"My work said nothing about the cosmos that the cosmos wasn't already capable of saying for itself. More importantly, it said nothing about me. So what if I walked in vacuum, or swam in seas of liquid nitrogen? So what if l could see ultraviolet photons, or taste electrical fields? The modifications I inflicted upon myself were gruesome and extreme. But they gave me nothing that a good telepresence drone couldn't offer any artist." 

"I think you're being a little harsh on yourself," I said. 

"Not at all. I can say this now because I know that I did eventually create something worthwhile. But when it happened it was completely unplanned." 

"You mean the blue stuff?" 

"The blue stuff," he said, nodding. "It began by accident: a misapplication of colour on a nearly-finished canvas. A smudge of pale, aquamarine blue against near-black. The effect was electric. It was as if I had achieved a short-circuit to some intense, primal memory, a realm of experience where that colour was the most important thing in my world." 

"What was that memory?" 

"I didn't know. All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free." He thought for a moment. "There's always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. 

He wept for joy." 

“我的作品并不能告诉人们宇宙的某种讯息，因为宇宙本身并不会透露任何讯息。更重要的是，我的作品也不会透露任何关于我的情况。这些画跟我能在真空中走、在液氮海洋里游泳有什么关系？跟我能够看见紫外线、感知电磁场又有什么关系？在我身上实施的改造是极端残忍的。这些改造不能给我带来任何东西，就像是一个远程观测无人机并不能变成艺术家。  

“我觉得你对自己是不是有点太苛刻了。”我说。

“一点都不。我能这样说是因为我知道自己曾经创造出一些有价值的事物。但是它的发生是我完全预料不到的。”  

“你指的是齐玛蓝？”  

“齐玛蓝，”他点点头说。“它的出现是个意外：在一幅差不多完成的画布上用错了颜色。一块苍白的污点，颜色介于宝石蓝与墨绿色之间。然而这块污点似乎是带了电的，我感觉自己的大脑瞬间短路了，激起了某种强烈的、原始的记忆。我有一种感觉：这种颜色曾经是我生命中最重要的东西。”  

“那是一种什么样的记忆？”  

“我不知道。我感觉到的就是这种颜色在跟我说话，就好像我花了整整一辈子的时间才找到了它，把它解放出来。”他想了一会儿。“这种蓝色肯定代表着某种事物。一千年前，伊夫•克莱因曾经说过蓝色就是颜色中的精华，能够代表其他所有的颜色。他就是这样一个人，花费了整整一生去寻找童年记忆中的那抹独特的蓝色。后来，他绝望了，觉得根本就找不到这样的蓝色。如此精确的色调肯定是他自己想象出来的，自然界可能就不存在这样的颜色。然而某一天，他却偶然地发现了它。那是自然历史博物馆里一个甲壳虫标本的颜色。他喜极而泣。”