Hypotenuse Blue

Author(s): Sonja Livingston

Source: Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction , Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 5-10
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/fourthgenre.17.2.0005

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ESSAY

Hypotenuse Blue
SONJA LIVINGSTON

T
“ here’s so much of it coming,” she says, the smile she makes taking up
so much of her face that she must squint as I swipe my card through
the machine. To call her a sales clerk would be to belittle her voca-
tion. She’s a priestess and the store, a temple of linen and raw silk for
women of a certain means.
“Here’s just a sample of our colors for spring.” She floats a thin hand through
the air to indicate a wall lined in turquoise and cobalt, hand-dyed tunics and
scarves. The word “lined” is not right. Nor is “store.” The hanging rods are
sculpted into bronze branches and buds. “It’s not just clothes,” the woman says.
“I’m just back from Atlanta and wall coverings and sofas— even paint colors—
will get in on the act.” She walks around the counter with the beribboned bag
into which my cardigan has been swaddled in tissue and set.
“Everything this season,” she says, “is going to be blue.”

8 8 8

Just hand me the damned bag, I want to say, but compared with the tangle of my
brain—the mess of polygons and cylinders and right angles—my body is soft, so
perhaps I’m more annoyed with myself than with the woman using a coin-lined
mouth to invoke the color of sky—as if the color is only a dress to be worn a few
times and carted off to Goodwill by women who will return for a new season’s
color and cut. And here I am, nearly one of them—is it this, how close I have
come, that makes me want to fall to the floor while shouting: What can you
possibly know about blue?

8 8 8

8 5

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6 8 FOURTH GENRE

I’m given to irritation these days, the chomp of unnecessary talk getting
under my skin like the crinkle of candy wrappers in a movie theater. It must
be related to age— I’ve been in my 40s for a few years now, but when did I get
old?
Perhaps life is what we allow ourselves to realize, and getting old is like
that dream of flying—you’re doing just fine, soaring over riverbed and gorge,
until common sense arrives to announce the impossibility of it all, and just
like that, you begin your slow and steady descent.
Sometime this past year, perhaps in late September, I looked myself in
the eye and said: You, my girl, are getting a bit long in the tooth and the very
next day found myself wanting nothing more than escape from highway
traffic and airline ticket counters in order to return to the soft shell of my
home to contemplate the flavor of cinnamon, the mystery and persistence of
certain colors, and of course you.

8 8 8

Back when I started writing, you were my teacher.

It was not a coincidence, I don’t think, that I’d begun to consider the
shapes of birds as they lifted themselves up and over the marshes near Lake
Ontario just as you showed how fluid an essay, how winged. Sometimes you
gave us writing exercises. One time, you told us to choose a color and write a
list of things that shade. I took a minute to start, peeking at those seated
nearby scribbling out their lists of yellow and red and lavender. Did I begin
with the sky? Maybe Virgin’s robe. Morning glories. The shutters of old
buildings. The entire city of New Orleans. The sea near Puerto Rico and
Santorini, electric where the water is shallow and slaps against the rock. The
beach at Crete. The way we did not have bathing suits but took off as much as
we could and fell into the sea, floating without trying because of how salted
the water so that it seemed we floated for months and not minutes. The water
cradled us as we took in the rubble of old altars rising along the rocky shore.
Yes, I would have thought of Greek islands. Of Samos and Pythogoras per-
haps, but most of all Crete. The island from which Icarus flew with a pair of
makeshift wings, the water beneath him or somewhere near—making spirals
in the sky as he fell into the final swath of blue.

8 8 8

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 Sonja Livingston 8 7

It was the late nineties and blue was in the air. It always is, of course, but this
time it arrived in the form of LeAnn Rimes, a little girl who made it big with
her version of the song “Blue.” Just 13 years old, LeAnn sang the song in-
tended for Patsy Cline, who’d died in a plane crash before she could record it.
Three decades later, LeAnn opened her mouth wide, singing the loneliness of
Patsy’s song.
“Blue,” came the voice, drawing out the word, extending it, her voice a
winged thing, going high and low at once. And everyone listened, because
little girl or not, it’s not every day that you hear someone singing as if she’d
lived a thousand lives and with as much heartache as the salted Cretan sea.

8 8 8

When a student in my writing workshop suggests that the color blue is a

potential thread in the essay we were reading, another student says, Well, she
can’t do it—none of us can, blue has been done. He’s talking Maggie Nelson,
and though we all laugh and know what he means—I’d pushed that book on
my students for the past few years, helping to transform it into the crack of
nonfiction workshops—I’m stopped by the idea that blue can ever be done.
Why write, I wonder, if not to trace the blood as it travels beneath the
skin? Why bother if we don’t make a study of the wild berries that grow in
Cape Breton, the denim-clad knee of an old love, the drive along the Pacific
highway, the ocean the truest thing for miles except for how liquid we are, of
course—sculpted into the upright shapes of men and women, all flesh and
bone and tooth, but, of course, more water than anything else.

8 8 8

The thing about the truest teacher is that she becomes the eyes you work for.
The thing about the truest writer is that she becomes the voice you listen
for.
And when she’s gone—that teacher, that writer—what is there to do but
return to the way she tried to make sense of blue?

8 8 8

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8 8 FOURTH GENRE

Blue you could hear, even over the phone.

Hidden blue, like the cottony inside of a quilt, shadow on snow.
Radiant energy of wavelength approximately 475 nanometers.
Out of the blue: a memory. A membrane of memory, tasting of brine.
The shortest distance between two points, hypotenuse blue.

—Judith Kitchen, “Blue”

8 8 8

In “Blue,” you’re responding to William Gass, who wrote:

“Blue” and “triangle” are equally abstract.

And now I’m blue, and responding to you, who wrote:

Might as well have opened my heart to let the trapezoids fly

out on their huge, iridescent wings

8 8 8

The hypotenuse is the longest side of a right-angled triangle. From the Greek,
it relates to Pythagoras, and I’d best leave it there, because geometry is the
one exam I failed in high school—though, as it turns out, failing the New York
State Regents Exam in Geometry does nothing to dampen an appreciation for
certain angles, cannot hamper a devotion for certain lines, does not prevent a
theorem of wings.

8 8 8

You say radiant energy and I remember the thrill of sitting in your classroom.
You say membrane of memory, tasting of brine and I wonder if two words were
ever more perfectly paired than brine and blue? A few words and I’m floating
once again in the ancient salted sea, the ruins of monasteries and temples
glittering from the shore. You say open my heart to let the trapezoids fly out,
and oh, the geometric longing—I hear the whoosh of Icarus starting up, all
golden hair and triangle of flesh. You say iridescent wings and I think of
cerulean warblers, lovely cubes of blue, flitting beneath the traffic of the day.

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 Sonja Livingston 8 9

And yes, I failed that tenth-grade exam, but still hold tight to cylinders
and stars and parallelograms. Even I understand certain rules of physics,
such as the way a wing— born of muscle and feather— has no choice but to
work toward flight. The way the line opposite the right angle is not only
essential for certain mathematical equations but can be beautiful too—the
tug of it as it travels from its source, long and measurable and true. The way
the color of the sea just off the coast of Crete belongs to every last one of us,
but brings me most of all back to you.

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10 8

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