Midnight Blue
Following a line of colour through sorcery and science
“There should be a word for when blue goes from powder to midnight. From
sea to vein. From origin to eclipse.” — Scherezade Siobhan from “Radius “
Okay this is going to be another long story. A long squiggling blue line that ends with a square of almost electric blue solid colour. And I know I promised more pretty pictures and less words but this is one of those meandering adventures somehow needs to be told in full.
Next week (so long as I can get a negative Covid test a not crazy expensive airline ticket and some place to stay) I will be travelling to Manhattan to deliver a very particular ink coloured by this blue square enlivened by a living elixir of dog cells to Yuri Shimojo to make a unbroken line that speaks of water and salt, health and recovery, that together cast a spell.
Part 1: Dionne
Six years ago Michael Ondaatje sent me Dionne Brand’s Verso 4 to look at without explanation. The words blew my mind. It was a single page of dense writing something between poetry and prose and memoir and a kind of freeform run-on thinking and it was one of the most altering pieces of writing that I had ever come across and I printed it out onto a single sheet of paper and started taking little snippets of it and recombining these snippets in my sketchbook in a way that felt urgent and alive my kind-of attempt to really live inside these words that I loved to build my own shelter with them somehow. I often like to forage for words from songs, half-remembered lines, quotes, things people have told me or just word combinations that feel right as a kind of caption that is not quite a caption, to live under and around the blobs of ink that I am experimenting with. If you follow The Toronto Ink Company you will know what I mean. But this was something different, I kept going back to the same piece of writing with almost colourless grey handmade inks and just kept writing and re-writing Dionne’s words. This was (I know) audacious in the sense that she is (and with apologies to Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Leonard Cohen and all the rest) Canada’s greatest poetic voice. And still there I was doodling away with her words in my sketchbook until I had filled all but a few pages up. Just near the end of my project (?) creation (?) homage (?), a bright blue ink seeped into the book. I sent the sketchbook to Dionne and I think she was intrigued enough to agree to meet me for a coffee one early morning and she talked about her adventures in the Lithium Triangle desert where Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia meet, and the Pitch Lake of Trinidad and Tobago where she grew up and how she used to collect seeds that they called “pens” on the beach. Looking through my sketchbook she was shocked to see the slow emergence of the colour blue because out of her own writing was something that had a lot to do with blue. The Blue Clerk was just emerging and that single page would become one of the Verso’s of this incredible vehicle for breaking up and rebuilding our thinking about colonial colour.
Part 2: The Blue Clerk
You need to get ahold of this book. The histories of pigments are fascinating and colours prior to industrialized crop-chemical times we are living in now get us closer to the earth and are crucial to understanding how to make colour for yourself, but when you read a lot of books on pigment history in English you might begin to feel slightly queasy about the colonial aspects of colour history. Exotic woods and rare beetles found in some obscure island brought back in wooden boxes by waist-coated explorers to be experimented on, ground up, and finally made into pigments for use by some white male artist for the glorification of some aristocratic family. This is where Dionne Brand’s, “The Blue Clerk” comes in. Hers is not a story of the great explorers, but rather takes place on the dock where the ships leave. It is the green-aphids-on-the-underside-of-the-leaf of history and is strung together, literally, with a magic blue thread. Brand has made a thing that has made me re-think colour and ink and history and poetry and politics and the streets of Toronto and the salt desert and cell phone chemicals. Among other things, “The Blue Clerk” feels like the moment in youth where you become two things at once, a person and a person looking at a person. But it’s a doubling that struggles beautifully to come together with a wry and sideways elegance. Brand has made a book that feels to me like ink— amorphous, precise, and indelible.
Part 3: Mallojo Blue
At our meeting over coffee Dionne mentioned one other thing: a colour of blue that could only be worn by certain high Priestesses in the Caribbean. A sort of Sorcerer’s cloak colour that she couldn’t quite spell out for me but that was a magical, scary, electric blue that was known as Mallojo. The idea that certain colour can only be worn by certain people is as old as clothes and power but this idea of Mallojo entranced me. I researched African Indigo and its cultivation in the Caribbean, the use of copper-based blue in Haitian Voodoo and American Hoodoo and from here to the “Mal de Ojo” or evil eye and all the way back to Early Phoenician blue beads that protected against it. There is a kind of blue that has a kind of cleansing power. What really intrigued me was the mojo hand. The mojo hand is a kind of charm bag that often includes a bluestone which is ball or square of laundry bluing that replaced the more difficult and sometimes toxic copper blues used in Hoodoo. The bluestone concealed in a little bag was used for gamblers' luck and protection from evil. Sometimes called Añil Azul or blueing square or Paris Blue, blue balls, laundry square, or Dolly Blue Stone these were a source of brilliant blue that was widely available as an additive to give linens and other laundry a blue-white cast.
Part 4: Laundry Bluing
I have a fascination with pioneer-era laundry materials and had been playing with Mrs. Stewart’s liquid form for years for a bright blue ink-like substance but I was not aware of its solid form or long relationship to ritual and magic. Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing can be used to relieve insect bite pain, brighten pools, create depression-era crystal gardens, glaze pottery, mark ski-race courses and, of course, whiten your laundry. Its harder to get your hands on the solid form, as Ricketts (its biggest manufacturer), has gone out of business. The search for the dry and, at least ritualistically, more intense version of this blue lead me inevitably to some of the stranger corners of Etsy.
Part 5: Prussian Blue
Laundry bluing is made of a colloid of ferric ferrocyanide (blue iron salt, also referred to as "Prussian blue"). And Prussian blue is deliciously weird. It was the first modern synthetic pigment and a kind of a happy mistake. According to somewhat reliable accounts a pigment maker named Diebach in search of a perfect red ended up adding blood-tainted potash (supplied by a questionable alchemist named Dippel) to the materials for making Florentine lake from cochineal. The combination made a surprisingly rich blue instead of red and set in motion a fantastic set of chemical reactions. Prussian Blue which was way less expensive than ultramarine revolutionized European oil paintings (think Starry Night, Turner’s seascapes, Picasso’s Blue period) and became a replacement for indigo blues in Japan (think Hokusai’s woodblock prints of waves). It became the blue of Prussian solider’s uniforms, started the history of photography with the first cyanotypes defined the iconic blue of blueprints and was briefly a Crayola colour (later changed to midnight blue). The intense blue colour of Prussian blue is associated with the energy of the transfer of electrons from Fe(II) to Fe(III) but its atomic configuration goes way beyond colour. Prussian Blue has been deemed an essential medicine as an antidote to radioactive poisoning, as stain to detect metals in biopsies, and on the nanoscale, can be used as multifunctional molecular magnets for Quantum computing and even cancer therapies.
And so I am left with this singular blue square. Almost crackling with its various meanings the Prussian Bluing square seems too powerful to use, a colour that does not belong to me but to Dionne Brand’s Blue Clerk or rather to that oceanic realm that sloshes under the surface of colonial trade and scientific decorum that she has so elegantly nudged into the world’s consciousness, and so I waited.
The Job
And then I got a commission. Yuri Shimojo who I have talked about before in this newsletter asked The Toronto Ink Company for an ink that might be combined with the living serum for treating her miraculous dog Rudi’s eyes. Through treatment Rudi’s eyes have turned an extraordinary blue colour and Yuri has been thinking about water and saline solution, healing and the osmotic breathing of cells. She has asked for a kind of ink that might be part of her “Unbroken Line” series that that somehow speaks to eyes and healing and magic and science and blood and salt and water and the colour blue. She asked me if I had any ideas for this highly specialized ink and I said— yes.
