There is a special kind of blue only found in this country, heralding the arrival of lords and kings and captains of nations, the blue of Man’s subjection of the elements. A royal blue, a celestial blue, rolled out across the heavens for the most heavenly of guests. A Presidential Blue.
#00117F is a blue. It is 100% cyan, 86.6% magenta, 0% yellow and 50.2% black. It has a hue angle of 232 degrees, a saturation of 100% and a lightness of 24.9% It is the Blue whose Redness has been exorcised from RGB space, resulting in a dizzying kind of blue when rendered in high fidelity.
#00117F washed a 260-something-times is my own blue. The storied, wearied blue of a G2000 shirt I’ve worn since 2013, with now chaffed collars and bleached edges where the blue bled but I don’t have the heart to replace it. It is a sentimental blue.
There’s a yearning blue, which belongs to the shackled bird who broke free of his cage and had forgotten how to fly, but still contemplates the skies and reach to pale winds.
There’s blue at the end of the world, a traveler’s blue – Rebecca Solnit calls it – blue at the edge of the eyes, the colour of horizons and of the faraway. A longing blue.
There’s a curious blue that hangs between these eyes and the skies and the question that invariably dangling at the lips of every child. Why is the sky blue? Or “why is the sky”? As my little nephew once asked. Good quest. Why is the sky at all?
And there’s a deceptive blue. Of bluejays and blue morpho butter flies and blue beetles whose blues aren’t blues at all but tiny structures on their skins and feathers and exoskeletons scattering light in just the right way. They are blue in the way skies are. An illusory blue. The blue of dreams.
#00117F 