He knew he was dying he could have chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the sun. Think of filmmaker Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma as he was going blind and dying of aids, a death he also forecast on film as disappearing into a “blue screen.” Or of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Colour during the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of stomach cancer. Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as “a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note.” Goethe himself describes the period as one in which “a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question.” Goethe is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment. When I walked into my friend’s hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God.
In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. She had not yet moved the doctor described her as “a pebble in water.” I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded peri-winkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.
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