On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books Classics)

by William H. Gass

  Unless we continue to drain through the cunt till we reach metaphor, as Henry Miller often does:

  A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up with divans and cosy corners and rubber teeth and syringas and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent, and so soft and restful that I lay like a dolphin on the oyster banks. A slight twitch and I’d be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling sea-crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops.

  It’s true that Miller occasionally forgets himself. Still, he should be forgiven what we all want: forgetting within the fuck. Love is a nervous habit. Haven’t many said so? Snacking. Smoking. Talking. Joking. Alike as light bulbs. Drinking. Drugging. Frigging. Fucking. Writing. Forgetting. Nerves. Nerves, nerves, nerves. Our author does not, in fact, get sufficiently inside his line, forget enough to be forgiven. He talks too much, compulsively, his memory is made of suspiciously precise lies, the over—large anecdotal detail—yowl, stance, and quim size, garlic and onion, vestibule or stairway—like one of those guides at the Vatican.

  • • •

  The common deer in its winter coat is said by hunters to be in the blue. To be in the blue is to be isolated and alone. To be sent to the blue room is to be sent to solitary, a chamber of confinement devoted to the third degree. It’s to be beaten by police, or, if you are a metal, heated until the more refrangible rays predominate and the ore is stained like those razor blades the sky is sometimes said to be as blue as, for example, when you’re suddenly adrift on a piece of cake or in a conversation feel a wind from outer space chill your teeth like a cube of ice. Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow? Let us move our minds as we must, for form was once only the schoolyard of a life, the simple boundary of a being who, pulsating like an artery, drew a dark line like Matisse drew always around its own pale breath. Blue oak. Blue poplar. Blue palm. There are no blue bugs of note, although there are blue carpenter bees, blue disk longhorn beetles, blue-winged wasteland grasshoppers, one kind of butterfly, bottle-fly, the bird, and not a single wasp or spider. The muff, the fur, the forest, and the grot.

  So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend, sight, the sovereign sense and concept’s chief content, blurs. ‘The lover,’ Rilke wrote, ‘is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.’

  A flashlight held against the skin might just as well be off. Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content, that the intensity of that content quickly outruns its apparent cause, that the full experience becomes finally inarticulate, and that there is no major art that works close in. Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed.

  Caspar Goodwood suddenly takes Isabel Archer in his arms: ‘His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread and spread again, and stayed . . .’ and Henry James, quite unconsciously, goes on to say that ‘it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession.’ But he never made this mistake again.

  The blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue john is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are Yankee boys. Mercurial ointment, used for the destruction of parasites, is called blue butter, although that greenish-blue fungus we’ve all seen cover bread is named blue-mold instead.

  So Barth wisely remarks that the lady was ravished unmercifully and turns his hero sadly away. But the deck of the Cyprian is not in this world. Would we be content here, where we are, napkin at neck, to stare distantly at our beef, to receive reports that we had eaten without the pleasures of the chewing? No—only close-ups will content us here. We approach, indeed, until it’s entered us. The difference between ‘the beef’ and ‘the blue’ may seem at the same time too wide and too narrow to be of significance. Although, in many ways, these appetites are quite alike, there is no comparable literary mode dedicated to the seared and steaming flank; the mark of every tooth is nowhere with joy recorded; the floods of saliva, the growls which empty from the throat, the delight of every bite and swallow, the slice of the knife, its grate on the plate beneath, the hot . . . the glands groan as I describe it . . . the spicy hot sauce in which the sausage swims . . . there’s no Homer for them; there’s no Henry Miller either, or Akbar del Piombo; there’s only James Beard and Julia Child, masters of the shopping list.

  As writers we don’t hesitate to interrupt murders, stand time on its tail, put back to front, and otherwise arrange events in our chosen aesthetic order, but how many instances of such coitus interruptus are there in the books which speak to us so frankly of the life we never frankly lead? how often does insertion come before erection, weak knees anticipate the kiss?

  I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing.

  • • •

  The worship of the word must be pagan and polytheistic. It cannot endure one god. The Scots use blue brilliantly, for instance, and have their own term, blae, for gray blue, lead blue, and livid. The hedge-chanter is better known to them as the blue hafit, and if we pursue their names for the lumpsucker or sea owl, a fish of uncouth appearance, we come upon bluepaidle, or the even more common cockpaidle. The dictionary is as disturbing as the world, full of teasing parallels and misleading coincidence. The same fish is called a paddlecock on account of the tubercular skin which envelopes its dorsal ridge and which resembles the comb of that barnyard lord.

  Suppose the name of any maiden’s private part were known to her alone. Suppose the name of Ellen’s pout were Rosalie. Then that name, if we came into possession of it, would argue an intimacy for us no parent or lover could overlook, as though we had been privy to the mole on her mount of Venus. From the first ‘In the beginning . . .’ words have been thought to have magical properties. They can, we are assured by authorities, persuade, snare, frighten, bless. They can stimulate, damn, anger, kill, caress. If signs are not the same as the things they designate, they are at least an essential segment, so that to speak the word, Rosalie, is to be halfway to Ellen’s occupation. Look how the blood rises in her bottle-skinny neck. What was naïve in the magician was the belief that things have names at all, but equally naïve are the learned and reasonable who reject any connection beyond the simply functional between blue and blue, Ellen’s beard and Rosalie. Words are properties of thoughts, and thoughts cannot be thought without them. We are truly in the blue, and if we try to think blue without thinking blue, we are forced into euphemism: Ellen’s pretty promenade, we say, Ellen’s merry whiskered friend, the South Pole Santa Claus, and so forth.

  Which brings us to Fanny Hill, a dirty book without a dirty word; nor is the work as successfully suggestive as its title. There are plenty of explicitly sexual scenes, but ‘amorous engine’ is as blunt as Cleland can bring himself to be. He had a deep sense for the blush in blue language. As Christian Enzensberger has recently observed:

  Its [language’s] reaction to smut is inevitably one of impotence if not downright hostility. It resists, begins to stammer, if
dirty words have to be pronounced it does so, but sulkily, dutifully as it were, in the most unfeeling way, which is to say by means of onomatopoeia; in short, language becomes as embarrassed as the speaker himself and prefers to take refuge in indirect speech. (Smut: an Anatomy of Dirt)

  Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language, a slight light blue book, was written in the twenties. There its author, Robert Graves, repeats Samuel Butler’s definition of Nice People as ‘people with dirty minds’ in order to point out that his book was written for Nice People like that, and partly to apologize for its discretions.

  Observe with what delicacy I have avoided and still avoid writing the words x—— and y——, and dance round a great many others of equally wide popular distribution. I have yielded to the society in which I move, which is an obscene society: that is, it acquiesces emotionally in the validity of the taboo, while intellectually objecting to it. I have let a learned counsel go through these pages with a blue pencil and strike through paragraph after paragraph of perfectly clean writing.

  These scrupulosities are no longer necessary. I do not practice them. Yet I cannot honestly say I see any noteworthy improvement in our life, thought, or writing, now that ‘fuck’ can be heard and seen in public, because its appearance is as unmeant and hypocritical as its former absence was. We fear to seem a prude. We fear also the loss of revenues. So we green pencil in the penis, then yellow it out for prick. Cock is okay but only schoolboys have dicks. Thus civilization advances by humps and licks.

  Of course every soldier-sport-and-buddy book believes that you can’t kill either animals or people without swearing at something first. Since one honors the animals one is about to murder, you must swear at your beaters. There are no girls in foxholes, as everyone knows, so there’s no occasion for sex (we should smile in our amorous wisdom at this remark); there is much manliness, however, which consists of saying ‘shit’ with every breath you haven’t used up spitting. Each rifle is erect. It would be hard to imagine a work in which there were all sorts of words for dogs, cats, and cows, their natures and parts (as in the expression, ‘by doggies’), without a single animal appearing in it (certainly not a dog, a cat, or a cow), but this is normal in the literature of strong (that is to say, embarrassed) speech. Strength of this kind, of course, is the visible side of weakness, and requires a special use for language which I should like to set aside for mention later.

  The following verses from World War I, which Graves quotes, illustrate nicely the imaginative meanness of tough talk.

  THE AUSTRALIAN POEM

  A sunburnt bloody stockman stood,

  And in a dismal, bloody mood

  Apostrophized his bloody cuddy:

  ‘This bloody moke’s no bloody good,

  He doesn’t earn his bloody food,

  Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!’

  He leapt upon his bloody horse

  And galloped off, of bloody course.

  The road was wet and bloody muddy:

  It led him to the bloody creek;

  The bloody horse was bloody weak,

  ‘Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!’

  He said, ‘This bloody steed must swim,

  The same for me as bloody him!’

  The creek was deep and bloody floody.

  So ere they reached the bloody bank

  The bloody steed beneath him sank—

  The stockman’s face a bloody study

  Ejaculating Bloody! bloody! bloody!

  There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren’t nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they’re not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough.

  Contrary to those romantic myths which glorify the speech of mountain men and working people, Irish elves and Phoenician sailors, the words which in our language are worst off are the ones which the worst-off use. Poverty and isolation produce impoverished and isolated minds, small vocabularies, a real but fickle passion for slang, most of which is like the stuff which Woolworths sells for ashtrays, words swung at random, wildly, as though one were clubbing rats, or words misused in an honest but hopeless attempt to make do, like attacking tins with toothpicks; there is a dominance of cliché and verbal stereotype, an abundance of expletives and stammer words: you know, man, like wow! neat, fabulous, far-out, sensaysh. I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues . . . allow them a language as lousy as their lives.

  Thin in content, few in number, constantly abused: what chance do the unspeakables have? Change is resisted fiercely, additions are denied. I have introduced ‘squeer,’ ‘crott,’ ‘kotswinkling,’ and ‘papdapper,’ with no success. Sometimes obvious substitutes, like ‘socksucker,’ catch on, but not for long. What we need, of course, is a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine fuck from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one—a fack from a fick, a fick from a fock—but we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses, and our earthy words are all . . . well . . . ‘dirty.’ It says something dirty about us, no doubt, because in a society which had a mind for the body and other similarly vital things, there would be a word for coming down, or going up, words for nibbles on the bias, earlobe loving, and every variety of tongue track. After all, how many kinds of birds do we distinguish?

  We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming. In fact our entire vocabulary for states of consciousness is critically impoverished.

  The forbidden words may be forbidden, but we sneak them in. First we pretend to be using another word which happens to resemble the forbidden one exactly, as in this exchange between Romeo and Mercutio. Romeo begins:

  Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,

  Too rude, too boistrous, and it pricks like thorn ...

  To which Mercutio replies:

  If love be rough with you, be rough with love;

  Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down ...

  Prick, cock, screw, balls, bust, bang, suck, lick . . . the list is endless, and endlessly uninteresting.

  The raw rude word may appear submerged, as when an angry Hamlet asks Ophelia if he may lie in her lap, and she says:

  No, my lord.

  I mean, my head upon your lap.

  Aye, my lord.

  Do you think I meant country matters?

  . . . a line in which ‘cunt’ is concealed by a tree.

  I think nothing, my lord.

  That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

  What is, my lord?

  Nothing.

  There is the love inside of glove, the ass in brass, the dung in dungeon, and even the pee in perspective. It is necessary to rub the little-boy smirk off these words before they can be used with any success, and introducing them in these angular ways sometimes helps. Although rarely.

  The fact is: they aren’t loved enough. Almost every English poet writes of love and fornication, enjoys describing women as if they were fields awaiting subdivision. Does not our Dr. Donne, himself, cry out: Oh, my America, my new-found-land? Indeed. But he keeps the language clean. When it comes to sexual directness and plain speech, Burns probably surpasses, but even he has the advantage of a dialect extraordinarily rich in sweet blue words like gamahuche* and

  Then gie the lass her fairin’, lad,

  O gie the lass her fairin’,

  An’ she’ll gie you a hairy thing,

  An’ of it be na sparin’;

  But lay her o’er amang the creels,

  An’ bar the door wi’ baith your heels,

  The mair she gets, the mair she squeals,

  An’ hey for houghmagandie.

  . . . which may account for the fact that I could never take Mahatma Gandhi very seriously.

  Walt Whitman, who was indeed daring
in his day, was rarely convincing. In truth, America’s great maker of lists was usually sappy:

  This is the female form.

  A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,

  It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,

  I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,

  Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,

  Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,

  Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,

  Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,

  Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,

  Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,

  Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

  Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

  Poets who would never meter their stick or brag of their balls; who would never vulgarly vaunt of their lady’s vaginal grip or be publicly proud of her corpulent tits, succumb to the menace of measurement. Rossetti, while he kisses, counts.