In the blue room, time slows down.

Things levitate in its atmosphere, moving imperceptibly from one point to another. Increments that, in the empire of air be Seconds, are in the blue room Minutes. Minutes there are Hours. An Hour is an ocean of eternities. Things hover and hang in its space, seemingly motionless but suddenly darting thisaway or that, appearing somewhere else when, for the longest time it appeared stationary and you were about to look away. So yes, there is 'speed' and motion in the blue room, but paradoxically no sense of time's passage. There's mostly only colour.

For in the blue room the floor is sandy white with pearly veins of lighter gray, the walls are sheer darkmaroon escarpments of lava encrusted with pink and yellow coral, the ceiling of cerulean glass casting a shimmering filigree of titanium ribbons angling sinuously below... and you get this feeling you could stay in this room forever, for it was where you were born after all.

It was where you were born.

I've always liked this famous painting by Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea, but never until now have I figured out why I like it so much. I think it's because I literally feel like I'm now living in that room in the painting, with the sea just a step outside. Also, in a way less tied to the present, my family and I have always lived in cities and towns near the sea... on islands in the Philippines and Hawaii or, in the case of North America, right on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. So, the picture is a fairly good rendering of an aspect of my personal condition. The wash and geometry of the colours is intense and subtly provocative, arresting your eye and mind for a while, which all good images do. And then there's of course the element of dreamlike surreality to it, which is how life itself is, often enough.

So yeah. Hopper's painting could well be this weblog's undocumented logo, though the Magritte pipe came first, way back in June of last summer. ;-)

[ click on the pic to see a (much) larger version of it at artchive.com. the link goes to the jpg itself, but if you want to play with Java-ish controls which you can manipulate the image with, as far as zooming, resizing and even changing the bgcolor--though not of the art itself, obviously--go here. ]

Historical reference for me, for when I'm reading this years hence:

today's prose poem rendered in blue above inspired by a dive me and my brother Jovi had at the cliffs on the leftmost part of Kahekili (Old Airport) beach, just around the bend from Keka'a (Black Rock). Saw three green sea turtles in the deep. Playing. A humpback whale passing by, a mere quarter mile away.

{ net.casting }
^