Eleni Gorla

“According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright-- a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that flowers at its center. But as compelling as this paradox, or this experiment, may be, I am not as interested in it as I am the fact that in Christian iconography, this "dazzling darkness" appears with startling regularity as blue.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth. But are you certain-- one would like to ask-- that it was sweet? --No, not really, or not always. If I am to enforce a rule of "brutal honesty," perhaps not even often. It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional. Of all the philosophers, Schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson for this idea: "As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected." You don't believe him? He offers this quick test: "Compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Cézanne, too, had had enough of psychology. He attended, instead, to color. "If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance," he said of painting a man's face. This may be but a colorized restatement of Wittgenstein's remark, "if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lots. But the unutterable will be-- unutterably-- contained in what has been uttered!" Perhaps this is why I take the blues of Cézanne so seriously.”
― Maggie Nelson

“The idea is a complicated one, as the burden falls to us to differentiate this Divine Darkness from other kinds of darknesses-- that off a "dark night of the soul," the darkness of sin, and so on. "We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the realization that by not seeing and unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge," Dionysius wrote, as if clarifying the matter. Equally complicated: the idea of agnosia, or unknowing, which is what one ideally finds, or undergoes, or achieves, within this Divine Darkness. Again: this agnosia is not a form of ignorance, but rather a kind of undoing. (As if one knew once, then forgot? But what did one know?)”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets