A Vat of Blue

Blue is a slow color.

Zhoucheng, mid-afternoon. The lanes are packed-earth yellow, and then you turn a corner and a whole wall is blue. Cloth hung on bamboo poles, not yet dry, so deep it's nearly black. The wind moves through and the wall stirs, like water, like someone breathing.

I stood there a long time, saying nothing. Some of the blue is close to night — the kind just fallen, not yet settled. Some is close to the sea, far out. And one, dipped over and over, is nearly black, as if all the blues had been laid on top of one another.

The dyer had his back to me, lifting cloth from the vat. It was heavy with water. The strange thing: it came out not blue but a dull yellow-green, like something not yet awake. He shook it loose, hung it, turned to other work, didn't look at it.

I kept watching that cloth. After a while — a few minutes, no more — the yellow-green began to turn. From the edges the blue rose slowly inward, the yellow draining out, as though something under the surface were waking. Only when it had gone blue all the way through did he glance back. Alive now, he said.

I asked what was alive. The blue, he said. It isn't a pigment, it's leaves left to rot, kept in the vat — alive. It breathes. It gets hungry. It dies. Tended well, a vat lasts two or three years; tended badly, in a few days it turns pale and sour and you pour the whole thing out. The first thing he does each morning is read the vat, the way you'd read a face.

What I watched were his hands. The blue worked into the nail-beds, the lines of the palm, the creases of the knuckles, dark over light, like a river drawn on a hand. Not dirt. Days. One vat a day, three hundred-odd vats a year, and over the decades the blue had grown down into the flesh along the lines of his palm.

The cloth leaves. Hung, taken down, boxed, sent somewhere far, to settle on the shoulder of someone I'll never meet. The hands stay. Year after year, dyeing themselves the color of the cloth, then sending the cloth away.

Does it wash off, I asked. Doesn't wash off, so it doesn't, he said. There's another vat tomorrow. A lifetime in the vat — his hands stopped being his own long ago. They belong to the blue.

Near dark, the light came in low across the cloth. A little violet in the blue, then a little grey. No two were the same. The blue you see today won't be here tomorrow.

Like waiting for a photograph to develop. Standing in a darkroom, watching something surface out of nothing. There's nothing to do but wait — wait for it to decide what it will become.

Blue is a slow color. So slow you take it for still, when all the while it's moving. In the vat, on the cloth, on a person's hands. Always moving.