2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

3. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

4. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say, the idea that a color could become personal. That it could be speaking to you, meant for you, God come to lick the cunt of your eyes. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.

5. But first let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stephane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: “These last few months have been terrifying. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has suffered throughout that long agony, is indescribable.” During this agony, Mallarmé fought a battle he describes as taking place on God’s “boney wing.” “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth,” he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Shortly thereafter, Mallarmé began replacing the word “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of any religious connotations. “Fortunately,” Mallarmé wrote Cazalis, “I am quite dead now.”

6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. Not to own them, but to have come upon them. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt the sting of desire. But desire to do what? Liberate it? Buy it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisors generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it, expressing devotion by making her figure unthinkably expensive. But still you wouldn’t be absorbing, or accessing, the blue of it. Not exactly.

8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.

9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

10. That is to say: I don’t care if it’s colorless.

11. And please don’t talk to me about “things as they are” being changed upon any “blue guitar.” What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.

12. At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men across the table asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. Sometimes we don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.

13. Do not think, however, that this is a scrapbook in which blue is the star and I its delirious fan. For it is a mistake to think of blue as separate from us. It is the bulge of the carotid against the bracket of your skin. It is the matrix of veins that enlaces your heart.

14. I have enjoyed telling people that I am writing a book about blue without actually doing it. Mostly what happens in such cases is that people give you stories or leads or gifts, and then you can play with these things instead of with words. Over the past decade I have been given blue inks, paintings, postcards, dyes, bracelets, rocks, precious stones, watercolors, pigments, paperweights, goblets, and candies. I have been introduced to a man who had one of his front teeth replaced with lapis lazuli, solely because he loved the stone, and to another who worships blue so devoutly that he refuses to eat blue food and grows only blue and white flowers in his garden, which surrounds the blue ex-cathedral in which he lives. I have met a man who is the primary grower of organic indigo in the world, and another who sings Joni Mitchell’s Blue in heartbreaking drag, and another with the face of a derelict whose eyes literally leaked blue, and I called this one the prince of blue, which was, in fact, his name.

15. I think of these people as my blue correspondents, whose job it is to send me blue reports from the field.

16. —But you talk of all this jauntily, when really it is more like you have been mortally ill, and these correspondents send pieces of blue news as if last-ditch hopes for a cure.

17. But what goes on in you when you talk about color as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.

18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea, a very blue hotel, to fuck. Afterwards, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

19. Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said unto me: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.

20. Different dream, same period: Out at a house by the shore, a serious landscape. There was a dance underway, in a mahogany ballroom, where we were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love. Afterwards it was time for rough magic: to cast the spell I had to place each blue object (two marbles, a miniature feather, a shard of azure glass, a string of lapis) into my mouth, then hold them there while they discharged an unbearable milk. When I looked up you were escaping on a skiff, suddenly wanted. I spit out the objects in a snaky blue paste on my plate and offered to help the police boat look for you, but they said the currents were too unusual. So I stayed behind, and became known as the lady who waits, the sad sack of town with hair that smells like an animal.

21. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking in no way interferes with the actual use of language. For it cannot give any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

22. Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of the can. I remember that day very clearly, the day the blue changed. I had received a phone call; a friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had no more face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as “a pebble in water.” I walked around Brooklyn and found the blue had become carnivorous. The faded periwinkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner suddenly bloomed with a new haunting. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed with fascination that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, the white winter light spangled the cloudy blue of the water and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend’s hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating.

23. Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as “a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note.” Goethe himself describes the period as one in which “a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question.”

Goethe is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment. Think of filmmaker Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma as he was going blind and dying of AIDS, a death he also forecasted on film as disappearing into a “blue screen.” Or of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Colour during the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of stomach cancer. He knew he was dying; he could have chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the sun. He chose to write about color. About color and pain. Much of this writing is urgent, opaque, and uncharacteristically boring. “That which I am writing about so tediously, may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit,” he wrote.

24. “In view of the fact that Goethe’s explanation of color makes no physical sense at all, one might wonder why it is considered appropriate to reissue this English translation,” one critic recently noted. Beethoven felt differently. “Can you lend me the Theory of Colours for a few weeks?” he wrote to a friend in 1820. “It is an important work. His last things are insipid.” Wittgenstein, too, was sympathetic: “This much I understand: that a physical theory (such as Newton’s) cannot solve the problems that motivated Goethe, even if he himself did not solve them either.”

So what were Goethe’s problems?

25. Goethe was interested in the case of “a lady, who, after a fall by which an eye was bruised, saw all objects, but especially white objects, glittering in colours, even to an intolerable degree.” This story is but one of many Goethe relates of people whose vision has been injured or altered and who seemingly never heal, even when the cause of the injury is psychological or emotional in nature. “This indicates extreme weakness of the organ, its inability to recover itself,” he observes.

26. After my friend’s accident, I began to think of this lady of the bruised eye and these glittering white objects with more frequency. Could such a phenomenon be happening to me, with blue, by proxy? I’ve heard that a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression, though I do not have any idea how or why such a thing is neurologically possible. So what would it be a symptom of, to start seeing colors—or, more oddly still, just one color—more acutely? Mania? Monomania? Hypomania? Shock? Desperation? Love? Grief?

27. But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

28. It was around this time that I first had the thought: we fuck well because he is a passive top and I am an active bottom. I never said this out loud, but I thought it often. I had no idea how true it would prove, nor how painful, outside of the fucking.

29. If a color cannot cure, can it at least incite hope? The blue collage you sent me so long ago from Africa, for example, made me hopeful. But not, to be honest, because of its blues. Because it came from so very far away, and because it came from you. Plus, it rattled.

30. If a color could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair? I can think of many occasions on which a blue has made me feel suddenly hopeful (turning one’s car around a sharp curve on a precipice and abruptly finding ocean; flipping on the light in a stranger’s bathroom you presumed was white but which was, in fact, robin-egg blue; coming across a collection of dark blue bottle tops pressed into cement on the Williamsburg Bridge, or a shining mountain of broken blue glass outside a glass factory in Mexico), but for the moment, I can’t think of any times that blue has caused me to despair.

31. Consider the case of Mr. Sidney Bradford, however, whose corneal opacities were grafted away at the age of fifty-two. After his vision was restored, he became unexpectedly disconsolate. “He found the world drab, and was upset by flaking paint and other blemishes; he liked bright colours, but became depressed when they faded.” Not long after he gained vision and saw the world in full color, he “died in unhappiness.” There would seem to be a lesson here, but I am not prepared to describe it.

32. When I say “hope,” I don’t mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open. “What are all those/ fuzzy-looking things out there?/ Trees? Well, I’m tired/ of looking at them”: the last words of William Carlos Williams’s English grandmother.

33. At times I have wondered whether being in love with blue is one of the only things keeping me alive. This thought leads to the unsettling admission that not all blues thrill me. I am not overly interested in the matte stone of turquoise, for example, and a tepid, faded indigo usually leaves me cold. Sometimes I worry that if I am not moved by a blue thing, I may be completely despaired, or dead. At times I fake my enthusiasm. At others, I fear I am incapable of communicating the depth of it.

34. Acyanoblepsia: non-perception of blue. A tier of hell, to be sure—albeit one that could be potentially corrected by Viagra, one of whose side effects is to see the world tinged with blue. The expert on guppie menopause, whose office is across from mine at the Institute, tells me this. He says it has something to do with a protein in the penis that bears a similarity to a protein in the retina, but beyond that I cannot follow.

35. Does the world look bluer from blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement).

36. Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. “It may be said to disturb rather than enliven.” Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

37. Are you sure—one would like to ask—that it cannot love you back?

38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?)

39. Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it’s orange, that we’re normal.

40. When I talk about color and hope, or color and despair, I am not talking about the red of a stoplight, the pale blue line on the white felt oval of a pregnancy test, the wrong sail strung from a ship’s mast, or the theological symbolism of a saint’s robes. I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

41. On the eve of the millennium, driving through the Valley of the Moon. On the radio a DJ was going through the best albums of the century, and somewhere, I think around number thirty, was Joni Mitchell’s Blue. The DJ played “River,” and said that its greatness lay in the fact that no woman had ever said it so clearly and unapologetically before: I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad. Progress, I thought. Then came the song’s next line: Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had.

42. Sitting in my office before teaching a class on prosody, trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? How can it be? Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue. I look down at my lecture notes: Example: Heartbreak is a spondee. Then lay my head down on the desk and start to weep. —Why doesn’t this help?

43. Before a faculty meeting, talking again with the expert on guppie menopause. I make him come into my office so I can ask him some questions about color. What do biologists make of the question, Does color exist? for example. Duh, he says. A male guppie looking for a mate doesn’t worry about whether color exists, he says. A male guppie only cares about being orange, in order to attract one. But can it really be said that the guppie cares about being orange? I ask. No, he admits. It cannot rightly be said that the guppie cares about being orange. The male guppie simply is orange. Why orange? I ask. He shrugs. In the face of some questions, he says, biologists can only vacate the field.

44. This particular conversation with the expert on guppie menopause takes place on a day when, later that afternoon, my therapist will say to me, If he hadn’t lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. In short she is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact voluntarily blind to the man he actually was, or is—a man who was, or is, a liar and a hustler, and probably always will be.

This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can’t answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced to admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave something like an ugly, pigment-less fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter.

Disavowal, says the silence.

Is there a good kind of hustler? I wonder on my way home, steering my car through the forest of gargantuan billboards, ghostly palm trees, and light-flattened boulevards that have become my life.