BLUE VOICE

Trinidad Ca 2008 BK Photo

This poem happens to contain this blog's name within in.  I'm not aware of having read the poem before I named the blog, which was a very long time ago in Internet years.  That's even though it happens to be by probably my favorite poet, William Stafford. I present it here now as a way to rededicate this blog, which I've neglected.  But it's always been my favorite blog, though I am apparently its only faithful reader. Here's the poem.

Sky

I like you with nothing.  Are you
what I was?  What I will be?
I look out there by the hour,
so clear, so sure, I could
smile, or frown--still nothing.

Be my father, be my mother,
great sleep of blue; reach
far within me; open doors,
find whatever is hiding; invite it
for many clear days in the sun.

When I turn away I know
you are there.  We won't forget
each other: every look is a promise.
Others can't tell what you say
when it's the blue voice, when
you come to the window and look for me.

Your word arches over
the roof of all day.  I know it
within my bowed head, where
the other sky listens.
You will bring me
everything when the time comes.

---William Stafford

I've seen Page Eight something like 5 or 6 times now. It was first broadcast on the BBC and PBS in 2011, although I believe the first time I saw it was on DVD in my Bill Nighy period.  In any case I did catch it on the PBS rebroadcast last year.  Last week we got the DVD from netflix but I didn't send it right back.  I watched it a few more times, at my computer, on the cave TV..  Finally mailed it back this morning.

Why was I obsessed with watching it?  It's an excellent drama, written and directed by one of the contemporary greats of British stage, David Hare, and featuring great actors in excellent performances: the ever watchable Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz, plus important roles played by Michael Gambon, Judy Davis, Alice Krige, Felicity Jones, Ralph Fiennes, Ewen Bremner and Marthe Keller.  It's an absorbing story, about British intelligence in the post-9/11 era.  But I realized all of that didn't add up to the total reason for my obsession.

First I thought it was because it just looked good.  But why?  Then I realized: because it's blue.

  I began to consciously realize this by the images that came into my mind when I thought about it.  Then last night I looked at it with this in mind, and it's absolutely true.  The dominant color by far is blue.


It's blue damp misty streets, blue-gray skies, blue-green structures and the lighting within them. Blue walls, blue cars. For the first part of the movie everyone is wearing blue, so much so that it resembles one of those color episodes of the 1950s Superman series they filmed to work in black and white as well as (later, when TV technology caught up) in color.  Bill Nighy in particular always wore a blue suit with a blue tie (sometimes blue and white) and at least once a blue shirt.

Eventually a few other colors intrude.  A couple of the women--conspicuously, the fascinatingly evil character Judy Davis played--wore red. (Red, white and blue would fit with a main theme--the "special relationship" with the U.S. in the Bush years as corrupting influence on the UK.)  There was a black tie event in the woody brown interiors of Cambridge University.  The Rachel Weisz character gets a earthy brown sweater.

Color palettes are important to some filmmakers.  Woody Allen hates blue--he favors browns and greens.  I saw a movie recently that ruled out almost every color except brown and green.  That I can't remember the movie tells it all.  I don't like brown and green.  I like blue.  More than like--I was ecstatic.

I happen also to like the music of Page Eight---jazz, a little James Bond, some Satie-like piano.  I would place it among my very favorite films (or TV films to be precise) except I'm bothered by the assumption in it that torture yielded real intelligence--I've seen no credible evidence that it did, or does.  There's a nice moment at a meeting when a woman (played by Holly Aird) mentions this, and Bill Nighy's character agrees.  They exchange a glance; later it turns out they've been sleeping together.

But the fact that I can't absolutely defend it as a great film worth watching over and over doesn't keep me from seeing it over and over.  The performances, the music.  But mostly, it's blue.  

P.S. I'm not the only one who liked this movie, by the way.  It was an immediate hit in the UK, and two sequels have been ordered up.

When did I start identifying with blue?  Blue eyes maybe. Blue blankets and other blue baby stuff for a boy.  It became at some point my favorite color and has grown in that regard.  So that now blue is an essential marker of me.  And my blue voice.

It turns out that "true blue" has a colorful meaning. In the New York Times:

For the French Fauvist painter and color gourmand Raoul Dufy, blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.” Darkened red looks brown and whitened red turns pink, Dufy said, while yellow blackens with shading and fades away in the light. But blue can be brightened or dimmed, the artist said, and “it will always stay blue.”

 And that blue fascinates more than me.  The Times story by Natalie Angier goes on:

 Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency. They’re exploring the physics and chemistry of blueness in nature, the evolution of blue ornaments and blue come-ons, and the sheer brazenness of being blue when most earthly life forms opt for earthy raiments of beige, ruddy or taupe."

All that and more.  Blue by the way is the color of the throat chakra.  Blue voice.  How about that for metaphorical fluency?

The artist of blue most people think of is Picasso.  The Blue Period (brought on by the combination of the suicide of a friend and--at least according to Gertrude Stein--because someone gave him a lot of blue paint, and he was too poor to buy other colors.)

But I like blues in Klee, Van Gogh, O'Keeffe, Monet, Severini, Morris Graves, and Rene Magritte.  Magritte paints blue skies, usually in that mysterious luminous blue that partakes of both day and night.  It is the blue of dawn and the blue of dusk.  And one of the features of these paintings I love is, you can't tell which it is.  Everything is the dawn of something, and the dusk.

I wear a lot of blue. I enjoy it.  Beginning with its third season, the George Reeves Superman TV series of the 50s was filmed in color, even though it would be shown in black and white for the next decade or so.  When color TV was more widely available in the 60s, the series had a big revival.  But to both film in color and principally for black and white TV, almost everybody in Superman wore blue. I assume that was the reason.  All shades and patterns of blue.  Blue sweaters with blue suits. (And they didn't seem to change their outfits very often.)  Even the cars tended to be blue. I've got these on DVD.  It's my kind of world. 

Superman wore blue.  Doctor Who in his blue box. Spock in his blue uniform.  Now that new BBC Sherlock wears blue.  But it probably all comes down, or up, to that blue sky.  The blue ocean.  This blue planet.  This blue voice.