in-flight entertainment
I know that writers love to talk about it, but I think there's always more to say about blue
If you’ve talked to me in the past three years, I have probably talked to you about Agnes Martin. Her blue-gridded painting Untitled (1965) is my phone background, my Facebook cover photo, and the preamble to this newsletter.
In 2017, I read Larissa Pham’s brilliant article Agnes Martin Finds the Light That Gets Lost. Pham reflects on her road trip to New Mexico, Martin’s home base and source of inspiration through the final decades of her life. She ties her longing for distant blues–skylines, mountain ranges, oceans–to the blues Martin paints in works like Untitled. On blue, Pham writes that:
“Places very high and very far appear to us as blue. . . places like distant cities or mountains or even the flat lip of a foggy horizon at sea. But that blue—that blue isn’t stored in those distant locations. And it isn’t stored in our eyes, either; we can’t carry it around with us, even if we buy thousands of tubes of cerulean. It’s in the distance between us and the place we observe, and that gives it its particular poignancy, because it’s a product of circumstance, never of active creation.”
This always-blue distance fills Pham with longing, and I know exactly what she means. I can never peel my eyes away from powerlines and mountains and bodies of water on the horizon. The Chicago skyline haunted my dreams until I moved to Evanston, where I could see it from campus and eventually from my own window. Untitled takes this longing and lets us be present with it. It fills the rigid form of the grid–forever wrapped up in settler colonial understandings of space–with white gouache circles that Pham, beautifully, calls “gifts.”
I know that writers love to talk about it, but I think there’s always more to say about blue. The blue in the title of this newsletter refers not to sadness but to distance, and an effort toward active creation.
But first, the circumstance: on Wednesday I flew out of O’Hare to Dublin, flew from Dublin to Manchester, and finally, took a train from Manchester to Leeds Central Station. I couldn’t sleep on the flight to Dublin. My thoughts raced, not unpleasantly. Counting to 100 didn’t work—I lost focus around the 70s. Whenever I’m on planes I’m surprised by how much time I spend watching the map-slideshow that shows where we are. Most of it is easily legible–where we are, how fast we’re going, how much longer we’ll be in the air. The map tries to tell us both local time and destination time, but never all on the same slide; it’s up to us to decide what the time really is. I think that, for the bulk of our lives, “on a plane” is the only state in which we can make that decision.
Then there are the wind speed readings, which strike me as incompatible with movement that, in the cabin, feels maddeningly slow. And I don’t want to imagine the piercing shrill of -52 degree air around us. It reminds me of the week in winter 2019 that my roommates and I stayed inside of our apartment for 72 hours. They told us that if we went outside, our bodies would go into shock, our corneas might freeze. People filmed themselves throwing buckets of water out the door that froze in midair.
But I’m back to the screen, watching it flicker between readings and scales and perspectives. I see the blue of the ocean in enough detail to make out valleys and ridges, but not enough to make out colored variations in depth. Once, as I crossed the floor of Gare de l’Est, someone told me that these variations—seen on maps and from boats and cliffs—shake him to his core in a way he can’t fully explain. I don’t feel that way about this map but I think I could if I looked long enough. The blue on the map is a blue that pulses off the screen, gets caught in the fog of my glasses as I breathe into a blue mask. It grows and shrinks with each inhale and exhale, and, for a moment, I close the distance and inhabit it.
This truly is “wanderlust” put into words. Beautifully written, Lois!