starbet777 Why Are We So Obsessed With Blue?

“SUPPOSE I WERE to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” reads the first line of Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” her 2009 book-length lyric essay about the color blue. “Bluets” — the title refers to the delicate, diminutive wildflower but also to the abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s magnificent 1973 painting “Les Bluets” — is an elliptical exploration of heartache, the bluest of blue experiences, in the guise of a scholarly, metaphysical and emotional enchantment with one particular hue. “Each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent,” Nelson writes of her affinity for the color, which she began to see everywhere.

When I read “Bluets” a decade ago, Nelson’s book activated my own blue sensors. I began to notice not only the color — apparent on computer screens and hospital scrubs, holiday lights and pharmaceutical pills — but also just how many visual artists (Derek Jarman, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh), musicians (Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Presley) and, especially, literary writers had explored it in various forms. “Every dozen years or so,” Nelson deadpans, “someone feels compelled to write a book about it.” There’s Joan Didion’s 2011 memoir, “Blue Nights,” and William H. Gass’s 1975 “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry” (reprinted by New York Review Books in 2014) and Rebecca Solnit’s 2005 autobiographical meditation, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” which touches on multiple blue phenomena, from the Mississippi River cyanotypes made by the photographer and cartographer Henry Peter Bosse to the vivid shade of paint developed by the conceptual artist Yves Klein. “Why blue?” I wondered. Where are the many monographs on green and yellow, the treatises on more esoteric shades like violet or tangerine?

ImageJack Whitten’s painting “Mirsinaki Blue” (1974).Credit...Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum

I became a magnet for all the other blue books out there: Kate Braverman’s strange and spectacular 1990 book of short stories,jiliace login “Squandering the Blue”; Michel Pastoureau’s 2001 cultural study, “Blue: The History of a Color”; Jean-Michel Maulpoix’s lovely 2005 edition of “A Matter of Blue,” a collection of prose poems in translation; David Coggins’s charming, illustrated 2018 “Blue: A St. Barts Memoir”; and Amy Key’s achingly honest 2023 “Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone.” Over time, as my pile of blue grew, I felt like the satin bowerbird, which decorates its elaborate dwelling with scavenged blue trinkets, like gallon milk jug tops and candy wrappers. When I heard about Imani Perry’s new book, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” in which she examines the ways that Black life is “a story of encounters with deep blue” — from slavery on indigo plantations in the Deep South to the creation of blues music — I decided it was finally time to take the measure of blue.

WHY, INDEED, HAVE writers been so drawn to the color? According to surveys, blue is by far the world’s most popular hue, regardless of geography or gender — mostly owing to our favorable associations with it, or so researchers posit. Not surprisingly, people love cerulean skies and aquamarine seas, moody gemstones — sapphires, lapis lazuli, the 45.52-carat Hope Diamond — and blue inventions, like denim jeans and ballpoint pens. But as Perry notes, “blue is contrapuntal. It is itself and its opposite: sweet and bitter.” It has long been associated with melancholy — we get the blues, after all. A modern abbreviation of “blue devils,” the term dates to the 17th century and refers to depression, as well as to the hallucinations of alcoholism’s delirium tremens. In several of their respective etchings, both George and Isaac Cruikshank personified that affliction as menacing blue demons.

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But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

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