Blue

When I was eight or nine, my parents bought me the complete Childrens World, a 15volume encyclopaedia for kids, covering from the origin of the universe to the nature of frogs, but
also teaching how to make your very own eggs-and-bacon-costume for Halloween parties. One of
the volumes that I was most curious about, though, was about senses and human perception.
There was a whole section concerning how we perceive colours and how it is important that things
are the way they are because, try to imagine if bread was blue, or if lettuce was black? Would you
drink brown milk? I remember the pictures were very impressing for a kid of my age, and I guess
since then I have never been comfortable with artificial coloured food mom says Thank you,
Childrens World.
These days I have been thinking about blue bread, and for the matter of fact, everything that
is not blue. Isnt it curious that mostly nothing edible is blue? Nature is wise, one could say. And
then I also think about things named after colours which are not that real colour: blue cheese has
never been blue, thanks God. I would never eat it. Or, think about blue blood, how alien would that
be?
Though it doesnt look tasty, the colour blue is present in every non-edible aspect of the
world. There is something ambiguous about it that goes beyond the fact it is also a mood and a
musical style. I was reading the other day about Parmenides division of the world into pairs of
opposites: light/darkness, warmth/cold, fineness coarseness: I could never tell which side to put the
colour blue. Its like when I decided to paint my bedroom walls blue, but then it seemed rather bold
and tiring so I just painted the bottom half of the walls, leaving the other half white, so when I sleep
it feels like Im drowning down the sea.

(lvaro)