"Being without Being is blue."

In a logic class, the professor uses the blueness of the sky to represent a truth dependent on something outside of the sentence, or a posteriori. Some analytic philosophy classes beg the students to define blue, explaining a color to a person who has never known anything.

Anyway.

The definition of blue does not seem to actually matter to our existence too much, but the sensation of color is a ragged part of living. I’ve read two books about the color blue; when I was in college, I read “Bluets” by Maggie Nelson and more recently, “On Being Blue” by William Gass. Gass is a philosopher educated at Cornell interested in the philosophy of language, a discipline anxiety ridden and blue. “On Being Blue” is the sky. It makes no point, deeply forgiving and personal to anyone looking at the sky.

At night when the sun only shines on the moon, the sky may look black (I am of the opinion that it’s the darkest of blues) but it has more Something than it does in the day, the existential mysteries of space and unfolding infinities, unbelievable numbers. In the day, the sun shines with the focus on us, only our being. On a good day—no instance of storm—the sky is blue and nothing.

When I take pictures of mountains far away, they look blue in the atmosphere and if they get far enough, they fold into a watery mix of blue, green and the brown-orange of dry grass. Coming from an eastern city at 1,200 feet elevation, I’ve had to adjust to the altitude. I climbed up toward the sky and felt like dying from lack of oxygen, a reminder of humanity’s precision. It was sunny when I got altitude sickness and the sky was a mineral blue. As I climbed closer into the sky, I felt Nothing--so much nothing that I couldn’t breathe.

Blue was breathing without breathing. My lungs expanded regularly but there was Nothing, a priority that had nothing to do with me.

My skin turned bright red, a function of my organs’ aggressive life. Had I been blue, it would have been for flushless flesh, frozen or worse. The philosophy of language and other subsets of analytic philosophy, including logic, deal with these color definitions but can’t find any proof for an analytic, a priori definition. A priori essentially means that it’s a self contained definition of truth--the classic phrase is “A bachelor is unmarried.” It requires no proof because a bachelor must be unmarried. These colors are explored because they cannot be defined, and blue is explored because it is the color of the sky, the color of the sea and thus pumping some kind of existential dread.

Red has a believable proof that blue doesn’t. “We all bleed red,” people say. Bite your lips and they turn red, run long enough and your cheeks turn too. Red is vital, vibrant. Gass talks about blue in relation to being with others, the absence of touch even while touching. I haven’t had chance to finish the book, but I would have to argue that if anything isn’t blue, it would be the closeness of people. People in crowds are red faces and in summer. When skin sticks together, it peels away red from sweaty adhesive. Red is only creating more red. Blue is asthmatic, freezing, ahead of us and behind us. Like Gass says, “Being without Being is blue.” Blue is suffocating in the atmosphere, far from the red core of Earth. Blue is the steady depth of infinity.

This sensation of blueness captures (to some level) the ways I’ve tried to describe living in the West to friends and family back in Pittsburgh. I’ll describe a place I’ve been or a place I’m going, and they summarize what I say with “there’s nothing there.” For better or worse, things exist out in the woods or in fields, but it is evenly person-free punctuated with a breathless sky.