Black and Blue - Carol Mavor (moments, and bruises as their symbol)

I picked up this sweet and lovely book from the college library after failing to find a copy of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. Mavor's text heavily references Barthes. The book's purpose seems to be exploring the markedness of people, things, etc, after some impact of history, life, or experience. An exploration of happening which is framed within the two colours, black and blue, predominantly here a symbol of bruising. The book is very visceral in it's exploration of this, and for that reason I like it very much. It feels like a very artistic work in itself, like mist in a book form. It has a lot of fascinating pictures too, and I like books with pictures.

Quotes:

"I was once an infant, without speech, marked by (a black and white) image from the womb."
- Introduction, First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts, pg. 2

"When I first watched A Patch of Blue I was a nine-year-old white girl enjoying the freedom of being just a little sick, of missing school, of drinking ginger ale in the morning and sucking on red, triangular-shaped, deliciously artificially flavored cough drops."
- Introduction, First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts, pg. 5

"One only needs to sink into the wistful longings of Proust: unalloyed blues of the azure sky, beryl blues of the ocean, and melancholic dusky sapphires of the midnight hours."
- Introduction, First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts, pg. 11

"Sometimes, between the time of the pain and when the bruise presents itself, we forget the injury. I am trying to not forget. Bruises are the before-time wounds of always-falling childhood and the after-time of growing old."
- Introduction, First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts, pg. 16.

"This moving image of three Icelandic children in 1965 wounds me. It bruises me with that Barthesian black-and-blue feeling of that which has been."
- Chapter 3, Happiness with a Long Piece of Black Leader: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, pg. 81

"I am eight years old. The Chandelier Tree, with its hidden rings of time and its huge branches, like lamps that light the way to the past, has lived and will live far outside the parameters of my lifetime."
- Chapter 3, Happiness with a Long Piece of Black Leader: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, pg. 109

"I remember the darkened classroom, the sound of the film moving through the sprockets of the reel, the constellation of bits of dust dancing in the projector's light (like a dandelion blown), the shock of seeing fellow students crying, even boys. Still, I can hear the words from the film, especially the bit about the atomic flowers."
- Chapter 4, "Summer Was inside the Marble": Alain Resnais's and Magurite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour, pg. 123