1. Regular in that I was recognized and chatted with workers at. Also I'm probably forgetting many places.
Abstract thoughts in a blue room; ...
...
The blue room was round and warm and smooth.
...
Thoughts without a name in a blue room: ...
...
An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented. I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room, I amâ
Her lids had been half-closed on her eyeballs. She opened them and came up suddenly against a restraining web. It knocked her breath out, and she fell back, turning about to look at the room.
No.
She didn't "look at the room."
She "something at the something." The first something was a tiny vocable that implied an immediate, but passive, perception that could be aural or olfactory as well as visual. The second something was three equally tiny phonemes that blended at different musical pitches: one an indicator that fixed the size of the chamber at roughly twenty-five feet long and cubical, the second identifying the color and probable substance of the wallsâsome blue metalâwhile the third was at once a place holder for particles that should denote the room's function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only the one symbol for as long as she needed. All four sounds took less time on her tongue and in her mind than the one clumsy diphthong in 'room'.
In âUntitledâ (1965), Martin captures the longing of the blue of distance, the blue that scatters across the expanse of space.
âŠ
But that blueâthat blue isnât stored in those distant locations. And it isnât stored in our eyes, either; we canât carry it around with us, even if we buy thousands of tubes of cerulean. Itâs in the distance between us and the place we observe, and that gives it its particular poignancy, because itâs a product of circumstance, never of active creation.
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. ...but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
âŠ
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
blue (bl50) n. 1. a. Any of a group of colors whose hue is that of a sky on a clear day. b. Anything of this color. 2. the blue. a. The sky.-adj. blu-er, blu-est. 1. Of the color blue. 2. Having a gray or purplish color, as from cold or bruise. 3. Informal. Gloomy; depressed. 4. Puritanical; strict. 5. Indecent; risqué: a blue joke. -- blued, bluing. 1. To make blue. 2. To use bluing on. -- idioms. once in a blue moon. Rarely. out of the blue. At a completely unexpected time.
(The American Heritage Dictionary, 2d college ed.)
âBlue is the specific color of orgone energy within and without the organism. Classical physics tries to explain the blueness of the sky by the scattering of the blue and of the spectral color series in the gaseous atmosphere. However, it is a fact that blue is the color seen in all functions which are related to the cosmic or atmospheric or organismic orgone energy:
Protoplasm of any kind, in every cell or bacterium is blue. It is generally mistaken as ârefractionâ of light which is wrong, since the same cell under the same conditions of light loses its blueness when it dies.
Thunder clouds are deeply blue, due to high orgone charges contained in the suspended masses of water.
A completely darkened room, if lined with iron sheet metal (the so-called âOrgone Roomâ), is not black, i.e., free of any light, but bluish or bluish-gray. Orgone energy luminates spontaneously; it is âluminescent.â
Water in deep lakes and in the ocean is blue.
The color of luminating, decaying wood is blue; so are the luminating tail ends of glowworms, St. Elmoâs fire, and the aurora borealis.
The lumination in evacuated tubes charged with orgone energy is blue."
—Wilhelm Reich: The Orgone Energy Accumulator—Its Scientific and Medical Use
The word itself has another color. Itâs not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasnât the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellowâs deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasnât violetâs rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of greenâŠ
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. âThe sky is blue,â he said, âthe grass is green.â Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. âUpon my word,â he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), âI donât see that oneâs more true than another. Both are utterly false.â And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
1. All text and citations from "Manifesting Manifestos" by Alison Kafer, in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (2023), p. 184 [full citation below]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kafer, Alison. 2023. âManifesting Manifestos.â In Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, 181â194. New York: New York University Press. Link to open-access book download page
Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Alvarez, Natalie, and Jenn Stephenson. 2012. âA Manifesto for Manifestos.â Canadian Theatre Review 150 (Spring): 3â7.
Caws, Mary Ann. 2001. âThe Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness.â In Manifesto: A Century of Isms, xixâxxxi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Fahs, Breanne. 2020. âIntroduction: The Bleeding Edge: On the Necessity of Feminist Manifestos.â In Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution, edited by Breanne Fahs, 1â21. New York: Verso.
Lyon, Janet. 1999. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
"At the very beginning the King made engravings in the supernal purity. A spark of blackness emerged in the sealed within the sealed, from the mystery of the Ayn Sof, a mist within matter, implanted in a ring, no white, no black, no red, no yellow, no colour at all. When He measured with the standard of measure, He made colours to provide light. Within the spark, in the innermost part, emerged a source, from which the colours are painted below; it is sealed among the sealed things of the mystery of Ayn Sof. It penetrated, yet did not penetrate its air. It was not known at all until, from the pressure of its penetration, a single point shone, sealed, supernal. Beyond this point nothing is known, so it is called reishit (beginning): the first word of all ..."
1. I sat in an actual one early in the morning at a construction site on my college campus. Hopped the fence and found it unlocked for some reason. So I just climbed in and sat there and looked at all the buttons and levers and switches in a childlike wonder. Looking at the controls that the pros use but being scared to learn how to turn it on.
I don't know if this will make sense to another reader--feel free to let me know if it does.
1. N+7 made with spoonbill.org/n+7
2. friend joke about this line: "me at an antique store."
3. no I don't
1. i no longer have this recording :'/