6. Neither Blue Nor Purple

The subject wants to hide. You want to say something without me knowing that it came from you. You want me to believe you are not here, that the words you speak have a meaning or value beyond what they have for you or me.

You obscure your “I” by speaking in a voice that pretends to come from nowhere. “The sky is blue,” you say. There is no “I” here. Your sentence claims to report an observation about the world with no reference to an observer. Perhaps you want me to believe the claim is true in some incontrovertible way, as though it were an objective fact. Really what you’re telling me is that the sky appears blue to you, and so the truth of your claim depends entirely on the observer, on the subject who is hidden, on you.

If you say “The sky looks blue to me,” then your subjectivity is explicit. You are no longer hidden. I might agree, by saying that it also looks blue to me. Is the sky then blue, objectively? No, it is only blue for the two of us. We might, at any time, encounter a third person who sees it differently. “The sky looks purple to me,” they might say. Their claim might seem wrong to the two of us, but is it? Or is it just that the agreements of language lie so deep inside us that they seem objective?

In any case, at this moment and from my point of view, the sky is neither blue nor purple, but a rusty orange as the sun disappears below the horizon.