singing the [Stygian] blues

janeandtonic commented on the list singing-the--stygian--blues

inspo: Stygian blue, the chimerical color, an impossible color. a color you can only see as a spectral afterimage, the blue uncannily bright despite the fathomless dark.

consider then, the blues of melancholy: a progression from ineffable discontent to profound, cimmerian gloom. as if at twilight, a floating overlay of an impossible color suffuses the world, then deepens through navy, and midnight, ink, beyond.

and if there was a way to sing these blues, world-weighted, whiskey-soaked and creaky yet emotionally-keening, a few souls come to mind:
- Sia, wandering into the twilight, doll-like innocence still clinging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZly12eGpNA
- Billie Holliday, who manages fill songs of summer such yearning wistfulness (saudade perhaps?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYUqbnk7tCY
- Tom Waits anything; whose voice sounds “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” -Daniel Durcholz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIZiWYK2md8
- this song, sung in many hues: the Animals (blue vitriol): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sB3Fjw3Uvc Odetta (myrtled): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaya8jYZBO8

"Chimerical colours don’t appear within the colour space of human vision. As the name suggests they are a construct of the mind. They can be created by inducing a natural process of the eye called colour fatigue. If you stare at a colour for a long time your eye will temporarily displace the colourspace by the opposing colour. So if you stare at yellow, then black, for a short time you will perceive that black to contain blue. The colour you are seeing is out of the range of visible colours. It is a pitch black blue; thus it is deemed an impossible colour." (1)

"Here’s a project for you: if the Greeks saw blue without a name for it, there is a name for a blue that no one can see: Stygian blue, which belongs to a theoretical classification called, alternately, impossible colours, forbidden colours, and chimerical colours. In 2005, philosopher Paul Churchland explained how you might try to catch it. First stare unflinchingly at a circle of blindingly saturated yellow on a grey sheet. By fatiguing your eye’s receptivity to the wavelength we use for yellow, you produce an afterimage of blue. Stare at a black sheet, and your eye falls into darkest, darkest underworld blue of the River Styx. Look inside it long enough, and you’ll see Homer with a finger to his lips." (2)

"Stygian colors: these are simultaneously dark and impossibly saturated. For example, to see "stygian blue": staring at bright yellow causes a dark blue afterimage, then on looking at black, the blue is seen as blue against the black, but due to lack of the usual brightness contrast it seems to be as dark as the black. The eye retina contains some neurons that fire only in the dark." (3)

1) http://www.luniere.com/2014/03/01/hyperbolic-orange-and-the-river-to-hell/
2) http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/feature/how-see-secret-blue
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors
4) http://soffus.tumblr.com/post/40493370483/why-isnt-it-possible-to-imagine-a-new-color

April 10, 2015