Phillips, a company that produces light bulbs, claims that exposure to the color blue brings calmness and alleviates pain.
Why is it, then, that feeling blue is such a miserable condition?
Artists know that distant landscapes far away from us take on a blue tone. Blue lands are those beyond our reach, however much we want them.
The world also turns blue as it moves toward darkness in the evening. It’s become trendy to warn against exposure to blue light in the evening time, on the grounds that blue light wakes people up, disrupting their circadian rhythms. If that were true, though, wouldn’t standing outside in the dusk make people feel perky? It doesn’t. The blue light of dusk tends to slow people down, bringing them into a contemplative state as a precursor to sleep.
If we look for the meaning of feeling blue only in the physical impact of blue light on human physiology, we’re missing the point. The blue color of a cloudless sky in the middle of the day elicits a cheery feeling in most people, the exact opposite of what people refer to when they talk about whether they have the right to sing the blues. Still, as much as I’d like to distance the feeling of blue from the color, there is an experience of being blue as existing in a world deprived of all other colors. It’s an emotion of the stark limitation of light.
Some say that the use of the word blue as an emotional term has its origin in the color of bruised skin. A blue feeling certainly has some similarity to the soreness that comes after a battering.
Blue is an emotion encountered in the winters of life, occurring in those times when illumination comes in at a low angle, cooling down our reactions to whatever we encounter.
Still, as an emotion, if feeling blue is connected to the color and its connotations, it’s in the sense of the experience of blueness from the inside out, rather than the objective qualities of the electromagnetic oscillations that triggers blue. A blue emotion a coloring of consciousness in a metaphorical sense, a cooling of the mood that’s related to sadness but not exactly the same thing. Feeling blue, we are subject to a filter laid over the world as we know it, screening out the warmer tones of life until we forget that they even exist.
