Eleni Gorla

“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

“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

“Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charge, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fucking. In the Phaedrus, the written word is also notoriously called pharmakon. The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it- whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets