too many dinosaurs

BLUE
Blue is the simplest and the most complex of the colours I will write about. At one level it is the smell of warm milk and vanilla pods, the taste of fleur du sel and caramel ice-cream on a sunny day on the shores of Lake Geneva and the dress my friend S wore. It is the drone of an aeroplane above the clouds where the sky is always blue and you never could be. It is the colour of the robes of Giotto's Mary, humbly drawn for greater glory - and this is where blue becomes difficult. Tricksy and grandiose, the begetter of words like azure and cerulean, it is a colour that a tradesman's wife in Galilee would not have worn. Our blue comfort is a lie to us and yet we cannot separate it from this woman. Marian blue is the blue of the veins on her eyelids, weeping for the world. It is duck-egg and eau-de-nil and della Robbia on a roadside shrine, all covered round with dying flowers. It is a lapis rosary, the gaudy fashion of our Lady of Guadalupe, it is the eyes of her shining, oddly Aryan son. It is Europe making its mark. It is what we code the least known two-thirds of the map, making what cannot be known whole and safe. It is forcing sky and earth to meet where they are in fact quite separate, the one mindlessly reflecting the other, whose blue is simply wavelengths.