Anam Cara

DISTANCE AND LIGHT OFTEN CONSPIRE TO CREATE UNEXPECTED beauty. On certain summer days the dark mountains here in Conamara become suffused with delicate blue fog. In the distance the mountains lose their coarse eroded aspect and assume the dream of being shrouded in delicate muslin of blue. There is nothing else left but blue. Distance loves blue. More often than not distance will choose to express its faraway-ness in blue. Somehow it feels appropriate that distance and loss have the same colour and the colour of such sorrow is blue. This conviction is at the heart of the haunting music we call ‘The Blues’. When someone says or sings ‘I have the blues’, the tonality enfolds us. There are certain valleys in the interior worlds that seem to be totally blue. The blue suggested by the blues has a dignity and completion to it. The blues may wail but ultimately they are not narcissistic or sycophantic. There is recognition of a higher order, that sooner or later destiny may play everyone a blue card. The phrase ‘I have the blues’ seems to cohere with the tonality of such destiny and experience. It is impossible to feel the same gravitas if another colour is used: I’ve got the whites or I’ve got the yellows does not evoke the elegant darkness that blue conveys.

Red was the dominant colour of ancient civilization until the high Middle Ages. During all this time there was practically no attention to blue. Yet in the late Middle Ages blue took the place of red as the West’s favourite colour. Then for more than three centuries, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, blue became dominant. It was the colour reserved for Mary, Mother of God and for royalty. In the eighteenth century the use of indigo and the discovery of Prussian blue ended the reign of blue.

N

IGHT AND

D

AY

A

RE

I

NSIDE

B

LUE

YET BLUE IS A STRANGE COLOUR. IT HOLDS NIGHT AND DAY WITHIN it. Though the land is mostly without blue, this makes clearance to intensify the blue of sky and water. The earth could have no more perfect covering than the sky. Earth and sky complement and counterpoint each other so perfectly because each is invested with the predominantly absent colour of the other. The earth is green, the sky has no green. The sky is blue, the earth has no blue. The ocean is the great mirror of the sky. It holds its own reserve of transparent mystery under its blue surface. Goethe says that rather than coming at us or hemming us in, blue draws us after it into the distance. Blue seems to be the colour of the infinite – an endless expanse where darkness and brightness dwell in blue light.

O

UT OF THE

B

LUE

BLUE OFTEN SEEMS TO STAND AT A MYSTERIOUS ANGLE TO HUMAN sensibility and intention. When something absolutely unexpected visits our lives, we say: it came out of the blue. Of the unexpected that in all probability will never occur, or at most happen rarely, we have the phrase: once in a blue moon. These unnoticed phrases in our language confirm blue as the indecipherable source from where the unexpected sets out towards us. All the while we continue with our lives never suspecting that we have become its destination and target. Great rituals are meant to harness and bless the unexpected. Perhaps this is why blue appears as desirable for a bride. For her wedding, it is recommended that she have:

Something old,

Something new,

Something borrowed,

Something blue.

When we quarried limestone, it was surprising to find deep beneath the white-grey surface a richer colour. When we broke into the deeper layering and the caked stone fell out, we noticed that the interior of the limestone was a rich blue. This blue depth of limestone was often counterpointed by white knuckles of fossil nesting within it. The most beautiful blue stone of all is of course lapis lazuli.

The other blue of childhood was bluestone. In summer the green potato stalks were sprayed with bluestone to prevent blight. We had to fill a large barrel of water and then the powdered bluestone was suspended in the water in a canvas bag. For some days afterwards the potato stalks looked as if they had been caught out in a blue rain.

C

OLOUR

T

HRESHOLDS

The line changes the colour of the colours on either side of it.

PATRICK HERON

A colour shines in its surroundings. (Just as eyes only smile in a face.)

WITTGENSTEIN

OUR EXPLORATION OF COLOUR HAS CONCENTRATED ON CERTAIN distinctive colours but every colour tends to change in the vicinity of other colours.