1.
The cinema is dotted with strangers sitting apart, some wearing face coverings, all still wary of the sound of coughing. The screen lights up in cobalt blue reflecting back onto their skin. Glassy blue eyes gaze up at it. Some fill with tears, others grow heavy, fall closed. Pupils swim in and out of focus. voices fill the room. With a mixture of narration and poetry, they speak of living and dying, HIV and AIDS, of government apathy, love and war. With the screen unblinking blue, blindness is described. Throughout these swathes of narrative and poetry, the voices continue to talk about love.
Apparently one night in 1993 the streets in certain parts of London were illuminated blue from peoples tv’s in their front rooms. The AIDS ward in Jarman’s hospital echoed with his words on the radio. Today this roomful of people will go home, blinking in the rosy hues of the outside world, and hug their loved ones if they can. An army of lovers shall not fail.i
2.
Every day and every night since, colourless blue ideas sleep furiously.ii
3.
You shut off the alarm. It's 4 am. You wheel your suitcase out the door and into the car. Surprised as ever by how much traffic is already on the road you feel sheepish, grateful for your daily luxury of sleep. You get to the airport two hours before the flight. Then a chain of waiting follows. The various queues and dead spaces of the airport. The cabin checks. The eight hours of fitful sleep in the upright plane seat. The surreal seriousness of American customs. And then there you are, Out on the sidewalk in New York. The following day you take the subway to MoMA. Pay an extortionate entry fee. Walk up three flights of stairs and through the channel of rooms until finally, you're there standing before it. This bright square of blue. And it's cost you £900 to be here. You stand for a long time and find that your attention keeps drifting to everything else. Your heart in your chest, how hot your hands are, sounds of the periphery, the white walls that surround everything. Coughs and the buzz of the air conditioning. Other people enter and leave the room. They keep standing in the way.
Eventually you take a picture. No zoom. No edges. Just blue.
.
You get back to the hotel that evening and turn off all the lights and load the picture up onto your laptop screen and sit there. Staring at this impossibly bright rectangle of blue. After a while, could have been seconds, could have been hours, you notice yourself watching on the surface of the screen, glassy eyes blinking blue. Dazed by jetlag you don't feel real anymore.
4.
He’s been at his desk for hours. He's tired and cold and his brain has gone to mush. He starts again. Writes a sentence. Turns the page over. Writes it again. It's no good. There's no words for it, the decadent blue of it all. It feels vulgar but he wants to write about the sex. He tries so hard, pressing his words into the page like he's pressing his body up against him.
He tries again and again day after day to describe the brightest blue, the softest kiss. He looks at the pages and wonders what's left. When you take the bodies out, what is there left to say.
He writes it anyway.
Eventually it's finished. He dresses in a black suit and arrives early. They have all done this so many times, the familiarity of the service hurts. When it's time his hands start shaking. He walks to the front of the room, unfolds the pages and reads it aloud to his friends. He manages not to cry.
Later they go to the pub. He’s focussed on not drinking too much. The room is filled with the feeling of everybody trying their best. An old friend of theirs hugs him, says she knows how hard it is and he did a really good job because it wasn't even so much what he said, it's more how he conveyed the impossibility of description. Not that it wasn't good because it was, really good. It's just she felt the loss so powerfully. “He was there” she said “in all the gaps between the words.”
5.
There's a toddler in a pushchair on the bus. Her dad’s on his phone, she's reading a book. Except she's only two or three and it's a chunky crime thriller, comically large in her little hands. But she's sitting there, staring at the pages in deep concentration, carefully turning them every now and then. She can’t be reading, unless she's some sort of genius, she barely looks old enough to talk.
Across the aisle is a teenage boy. He’s looking out the window up at the clear sky. He’s whispering to himself very quietly, his lips moving slightly. He's not staring into space, his eyes are actively fixed on the sky as if he’s reading aloud from it.
6.
They often find her asleep in front of the TV with the radio on and the screen blinking blue. They despair, we’ve told her a million times that she has to use both remotes to turn it on, they exclaim. Nonetheless they keep finding her there, sitting in her chair with the radio chatting softly while she stares at the blank cyan screen. HDMI-1 NO SOURCE. It never occurs to them as, sighing, they switch on channel 4 and dial up the volume, that she knows perfectly well how to work it. They don't consider that she's happy just as she is. If they asked her she probably wouldn't try to explain but, staring into the blank Tv’s screen, she can see clearer the flashing lights and busy crowds of the city. It’s better this way, now her sight’s slipping away. She tunes the radio and settles in front of the blue screen that lets her vision turn back in. In shades of ultramarine appear striking workers and shouting politicians, navy warzones and cobalt courtrooms. Outside her window the sun sets and the people opposite switch their lights on. The room around her grows dark and her eyes begin to droop. She falls asleep in her chair and dreams in blue of airport delays and factory closures and too many lorries jamming up the M6.
7.
It’s Sunday morning. The cat wakes you up early for her breakfast. You put coffee on and check your phone. A friend sent you the link to a glowing review about an exhibition of paintings by an artist you’ve never heard of. There are no pictures and you can't find any online but you realise the gallery isn't far. You decide to go next Wednesday and spend the time until then thinking about it occasionally, feeling excited. You can't wait to see these paintings that are described so beautifully as
“An open door to the soul An infinite possibility Becoming tangible” iii
where the artist’s deft use of blue
“Protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it”
Blue is darkness made visible.” iv
Monday goes by slowly. On Tuesday it rains viciously and the cat bites you for towelling her dry. By Wednesday the weather’s cleared and the smiley barista recognises you and seems to be happy to see you which you know is just because they have the knack for customer service but it feels nice anyway. You leave early for lunch and arrive at the gallery just as it opens for the day. It’s a small white cube style place and you have to walk through the open plan office to get to the exhibition.
It's tiny. Seven heavy handed abstract paintings are hung too close together. As you move around the space disappointment sets in. The paintings bore you. They feel stale. Too thin. You get out your phone, double check the name on the wall with the title of the review just in case somehow you got it wrong but no, this is it. You feel an itchy frustration start in your chest. You were promised
“Voices unlocked from the blue of the long dried paint” v
and you wanted to hear them but while the paintings do look dry, they don't have an original voice at all. Sketched into the surface, wet on wet, are vaguely organic lines and curls like edges of petals and rocks. They look like the kind of painting an interior designer would buy to fill a gap in a bland front room. You look closer, trying to see what the writer saw. You were so desperate to experience the painting's rhythms like a
“phrase materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which casts everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections” vi
But this impossible spectacle remains brighter in your mind. The paintings are too matte, too sullen, too pastel. Eventually, having paced for some time. You leave. Reluctant to have not experienced something great. The reviewer describes travelling home with the sense that they
“have walked behind the sky”vii
You look up at the grey clouds and feel sure that behind them is greyer still.
You go back to work. The day drags. You're in a bit of a mood and you get a million annoying emails and end up having to stay late.
That evening at home you’re too tired to cook but you make eggs and eat them on the sofa and when you're done you let the cat lick the plate.
You spend ages trying to pick something good to watch on tv but nothing is appealing so you put the news on in the background and scroll though your phone.
You text your friend:
Saw that show today. Was a bit shit ngl They reply:
:(
8.
Derek Jarman dictated his final paintings while entirely blind. When interviewed about it he said simply that he had spent his whole life painting so he knew what they would be. I wonder whether if he’d seen them he'd have been disappointed.
9.
You go to the cinema in the early evening. Mid way through the film you notice that, more often than not, there is only one figure in each shot. You watch all of these solo bodies in solo shots and you start to feel very alone in your seat like you are frozen too in a single close up. The camera pans out and everyone in the cinema is laughing. Onscreen the main character is standing alone in an apartment, arms raised in a dramatic gesture of what? Shock? Exasperation? Elation? Cut to a man walking down the street, tightly framed. He passes under a streetlamp and the light flashes in his eyes. Every few seconds the shot changes and in his place is a woman and they are both talking out, to the audience, they gaze out the screen, to the side. Suddenly the camera jumps back and they are next to each other, but every time they speak we zoom in and they are once again completely alone.
Walking home from the cinema you pass under a streetlight and think about how somewhere else, right now, someone else is doing the same. And if this was a film you could be spliced together and by the time you get to your door we could zoom out to find that you have had someone there, by your side, this whole time.
10.
“You could do more with this.” viii
Says Blue.
“The note, for me, conjured the awful—as in magnificent—sense that language, too, might burn, bleed, smoke, explode, disappear.” ix
When we listen to speech we see words burn because we see nothing else. In Blue we can look but we won’t see anything new. Instead we become focused on listening. Gazing trancelike into the screen, we translate the narrative of the soundtrack into mirages burning brightly within the blueness. Like daydreams, they are impossible to focus on or examine closely. Little visions that dissipate as quickly as they appear. This endless cycle of life and death.
Jarman asks how can we do more? And he replies via Blue, via doing less.
Endnotes.
i From the poem Sappho’s Reply by Rita Mae Brown. The phrase appeared in the variation ”An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose” In Queer Nation’s 1990 manifesto Queers Read This. Distributed as a leaflet at the pride march in NY 1990 and published anonymously by the queers, the leaflet is a call to queer people to fight for their rights,
ii “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is an inadvertently poetic sentence coined by linguist Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, to demonstrate the limits of grammar. It is an example of a sentence that, according to the rules of syntax in the English language, makes perfect grammatical sense but semantically appears to mean nothing. When read as poetry however, the sentence swells with meaning.
iii From Derek Jarman’s 1993 book Chroma (p88) also appears in the soundtrack of Blue. iv Ibid p.90
v Ibid p.87
vi ibid p.89
vii Ibid.
viii Emily LaBarge. n.d. “Ana Mendieta, Emotional Artist.” The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/08/ana-mendieta-emotional-artist/. ix Ibid.
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