by Jeff McMahon
Climbing marble stairs between Bodhisattvas, backed by Buddha, one first sees it. The Institute calls it "luminous azure" but it should forever be known as Chagall blue. It streams like aquarium glow down a hallway lined with polearms, swords, shields, helmets, armor. There is something stirring about Chagall blue striking the empty carapaces of long-dead soldiers, something reanimating about a 21st Century sunbeam bent through Chagall's America Windows splashing 20th Century blue onto 16th Century German steel. These locust skins stand in glass cases bathed in blue front and back, for Chagall bounds from every pane and there are many sheets of glass, layered, stacked, spaced, containing gasses set ever so slightly astir by Chagall blue.
(Turn away from Chagall and he returns in reflection. Turn any way and he returns, omnipresent blue.)
Chagall hammers the silver turban of a Persian, the Infidel who even Louis, the Sun King, could not conquer, a little curl of blue on each loop of the mail that veiled a face long gone to dust. Chagall slices through the eyeslit of a 17th Century Milano, no eyes there now, only gold, silver, steel, and brass dimly blue. He alters alchemically the iron of a cavalry helmet; bars forged to deflect heavy blades soften to pewter under Chagall blue.
The crossbows are raised in deference, turned away in respect, but not the matchbook musket, not the rifle. They aim at Chagall, for the firearm is not yet willing to cede its primacy in the field of human arms, no, and certainly not to an elderly Russian French painter with a girlish affection for blue horses.
Chagall defeats them.
Streaks of blue race down the barrels, fall upon the deadly clockwork of flint and steel, set cold atoms abuzz. These metals and woods, wedded by screws, have known only earthly loves -- the rough finger on the trigger, the stubbled cheek on the stock -- but now they feel something that stills their thunder, now they lie in a trance of Chagall blue.
(How does one know what metals and woods feel under the influence of Chagall blue? By one's own feeling while gazing at metals and woods under the influence of Chagall blue.)
Down, down, down beneath the O'Keefe -- Georgia's blue a lovely pale gradient against her pink, but down, really down now, aswim in Chagall, the blue swallows all. Pink dove, yellow sun, birds, people, trees, the rooftops of the City America, it surrounds and overlaps them like a lazuli sea. They are imbued with blue, imblued, under blue as if under a spell, under yet lifted up. So it is, not just with the seen but also with the seers, the passing pausing people in all their prides and prejudice are one color now, swallowed up in blue.
Chagall blue, they should call it, because who has made a color into a force like this, a force for change? (Picasso's Old Guitarist upstairs, a marvel of his blue period, looks as though someone left it too long in the light of Chagall.)
A force for change. Because more serene than the Buddha, more merciful than Boddhisattva, more luminous than azure are the blued faces on the armies of children who march through this light hand-in-hand, seeing, wondering, changing in ways they know but may not know in a moment, may not know again for decades, may never know again, but changed nonetheless -- enriched, expanded, forever altered by exposure to Chagall blue.
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