I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.ħ. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. “Fortunately,” he wrote Cazalis, “I am quite dead now.”Ħ. Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. What the rest of me has suffered throughout that long agony, is indescribable.” Mallarmé described this agony as a battle that took place on God’s “boney wing.” “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage-God-whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth,” he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stephane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: “These last few months have been terrifying. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke-take your pick-an apprehension of the divine. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.Ĥ. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. And so I fell in love with a color-in this case, the color blue-as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.ģ. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a seahorse) it became somehow personal.Ģ. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.

Blue maggie nelson