Via Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Maya Jabbari
Editor-In-Chief

Over the summer, I, with excitement, sank my teeth into Maggie Nelson’s insightful autobiographical novel, Bluets. All about blue, this book of fragmented writing delves into Nelson’s devotion to the colour and its hues, not just because of what it means to her, but what it means to us.

”Blue, in our world, is a whole mosaic of meaning.”

To be frank, the colour is challenging, as we’ve made it paradoxical. In the realm of psychology, blue is often associated with trust and serenity. But at the same time, as the saying “having the blues” goes, blue also clearly has major ties to melancholia and loneliness. This is not new news.

Even historically, blue has carried its own symbolic weight. In the Mediterranean and Jewish traditions, blue can protect against the evil eye. In Christian paintings, a shade of ultramarine called Marian blue appears in the clothes of the Virgin Mary. Blue didn’t just signal protection and holiness, but sacrifice. Even artists at times saved it for the parts of a painting they valued most, hoping the colour’s depth would speak where words could not. Picasso, centuries later, painted almost exclusively in blue during his Blue Period, turning to the colour to express the heaviness and poverty that he underwent in his early life.

Artists have continued to chase the high that garners the emotional reach of blue. Famously, Yves Klein invented his own pigment called “International Klein Blue” and, as the MoMA puts it, “Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.” Blue holds contradiction better than almost any other colour. That might be why we reach for it so often when words fail.

Some of the most impactful works of music lean into this. Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971), for example, is, to me, not just an album. It has left a true mark on not only my life, but the lives of so many. It’s as if it exists in its own sphere, its own world, and sometimes people visit the planet of Blue to get a feel of real vulnerability. Mitchell recorded the album alone on the road in Europe just after a break-up. You can feel it in her songs: they are stripped of any protective layer, and are delivered to us with pure authenticity. People return to the album in moments of heartbreak or transition, drawn to the emotional clarity Mitchell offers. In naming her album Blue, she wasn’t just naming the sadness we attach to the colour, but rather, she was naming the openness and the courage to feel without armour.

On the other hand, blue also permeates our cultural imagination through visual media. Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue comes to mind. The film uses motifs drenched in blue, which is seen in beads, the sky, and garments that the main character comes across while attempting to overcome grief without being consumed by it.

Specifically, as of late, blue has also become a way of tracing cultural and political memory. In her book Black in Blues: How a Colour Tells the Story of My People, Imani Perry explores how blue treads through Black history from indigo plantations to the “blue notes” that shaped jazz and blues music. She writes about blue not as an abstract idea but as a lived experience. In Perry’s telling, blue carries the voices of people who endured and reinvented themselves through music, ritual, and storytelling.  

What keeps coming back to me, after reading Nelson and while writing this piece, is, truly, how blue manages to be both intimate and enormous. What a confusing and beautiful thing. We encounter it everywhere; when we look up (the skies), when we look down (the waters). It surrounds us constantly, and yet it still manages to feel personal and like it only invades us individually and no one else. 

”In a society that so often demands certainty, blue allows ambiguity.”

It’s as if it is an emotional vocabulary of its own, but not because it is visually pleasing or psychologically soothing. Sure, I mean, that can be a reason in and of itself, but because it also gives us a way to name experiences that are otherwise difficult to hold. Blue is how we learn to live with things we can’t fully understand, but can’t let go of either. This is precisely why it matters so much. This is why I love blue.