I dream I am being swallowed by a great blue nothing.
My lungs are thick with it, with all this colour, as if perhaps I have been engulfed by water, but my breath comes slow and easy and I understand, within my dreaming, that whatever this blue is, it is not hostile. I am unsettled, unnerved, untethered, but I am not in danger. I also understand why I am here, in this ethereal swallowing.
In another world, in the body that is really my body and not this nebulous dreambody, I’d been reading about spatial disorientation. About how divers, down in the deep, can lose their sense of place so completely that they have no idea in which direction the sky sits. Pilots, too, can lose every sense of what is up and what is down. Surrounded by their great blue nothings – the blues they have yearned for, chased, allowed their small bodies to be engulfed by – pilot and diver are both swallowed by the big empty bellies of sky and sea.
I was thinking of this as I fell asleep: the way blue, usually so innocuous, could become menacing through no fault of its own. Like a baleen whale’s gigantic, innocent cave of a mouth might become if you found yourself in its path.
In my dream, I am remembering my non-dreambody, my realbody, falling asleep while thinking about divers and pilots and whale mouths and I become disoriented all over again, a maze within a maze, lost in all the blue hues of my subconscious. I wake just as a whale’s throat engulfs me. In the liminal space between sleeping and waking, I feel the duvet against my skin and think it is the tickle of baleen.
Blue has been on my mind a lot lately. On this island, I often feel swallowed by it.
I think of it as a sort of holy colour. I realised this when I first moved here, but it wasn’t until I was floating on my back in an ocean far too cold for the sane that I pinned down the reason why: it is because blue is both real and illusion. The sea appears to be a thousand shades of blue, but pool the water in the palm of your hand and it is clear, colourless. And the islands in the distance look blue, too. On clear days, I can see North Ronaldsay, sometimes even Fair Isle – a thin blue lip kissing the ocean’s edge, almost not there, just visible in my periphery1. But those islands are, of course, not blue. Blue is just the colour of the distance between them and me.
When I mentioned my current obsession with blue to a friend, she sent me Rebecca Solnit’s essay The Blue of Distance (thank you Lydia). Yes, I thought as I read. Yes, yes, yes – blue is the colour of distance, of yearning, of possibility, of solitude, of where you are not and where you can never go. Blue is the colour of edges and edgelessness.
But why is the ocean blue, the distance blue, the sky blue (or, at least, perceived as blue2)? The ocean is blue because blue light has one of the shortest wavelengths, and while water absorbs long wavelengths of light, it reflects shorter ones. This means we see the sea as blue. Because blue light has short wavelengths, this also means that it scatters more than other colours when it hits particles in our atmosphere. When we look to the sky and when we look to the distance, there is a lot of atmosphere between our eyes and what we are looking at – and so there is a lot of scattered light.
The colour of distance is the colour of scattering.
Over the last two weeks, I have been scattering the ashes of three of my grandparents. Across various English moorlands, I have stood beneath the wide blue sky and watched ashes return to earth.
The day before we scattered the ashes of my nana and grandpa on Dartmoor, I saw a magpie with a beautiful iridescent tail – beetle-blue and glimmering. It looked brand new. The bird, the feather. I googled it later – how it is that a feather can shine blue. It’s complicated, and to put it simply it probably to butcher the beauty of it, but it is essentially because of the way light scatters across structures within the feathers’ cells.
The next day, watching ashes float across the moors, I thought of all these scatterings – ash and light and feather. They felt as if they should thread neatly into something whole, some sort of lesson or message or story. But then I thought perhaps it is okay that they do not; it is okay to find all these fragmented things beautiful, and for them to stay fragmented, with no thread to weave them neatly into one. Sometimes I try too hard to make the world neat, to weave things together, to make a whole that makes sense. Writers can do this, I think. And scientists. We can try so hard to make the world linear, to create a narrative, that we lose the nuance of the very thing we are trying to capture.
The next week, the day after we bury my grandad’s ashes in Yorkshire, I see another magpie. The sky is, once again, a bright and swallowing blue, and I am floating in the orange-tinged waters of the Ribble. The magpie hops to the edge of the water, its beetle-blue tail feathers shining bright against the rocks.
Beautiful, scattering light.
As we’ve been travelling the country with our boxes full of ashes, I have been thinking about grief. How it is not linear. How it weaves in and out of our beings, becomes a part of our fabric. How it feels a little fragmented, a little scattered, a little edgeless.
After my nana passed away a couple of years ago, I became fascinated by the science of grief. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was trying to make sense of it. Some people turn to church, I turned to google scholar. I wanted to know the evolutionary origins of grief. Whether it was a human phenomenon or rooted somewhere deeper, somewhere shared with other life. I was just coming to the end of my PhD on the evolution of animal cognition and social bonds, and so it was not too tangential for me to end up there, day after day, reading about comparative thanatology (the study of human and non-human reactions to the dead and dying). Or at least, it was justifiably tangential.
There is strong evidence that some non-human species grieve3. Perhaps this is obvious to those who pay attention. But it is certainly not obvious to all. Around one in ten of us think that animals do not grieve (and the older we get, the more likely we are to think this)4.
Many of the species that show evidence of grief-related behaviours (primates, whales, elephants) have big, complicated brains, but a big brain is not a necessity. Prairie voles (a rodent) show behavioural and physiological changes that suggest they grieve. Prairie voles form lifelong pair-bonds, and following the death of a partner they have increased levels of stress hormones, increased heart rates, increased immunoreactivity, dysregulated nervous systems, and they will not form a new pair-bond for a month or more5, which is a long time in the two-year life of a vole. It seems that grief does not require a big brain, it just requires strong, enduring social relationships.
Grief is the mirror of the quality of a bond.
Or, to put it in human terms, grief is the mirror of love6.
There is so much we cannot know about how other species experience the world, so much we cannot comprehend because we experience life through the lens and limitations of our human bodies. We will never know how it feels to be a pair-bonded prairie vole. We will never know how it feels to be an elephant grieving her calf, or a chimpanzee grieving his sister. But we can see we share the substrates of emotion. That at a behavioural, neurobiological and endocrinological level, grief looks similar across species.
There is something important in that, isn’t there? Something beautiful and brutal, I think – that this pain, this flipside of the beauty of deep relationships, is woven into the fabric of being alive. That we are all united here, on this earth, in the shadow and the light.
I sometimes wonder if dreaming is the closest we will ever get to understanding how other species might perceive the world. When I float in that big blue nothing and the great cave of a whale’s mouth is opening like a black hole before me, do I – just for a moment – get close to the feeling of being krill? Perhaps it is wishful thinking. Perhaps our imaginations are as limited by our biology as our conscious perception. I like to think this is not true, though. I like to think dreams might tip us over the edge just enough for us to get closer to some other species’ perception of the world. Or at least enough to begin to understand just how otherworldly another species’ perception could be.
If I had to give dreams a colour, they would be blue. A little bit real, a little bit unreal. Edgeless. The colour of possibility. Of distance. Of almosts.
But grief would be blue, too. And love. All the things that scatter us, all the things that blur our edges, within and without. All the beginnings, all the ends, all the threads binding us together.
Maybe I’d go so far as to say blue is the colour I’d give a mind, a life. All minds. All life.
One thousand hues of blue – edgeless, scattering.
I really enjoyed Margaret O’Brien’s musings on peripheral vision and the creative journey this week.
For the sake of clarity, I should say that what I mean by grief is a behavioural and physiological response to the death of a social partner that indicates deep distress. Some scientists/philosophers think that grief requires a concept of death, but this is not what I mean by grief here. Here, I am talking about grief as the emotional, embodied experience of distress caused by long-term separation from a loved one. We don’t actually know if any other species understands the concept of death (although scientists are trying to figure this out). Anyway, if you want to read more about animal grief, this article and this paper are brilliant starting points.
If you’re interested, you can read more about the study here. Note that the study was conducted in Australia, and it’s unclear how generalisable the results are to a general population.
Chloe Hope wrote about this in Death & Birds last week. She says “there are few greater displays of love than grief”. Read her piece and be astonished.
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Dogs definitely grieve. When I moved to Aotearoa, my beautiful border collie/ lab cross, Boadicea, (brave and strong and free) had to go into a kennel for 6 weeks. Meanwhile, I ran around getting our house sorted and trips back to Australia to sell the car. I dropped in to see her and play once or twice in the midst of the muddle, but that's all. When I went to pick her up in my just-bought Nissan van, she rushed out, was delighted to get on the front bench seat with me, ready to go. Then..... she moved over to my lap, pressed herself against my chest and whimpered. I held her close. Told her it was ok now, so eventually she went and sat down on her side. But before I chould drive off, she did it again, this time howling as well, for about 10 minutes while I loved and stroked her. Eventually she was sure. She saw that this was not a brief visit. I was not going to leave her again. She gave me another good 15 years of her beloved life. I miss her still.
My cat grieved the loss of her friend, my mum's elderly dog, when she was a year old. I've seen horses grieve for their herd mates too. I think grief is universal. In terms of being a human grief os baptism by fire. It's the making of the self and the reforging that makes you stronger as you come out the other side of the process.
I don't dream of the colour blue, but I do dream of water, especially waves. My wave dreams happen when I'm emotionally overwhelmed. I also had persistent dreams about a tsunami on Phuket island a few years before it ever happened, I was just a kid. I'd never been to Thailand, I still haven't. I appreciate science has no explanation for that besides coincidence. What I'm saying is that dreams tell you a lot about yourself in the most abstract ways.
This essay was a beautiful read. 😊