Maggie Nelson skriver i textsamlingen Bluets om att falla förälskad i en färg, i hennes fall i färgen blå. Kopierar och klistrar in hennes textrader i kapitel 1 i boken jag skriver. Det är en bok om konst, citat om färg känns passande på ett oerhört självklart sätt. Men det blir smått obegripligt och jag vet att det är en darling som tillslut kommer att dödas. Nelson får läsas för sig själv och helst längre än lösryckta citat. För utöver att skriva om färg skriver hon om att komma över en kärlek. Insnurrat i textrader av blå åtrå är det värt sin läsetid.
1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a seahorse) it became somehow personal.
2. 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.
[…]
6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.
7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire.
[…]
8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.
Utdrag från Maggie Nelsons Bluets (2009).