mainly lapiz lazuli or the blue saphire which are cherished in many cultures for their medicinal and healing powers.

I myself am a huge fan of the cerulean. Blue is the color of the sky as we imagine it when we hear or speak the word “Sky“. Blue has this quality of inducing contemplation and the more intense the color gets the more it awakens in us this longing for pureness and -maybe- even transcendency.

Blue, more than any other color, is the color of the artist, the poet, the musician, the thinker and philosopher.

So, for today here are some blue snippets and pieces I happened to find, all concerning, dealing with, telling of, this strange indefinable elusive blue feeling we get when Blue enters our vision:

Hans Arp (1886-1966), important French-German artist of the twentieth-century avant garde, a pioneer of abstract art, in an excerpt from one of his famous poems, „Singendes Blau“ (Singing Blue): 

Es klingt

es rauscht
es hallt 

es widerhallt
es sprüht
es duftet
und wird andächtig singendes Blau.

das Blau verblüht zu Licht.

        

It rings
it swooshes
it reverberates
it echoes
it sprays
it scents
and becomes devoutly singing Blue.

The Blue withers to light.

Novalis (1772-1801), German poet and philosopher, important voice of the German romantic movement, created the image of „Die Blaue Blume“, a magic, rare blue flower and thus gave an embodiment to the movement. Romanticism for Novalis was not a sentimental, nebulous, kitschy sentiment but a romanticised poetic longing for a world in which everything is a continuum of interacting connectedness and a means of understanding the world in its totality by connecting seemingly disparate opposites in the process of romanticising, the common with the extraordinary, the limited with infinity. “The world has to be romanticised, only then one re-discovers the original sense of it. Romanticising is nothing but a qualitative potentialisation.“

“… The youth lay restless on his bed and remembered the tale of the stranger. Not the riches have woken this insatiable longing in me, he said to himself, all this greed is far from my mind, but the Blue Flower I long to see. (Die Blaue Blume sehn’ ich mich zu erblicken…). It incessantly stays in my mind and I cannot think and write poems anymore“. (Novalis, „Heinrich von Ofterdingen“)

Paul Claudel (1868-1955), French poet and writer, picks up this image in his poem “The Delphinium":

… The big blue flower says: Have I not 

succeeded in bringing

from the depth of the blackest sapphire 

this fire purer than snow? …

Georg Trakl (1887-1914), Austrian expressionist poet, writes in his poem „Kindheit“ (Youth):

... Und in heiliger Bläue läuten leuchtende Schritte fort.

I wish to be able to convey this wonderful phrase to readers who are not familiar with the German language, but I cannot. There is such a grand melody in it. A rough translation would be: “And in holy Blue luminous steps chime away…“

Elke Laske-Schüler (1869-1945), German-Jewish poet, in one of her texts, about the color blue:

… one has to look for it, it blooms preferentially inside the human being. And he who has found it, still delicate and fragile, a blue amazement, an ecstatic looking up, shall care for his heavenly flower.

Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), German doctor, essayist and poet, in his poem „Die Blaue Stunde“ (The Blue Hour):

… Ich trete in die dunkelblaue Stunde -

da ist der Flur, die Kette schließt sich zu

und nun im Raum ein rot auf einem Munde

und eine Schale später Rosen - Du! …

… Du bist so weich, du gibst von etwas Kunde,

von einem Glück aus Sinken und Gefahr

in einer blauen, dunkelblauen Stunde

und wenn sie ging, weiß keiner, ob sie war.  …

… I enter in this dark blue hour -

there is the hall, the chain closes

and now in the room a red on a mouth

and a bowl of late roses - You! - …

… You are so soft, you tell of something,

of a bliss derived of sinking and of danger

in a blue, a dark blue hour

and when it is gone no one knows if it was …

Maria Müller-Gögler (1900-1987), German poet and teacher, in her poem „Blaue Stunde“:

Abends, wenn die Ufer blauen,

goldumsäumt auf silbergrauen

Fluten ferne Segel gehn,

aus den offnen Fenstern Frauen

von den schweren, sommerlauen

Lüften weich umschmeichelt spähn,

schwankend zwischen Wunsch und Grauen

in die fremde Ferne schauen,

bleibt die Zeit verwunschen stehn,

bis im Schwarzen alle grauen,

silberzarten, zauberblauen,

süßen Töne untergehn.

In the evening, when the shores turn blue,

and on silver grey floods bordered in gold 

far away sails go,

out of open windows women,

softly caressed by weighty airs of summer balm

peer out into the wide distance,

looking, wavering between wish and horror,

into the foreign distance,

then time stands enchantedly still

until inside the black all grey,

silver soft, magic blue,

sweet tunes vanish.

And as an ending line a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (*1929), German author, writer, essayist, poet, publisher and translator):

Die Visite

Als ich aufsah von meinem leeren Blatt,

stand der Engel im Zimmer.

Ein ganz gemeiner Engel,

vermutlich unterste Charge.

Sie können sich gar nicht vorstellen,

sagte er, wie entbehrlich Sie sind.

Eine einzige unter fünfzehntausend Schattierungen

der Farbe Blau, sagte er,

fällt mehr ins Gewicht der Welt

als alles, was Sie tun oder lassen,

Ich sah es an seinen hellen Augen, er hoffte

auf Widerspruch, auf ein langes Ringen.

Ich rührte mich nicht. Ich wartete,

bis er verschwunden war, schweigend.

The Visitation

When I looked up from my empty page,

there stood an angel in the room.

A most common angel,

probably undermost batch.

You can’t imagine,

said he, how dispensable you are.

A single one amongst the fifteen thousand shadings 

of the color blue, he said,

matters more in the weight of the world

as all what you could ever do or not do,

I saw it in his light eyes, he hoped

for contradiction, for a long struggle.

I did not move. I waited, silently,

until he had vanished.

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‘Waves’ - poem

 

Waves

I am glad you stayed with me. 

When I sit at the seaside and watch the waves 

it is beautiful. 

And when it rains and I have to sit on the terrace to watch the waves 

it is beautiful in a different way. 

Life is beautiful and living is an enormous thing. 

Dying is nothing. 

Living is the harder part and far more sensual.

                      

 Robert Faeth

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‘A Mind of Winter’ - poem

 

One must have a mind of winter...

... and not to think 

Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 

In the sound of a few leaves, 

Which is the sound of the land 

Full of the same wind 

That is blowing in the same bare place 

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

And, nothing himself, beholds 

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

excerpt from “The Snowman”, Wallace Stevens, (1879-1955)

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... when to be and delight to be seemed to be one ...

When to be and delight to be seemed to be one:

A quote from Leonardo da Vinci and excerpts from poems by Wallace Stevens:

Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

 Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519)

... The partaker partakes of that which changes him. 

The child that touches takes character from the thing, 

The body, it touches. 

The captain and his men 

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one. ...

 out of “It Must Change" by Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955)

... But he remembered the time when he stood alone, 

When to be and delight to be seemed to be one, 

Before the colors deepened and grew small. ...

out of “ANGLAIS MORT À FLORENCE" by Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955)

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It is never the thing but the version of the thing

 

 

Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves

It is never the thing but the version of the thing: 

The fragrance of the woman not her self, 

Her self in her manner not the solid block, 

The day in its color not perpending time, 

Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, 

The weather in words and words in sounds of sound. 

These devastations are the divertissements 

Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog, 

Whines in its hole for puppies to come see, 

Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust, 

Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets, 

Flies like a bat expanding as it flies, 

Until its wings bear off night’s middle witch; 

And yet remains the same, the beast of light, 

Groaning in half-exploited gutturals 

The need of its element, the final need 

Of final access to its element— 

Of access like the page of a wiggy book, 

Touched suddenly by the universal flare 

For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat 

The eloquences of light’s faculties.          

                                                                                    

 Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

Only as a child we live through moments of true revelation, true originality, true first times. This is the time when we discover the world and for a while everything we experience is new, astounding, surprising, exciting and truly baffling.

Then, as time moves on and we get older and more used to this strange world we have been thrown into, things start to repeat themselves. We discover patterns, we create categories and pigeon-holes, we sample, classify and structure and weave out of this complexity a cloth of understanding in order to make this world comprehendible and endurable. Out of new, possibly frightening things we create less frightening, easily recognizable and manageable patterns.

This is the time when the world for most begins to loose its magic. Only a few preserve a childish sense of wonder. But if you do this, then the world never stops to surprise and everything, a flower, a landscape, an object, is not just something which falls under the category flower, landscape or object but is an individual manifestation out of the great variety of flowers, landscapes and objects.

The world is a conglomeration, a cumulation of varieties. There might not be such a difference between two flowers on a meadow but if you look closer there is all the difference. And most of times the difference lies within yourself. It is you who makes one flower differ from the other because you allow it to differ, you allow it to become an individual and not a category.

“It is never the thing but the version of the thing.“

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‘Transition’ - poem

Transition

I am in transition.

I am aside. 

I am not at the heart of things anymore.

I am not in life.

In summer I shall feel again.

In summer I shall feel what is good.

In summer I shall feel what is beautiful.

In summer I shall feel.

Over time everything is slowing down, 

even oblivion.

Robert Faeth

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