And the rules of the foreground make it impossible for us to recognize the rules of the background. For when we keep the background together with the foreground, we see only jarring exceptions, in other words irregularity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1988. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: Volume I. The University of Chicago Press. p. 105e.

Under suitable conditions light falling on the eye may render visible certain objects within the eye itself.

  von Helmholtz, Hermann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomenon

The horizon, seen through the window, is like an incongruous detail cut from an hysterically veneered landscape in oil. The shapes of the clouds, unfolded away from the supercharged beams of color (the expressive force of light becomes multiplied in submersion), are like waves of the sea painted by Hablik. The impression is momentary. When I look again, things are merely yellow and blue, no longer inflamed by the tension of a hidden sun, now exposed: yellow and blue, the main characters in Goethe’s Theory of Colours.

  von Helmholtz, Hermann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomenon

Of the yellow sky, Goethe might say: This is the color nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces. In prismatic experiments it extends itself alone and widely in the light space, and while the two poles remain separated from each other, before it mixes with blue to produce green it is to be seen in its utmost purity and beauty. […] In its highest purity it always carries with it the nature of brightness, and has a serene, gay, softly exciting character. A little further on, he qualifies this with a description of yellow’s impure expression, its effect on us when we see that it is tending toward the minus side: By a slight and scarcely perceptible change, the beautiful impression of fire and gold is transformed into one not undeserving of the epithet foul [emphasis mine]; and the color of honor and joy reversed to that of ignominy and aversion. From light beams, chemical combinations, and mineral-based pigments, to cloth, skin, the off-whites of the eyes; the nobility and joy of an eminently non-living beauty becomes a mere stain, a human discoloration. The glow silently speaking from flecks of raw gold may at any moment transmute within our eye to the hue of a plasmatic scab. The sky on the horizon, only minutes ago a resplendent pool, becomes a sulfuric and ignominious vacuum.

Yellow plaque crowning a dog’s teeth at the gums, spotted black with disease or heredity; a golden tooth concealed in the drawn purse of an old woman’s mouth. Pus roiling under the shiny skin of a boil, impersonal, infectious, proliferating, hot with the friction of blood; a dress hanging from a lithe young woman’s shoulders; orange juice poured into white ceramic.

The ground of the horizon, the background of the background, empties, as though a secret drain had been unblocked in the cistern of the sky, and turns the shade of fingernails stained with cigarette smoke. But the blue clouds still hang together with everything else in the picture, and of blue Goethe says that As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. And repulsive discoloration in the company of darkness still may reach toward dignity, if not beauty. The jaundiced whites of an alcoholic man’s eye appear defiant beside his blue, sparkling iris and the dark pool of a pupil anchoring these two forces together in one single impression. This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful, but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose. The clouds look like they are from another world, inhuman weather phenomena without temperature, density, discernible size, or movement. They are clouds full of neither snow, nor condensation. They are the angel’s confused, disconnected idea of rain, closer to liquid pregnancy than to imminent precipitation. Their scent, if they could be smelled, is that of saline coursing through the blood, an internal scent that flashes through the insides of one’s skull, almost a taste, almost tactile on the tips of the teeth.

The houses are gray-green, paint peels from their shutters and yellow-white cornicing. All is cold below the painterly cloud ideograms rising in an atmosphere of sulfur.

As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us.

Now, the sky is that alcoholic old man, but he is well-dressed: periwinkle pinstripes and eggshell white socks, his eyes as soft as the pewter cufflinks on his impoverished yet tasteful dinner jacket. The cufflinks throw off muted sparks of light, like the liquor-painted glassiness of his eyes. He draws backward into a doorway, as though to retire, but invites us in with an airy wave of the hand, blue-veined and dark. There is nothing scandalous about him; maybe he wants to share a nightcap with us and talk in the wan light before he passes into the half-sleep of the drunk to dream hazy delirious scenes, scenes of beauty, sad encounters where our man finds himself a hero in faraway latitudes, alternate climes; there, he sees faces everywhere, always at the edges, whispering; his presence becomes powerful, precisely in his weakness and decrepitude, and the successive towns and streets of his heroic dreams roll past him in the spirit of something like adventure…for a dark, immeasurable duration he is almost master of his own world, his mind holding forth into sentiments and secret wishes made real—the reality of phantasm. But don’t tell him that it’s only sunrise and not sunset. He doesn’t know east from west anymore, and we should be careful not to embarrass him. Rather, follow him over the threshold, and mix a drink for yourself… But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it. Our old man disappears shadowlike. The clouds have become the dark blue of clear night skies. One finds no stars in their heavy bodies; pale all around like a Byzantine annunciation gone stale. The houses have become cracked flakes of lead paint, two-dimensional, drifting monads.

Blue is a surface. Yellow is never a surface, but a substratum, or an expression undulating below the mask of the face. Blue is the cast of a bell or the steely rinds of piano wire under the blow of the hammer and key. But yellow is the half-frown invisibly, miraculously linking the grace note and the principle note in an appoggiatura. Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade. We have before spoken of its affinity with black.

The clouds, so pregnant with dark water: a funereal blue now, yellow-rimmed once again, a sky like electrified rose gold. A young woman in a black dress stands at the opening of a grave. The grave is deep and made deeper still by the great pile of machine-dug soil (for all of the gravediggers have been buried) forming a pyramid beside the woman. The grave is so deep that the face of the dead cannot be seen any longer. Only his two eyes peer out, clear, as though they had floated back up, disembodied toward the sky, toward the black outlines of mourning. The grave eats away all color, pigment and light alike, and digests it without moving it deeper into earthen bowels—an interred cloud of metaphysical locusts, an absolute stomach full of acid and bacchanalian photoreceptors exiled from the inaccessible world of the retina.

The young woman’s eyes flash upward. Her lips slip cadaverously away from her teeth, which are the dull violet shade of ancient mosaic tile exhumed from dust. Her bones are penetrated to the marrow with the stain of red wine. A golden earring hangs from her white earlobe, opposite the black pyramid of grave soil.

The angel’s childlike idea of pregnancy breaks forth in water, and it rains.

Rooms which are hung with pure blue appear in some degree larger, but at the same time empty and cold.

Now, the horizon is such that one can only make out an impossible blue line at the tops of the dark trees, separating the blue world from the blue, empty heavens, like a wet crack in the wallpaper of the macrocosm. The yellow has gone out of the things of nature—has been exiled to the dingy interior of human things. Veins of copper, gold, opal, saffron, proustite, agate, and beryl are polished and pick-axed clean. The golden butterfly becomes white, immaculate like the dove. Flecks of fool’s gold burn out of our irises, little firmaments of blue, green, brown, gray, and the soul yellows like paper dipped in formaldehyde.

I try to imagine what this world might look like from the perspective of the horizon itself, which is an impossible perspective, impossible to imagine, a non-location. It is like trying to imagine what the inside of the eye might look like to a ray of light; a misty fjord spied by a rainbow, or the highest peak of the Brocken confronted by its own Specter, the object gazing back into the subject.

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