From Crispin Sartwell, "Six Names of Beauty" (Routledge 2004)
Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea)
Description: 5 ½" (14 cm). Sparrow sized. Male in bright sunlight brilliant turquoise blue, otherwise looks black; wings and tail darker. Female drab brown, paler beneath.
Voice: Rapid, excited warble, each note or phrase repeated.
Habitat: Brushy slopes, abandoned farmland, old pastures and fields grown up to scrub, woodland clearings, and forest edge adjacent to fields.
Nesting: 3 or 4 pale blue eggs in a compact woven cup of leaves and grass placed within a few feet of the ground among relatively thick vegetation.
Range: New England to the Gulf states, west to Kansas and Texas. Winters chiefly from Mexico and the West Indies south to Panama.
Indigo Buntings have no blue pigment; they are actually black, but the diffraction of light through the structure of the feathers makes them appear blue. These attractive birds are also found in rural roadside thickets and along the right-of-way of railroads, where woodland meets open areas. They are beneficial to the farmer and fruit grower, consuming many insect pests and weed seeds.
I've got a few quibbles with this description from The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region. First of all, the IB is never "turquoise," which suggests a lightish blue-green: it is deeply and luxuriously blue. Lapis Lazuli, the name of a blue gemstone which often has gold pyrite inclusions, is a better term, but of course closer to right for the IB's cousin the Lazuli Bunting, which is a bit lighter and less stunning; with its light-to-rosy breast the Lazuli Bunting is similar to the eastern bluebird, though with a more gem-like head. "Indigo" is right because it refers to a dye - traditionally the most indelible of dyes, but also beautiful even as it fades (for example in denim) - that produces a deep, burnished blue glow.
The indigo plant is a legume that is grown not only for dye but to refresh the soil, and was traditionally cultivated mostly in the Gurjurat and Sind regions, and later in Bengal. The Greek term is indikum, which essentially just means something from India. The color - imported into Europe by among others, the East India Company - was a valuable trade commodity for centuries. Indigo was used as a pigment by the Egyptians in their mummy wrappings, and by the Greeks and Romans in paints. In medieval Christian iconography, the Virgin often appears wrapped in indigo-colored robes, suggestive of both purity and power. During the Crusades indigo became one of the valued "spices" that Italian merchants acquired in Cyprus, Alexandria and Baghdad, endpoints of caravans from the east. Marco Polo described its cultivation in India, and it was the first commercial crop in Louisiana, though this was probably a native American relative rather than the Asian plant. M. De Beauvais Raseau, writing about indigo cultivation in the Eighteenth Century, stated that American tribes had long employed indigo as a dye. They used it, among other things, to darken their hair. Indigo has also been used for eye shadow. The French colony of Saint Domingo eventually became the largest producer of indigo in the new world. "Pigeon neck" - so called because of its prismatic colors - was the most valuable grade of indigo in the Americas, and during the American Revolution, small cubes of indigo were used for money when all forms of paper currency became worthless.
The process of extracting dye from Indigo is said in India to make women sterile. Descriptions of indigo production in Louisiana claim that the dye-producing process "repulsed livestock," "killed fish in streams," and was so "disgusting and disagreeable" that it "on average killed every Negro employed in its culture in the short space of five years." The notion that indigo is toxic seem puzzling given that the indigo legume is often fed to animals in Latin America.
The journal Nature in 1900, described the process of dye production as follows:
The cut plant is tied into bundles, which are then packed into the fermenting vats and covered with clear fresh water. The vats, which are usually made of brick lined with cement, have an area of about 400 square feet and are 3 feet deep, are arranged in two rows, the tops of the bottom or "beating vats" being generally on a level with the bottoms of the fermenting vats. The indigo plant is allowed to steep till the rapid fermentation, which quickly sets in, has almost ceased, the time required being from 10-15 hours. The liquor, which varies from a pale straw colour to a golden-yellow, is then run into the beaters, where it is agitated either by men entering the vats and beating with oars, or by machinery. The colour of the liquid becomes green, then blue, and, finally, the indigo separates out as flakes, and is precipitated to the bottom of the vats. The indigo is allowed to thoroughly settle, when the supernatant liquid is drawn off. The pulpy mass of indigo is then boiled with water for some hours to remove impurities, filtered through thick woollen or coarse canvas bags, then pressed to remove as much of the moisture as possible, after which it is cut into cubes and finally air-dried.
Indigo dye, then, is an "essence" produced by filtering and evaporation. And though we would in general associate the idea of essence with metaphysics or with scent, it refers just as clearly to the process and to the product of purification, to the identity of what is at the center of a substance in any sense modality, including vision. Most indigo dye is now synthetic (the process was invented in Germany in 1897), though there is agreement that the synthetic dye is neither as beautiful nor as indelible as the plant essence.
Back to the bird. Contrary to Audubon, the indigo bunting appears perfectly blue on a cloudy day as well as in full sun. It's an interesting idea, though, that the IB is "really" black, when I would have said it is the single bluest thing I have ever seen. Perhaps we should say that its way of being blue, the situation in which it is blue, is different from that of some other blue things, being a matter not of "pigment" but of "structure." But nothing is blue in the absence of a perceptual situation, and the situations in which an IB is juxtaposed with human visual apparatus is as blue a situation as any. Yet the IB's way of being blue is nevertheless relevant, because the structure lends a depth, a glow that indeed seems pervasive rather than being a matter of surface, as if the IB were blue all the way through, permeated by indigo.
The description of the IB's habitat is also relevant to this perceptual situation, because in almost every instance the description of the habitat makes use of human alterations to the environment, as in abandoned fields, railroad cuts, and so on. It's as though the IB has resolved to maintain itself on the fringe of our awareness, or in the interstice between the wild and artifactual environment, as though to show us its blue and then conceal it: to give it and withold it. And the bunting is elusive: though I have watched one at my feeder over the course of a day, it is always flitting off into the leaves and returning; its metabolism is incredibly fast and it flies in and out of the visual field as well as the meadow in such a way as to emphasize the preciousness of each moment of sight, even where real rarity is not an issue.
Bird books, including volume 3 of The Audubon Society Master Guide to Birding and the Golden Field Guide often feature the IB on their covers, in the latter case side by side with the eastern bluebird and the painted bunting, commonly described as "the most colorful of all songbirds." I've glimpsed painted buntings on trips south, but always so quickly that I couldn't quite take the intensity and variety of colors on board: too small, too fast, too various in its reds, purples, greens, blues, elusive as some sort of tiny rainbow (an effect also accomplished by refraction). But in the books themselves buntings appear frozen in paintings and photographs, available for an aesthetic delectation that can never quite get going in the context of real tiny birds as they peck and perch and return. This has the effect of turning the experience of a continuous reception and loss into something you can have, always, or whenever you like. But of course that is opposed in many ways to the experience itself which motivates it, the fugitive and elusive moment of contact with a creature that lives at a faster tempo than we do, that holds our attention and evades our experience simultaneously by the deployment and withdrawal of its glow into our sensory field.
It is a nice question whether and how and what colors mean. Some thinkers and artists have worked out systems that correlate colors and moods, for example, as is enshrined in the phrases "the blues" or "seeing red" etc. Others have also worked out correlations between musical tones or progressions and colors, and there are even machines that interpret music as sequences of colors and shapes. I admit that I am skeptical of these moves, and my view is that they attenuate in some ways the immediacy of the experience of something like the IB. It is actually very hard to say something about the reasons for our response to colors, and correlations to emotions or to other aspects of experience such as sound allow us at least to keep talking. And, of course, to call blue a "cool" color seems very compelling. But yesterday I saw my IB playing or battling with a cardinal across my yard, in an astounding and continuously transforming juxtaposition of color, and I wasn't thinking of hot and cold or happy and sad or Mahler: I was completely absorbed in the scene, not a symbolism, working just to try to keep track rather than on interpretation: thus it was a call to the present moment: a kind of destruction of all hermeneutics. Nevertheless, correlations of colors and moods are proverbial, and there is something - though perhaps not as much as is frequently imagined - in the idea.
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The great Duke Ellington standard "Mood Indigo" has been recorded by everyone from Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong to Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk to Frank Sinatra and Patti Austin. "You ain't been blue till you've had that mood indigo." It is an elusive melody: so much so that you can listen to a whole disk of recordings of it (as I am right now) and not really experience, without considerable concentration, that it only contains versions of the same song. But they certainly all occur within a single mood, as the title indicates, a mood of melancholy, first of all, which "indigo" indicates by its connection to the music and the state of mind of the blues. And yet the atmosphere is not merely melancholy; it's sumptuous, we might say: deep, as though one were taking pleasure in melancholy, welcoming it, relaxing into it in its familiarity, its gentleness, and the slow dissolution of consciousness that it promises. Rather than a "tune," "Mood Indigo" is a place for exploration, and though almost all readings of it are slow, they also open up a space in which a piano or horn player can dart in and out. The "color," we might say, is a matter of the structure rather than of pigmentation. It unfolds slowly, but that very luxuriousness is what suggests the possibility of unlimited improvisation. The improvisation is not on a theme, but is within a theme; it arrives as ornamentation for a theme that takes a very long time to develop. Each note, as it were, becomes a place of exploration, and you can experience the theme for its outline or structure, or instead as an environment, inhabited by birds.
