True Blue

For Manuela (sorry, the last post was rot; thought this was better)

The blues defined a kind of perpetual internal exile of people who couldn't go back.
---Rebecca Solnit.

Hard to 'know' what this sense of feeling blue is. Perhaps the blues are precisely this not-knowingness, the bewilderment that follows from the gradual dawning that what is near is also far. That we are lost, and to be so is deeper than being found, that from time out of mind we have been alone with the Alone. The blue flames of love mourned the loss of the red. And Time will not heal it, and no words will help soothe it. I am still me, you are still you.

Courtesy of Astarte:

And the cities will be bright with blues

because the unhappy one

Burns once again, even if all is burnt,

Burns once again, even if too much or too little

Tries to find himself by breaking

To reach the inaccessible star

Something here reminded me of Montale's 'Little Testament'. But it is gone. Instead, Akhmatova:

Do you forgive me these November days?

In canals around the Neva fires fragment.
Scant is tragic autumn's finery

This story by Isak Dinesen is retold by Rebecca Solnit:

An old English aristocrat, caring for little in the world, sets off with his daughter in search of beautiful blue china. On one of their journeys they become shipwrecked and the daughter is rescued by a sailor and for nine days the two are alone together on the sea.

.

Eventually the father finds his daughter and banishes the sailor to the far side of the world and once again all the daughter can think of is collecting blue china. "In her search she told the people with whom she dealt that she was looking for a particular blue colour and would pay any price for it. But although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say:'Alas, alas, it is not the right blue'.

.

Soon, she began to wonder if that blue even existed any more. Years passed, decades, her father died and finally a merchant brought her an old blue jar looted from the Chinese emperor's summer palace. When she saw it she said that now she could die, and when she died , her heart would be cut out and put in the blue jar.

.

"And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently..."