Mayan Blue

I suspect my transformation began the moment I submerged myself in the sea. I wasn’t aware of it until I saw the prints of Yves Klein: women’s stamps impressed upon white canvases, bodies revealed in a beautiful synthetic pigment.

People say the colour belongs to men. I think it is more appropriate for females, because women, as I once read, are made of water. And it seems to me like seawater, which cures all. For me, it soothes doubt. It ignites sadness and anguish, what Carla Faesler once called angsadness or sorrowguish. I, too, Carla, had to say them out loud. And, before I could finish naming these hybrid nostalgias, Benjamín Labatut’s Prussian blue came to mind: the Prussian army, a pot of pigment and sulfuric acid, cyanide baths, whirlwinds of agony. And still, they insist we look up at the sky, which is the colour of a hereditary fear.

[There are things it is better never to know]

To escape the sky, one only must look at the reverse of the eyelids, which are like a seascape. To throw oneself into the void. To become Passerina cyanea, an indigo body deceiving gravity, which is like immortality, with two wings. To die of vertigo. To die of the pain of six stabs in the gut, which is the same as dying of agony in the heights. But there is an explanation for the void. 

[Perhaps it is the urge to extinguish all the fires in the skin]

1980 degrees Celsius. The most intense flames are the colour of a turquoise Ocean. And yet, blue is a strangeness on Earth. We swim in it, breathe beneath its dome, but in matter it hides: few flowers, fewer stones, almost no flesh. It is a contradiction, an infinite sky, endless seas, yet in the touchable world, almost absent. Even our eyes struggle to catch it. The S-cones that catch blue are the rarest, the most fragile, the least sensitive. Perhaps this is why blue feels both limitless and elusive, as if it were never meant for us, as if it existed only to remind us of distance.

Prussian blue: synthetic, like the pigment of the women-stamps. But that blue does not lead to gangrene; it holds bodies’ memories. Long before Klein’s canvas, the Maya painted bodies in indigo and palygorskite clay offered to the gods in sacrifice. I think of my own flesh, covered in Mayan Blue as an embodied offering to the Earth: to fill the soil with blues burning with the intensity of a perfect flame. To transform the ancestral pain carried by my mother, grandmother and all the mothers that came long before them into colourless clouds: a counter-fire combusting the violent, soot-heavy red flames of an exhausted patriarchal realm.

The strongest light to the human retina lies between 400 and 450 nanometers, the same as ninety-one days of seeing your ultramarine silhouettes in the shadows.

I think in Purkinje; now I see why there is nothing else but you in the dark. Your blue is the flame that does not blacken. A fire without residue, burning inward, endlessly deepening. Not the red desire that leaves a sedimented hunger, but a brightness that strips the flesh of weight and carries it further, past the body’s edge, into the most secret cenote. There is a touch that is more than touch, a union that dissolves the flesh, an immersion so complete it becomes indistinguishable from the sea.

My transformation began the moment I submerged myself in cobalt, cyan, brilliant ultramarine, her body of blue, carrying me into the void.

Where Land ends and Seas begin.