Developed in correspondence with Robertina Šebjanič

Rehearsal of Empathic Learning & Inventory of Micro-localities of the Waters 404

Dear Reader, You are presented with a visual description of assembling a herbarium of the aquatic garden based in the tiny pond in my allotment 404. It's based on a score to perform macro and micro-observations and compile an inventory of inhabiting bodies inside (or near) the water. The observations include: to sense the materiality of water by employing a microscope*; notes taking or illustration of any kind, sound and video recordings. All witnessed organisms are not separated from their context and are documented during regular pond maintenance. The video recording was intended to avoid harming the pond's inhabitants.

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world. One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I am filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I just left there after breakfast, and the brown coffee and yellow eggs and green traffic lights filled me with no such desire, and besides I was there already and was looking forward to going hiking on the mountain’s west slope.

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away. The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, “Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.” For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths.

Accompanying reading

Rebecca Solnit

The Blue of Distance

This world was realized in the cyanotypes, or blue photographs, of the nineteenth century — cyan means blue, though I always thought the term referred to the cyanide with which the prints were made. Cyanotypes were cheap and easy to make, and so some amateurs chose to work in cyanotype altogether, some professional photographers used the medium to make preliminary prints, treated so that they would fade and vanish in a few weeks’ time: these vanishing prints were made as samples from which to order permanent images in other tones. In the cyanotypes you arrive in this world where darkness and light are blue and white, where bridges and people and apples are blue as lakes, as though everything were seen through the melancholy atmosphere that here is cyanide. The color persisted in postcards through the middle of the twentieth century: I own some of blue palaces and blue glaciers, blue monuments and blue train stations.”