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

by William H. Gass

  Her arms lie open, throbbing with their throng

  Of confluent pulses, bare and fair and strong:

  And her deep-freighted lips expect me now

  Amid the clustering hair that shrines her brow

  Five kisses broad, her neck ten kisses long . . .

  Lately, Yeats approached the problem, and Pound had occasional success, the most notable, I suppose, this passage from Canto XXXIX:

  Desolate is the roof where the cat sat,

  Desolate is the iron rail that he walked

  And the corner post whence he greeted the sunrise.

  In hill path: ‘thkk, thgk’

  of the loom

  ‘Thgk, thkk’ and the sharp sound of a song

  under olives

  When I lay in the ingle of Circe

  I heard a song of that kind.

  Fat panther lay by me

  Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,

  All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards,

  Lions loggy with Circe’s tisane,

  Girls leery with Circe’s tisane. . .

  Lovely as this is, the rest of his frankness is in Latin and Greek.

  No, they are not well-enough loved, and the wise writer watches himself, for with so much hate inside them—in ‘bang,’ in ‘screw,’ in ‘prick,’ in ‘piece,’ in ‘hump’—how can he be sure he has not been infected—by ‘slit,’ by ‘gash’—and his skills, supreme while he’s discreet, will not fail him? Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed. Lawrence is perhaps the saddest example.

  • • •

  There’s the blue skin of cold, contusion, sickness, fear . . . absent air, morbidity, the venereals, blue pox . . . gloom . . .

  There are whole schools of fish, clumps of trees, flocks of birds, bouquets of flowers: blue channel cats, the ash, beech, birch, bluegills, breams, and bass, Andalusian fowl, acaras, angels in decorative tanks, the bluebill, bluecap, and blue billy (a petrel of the southern seas), anemone, bindweed, bur, bell, mullet, salmon, trout, cod, daisy, and a blue leaved and flowered mountain plant called the blue beardtongue because of its conspicuous yellow-bearded sterile stamens.

  The mad, as we choose to speak of others who do not share our tastes, provide cases galore of color displacement: they think pink is blue, that brown is blue, that sounds are blue, that over-shoes are condoms, and we have only to describe these crazies directly and they will smuggle the subject in all by themselves. Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented room. The techniques, in any case, are similar.

  Here is Thick, in The Lime Twig of John Hawkes, beating Margaret:

  ‘I’ve beat girls before,’ whispering, holding the truncheon in the dark, bracing himself with one fat hand against the wall, ‘and I don’t leave bruises. . . . And if I happened to be without my weapon . . . the next best thing is a newspaper rolled and soaking wet. But here, get the feel of it, Miss.’ He reached down for her and she felt the truncheon nudging against her thigh, gently, like a man’s cane in a crowd.

  ‘It ain’t so bad,’ he whispered.

  She was lying face up and hardly trembling, not offering to pull her leg away. The position she was tied in made her think of exercises she had heard were good for the figure. She smelled gun oil—the men who visited the room had guns—and a sour odor inside the mattress. . . . There was a shadow on the wall like a rocking chair; her fingers were going to sleep; she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable.

  Then something happened to his face. . ..

  His arm went up quivering, over his head with the truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each blow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at abdomen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field. . . . When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.

  This passage is impossible to overpraise . . . an example of total control: get the feel of it, Miss . . . a man’s cane in a crowd . . . a length of cold fat stripped from a pig . . . a dead bird falling to empty field . . . she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable.

  When a character will not oblige by using a truncheon as a penis, the author must manage the shift himself. Flaubert directs our eyes to the room in which Emma Bovary commits her adulteries, and has the sense, so often absent in his admirers, to be content with that.

  The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its grey ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods, ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the chimney between the candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear.

  A muff, a glove, a stocking, the glass a lover’s lips have touched, the print of a shoe in the snow: how is it that these simple objects can receive our love so well that they increase it? I answer: because they become concepts, lighter than angels, and all the more meaningful because they began as solids, while the body of the beloved, dimpled and lined by the sheeted bed, bucks, sweats, freezes, alters under us, escapes our authority and powers, lacks every dimension, in that final moment, but the sexual, yet will not remain in the world it’s been sent to, and is shortly complaining of an ache. The man with his fetish, like a baby with its blanket, has security—not the simple physical condition (with locks on the doors who is safe?) but the Idea itself. Those pink shells, the curtain-rods ending in arrows, the great balls of the fire-dogs: how absurd they would be in reality, how meaningless, how lacking in system, all higher connection. It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.

  ‘Léa. Give me your pearls. Do you hear me, Léa? Give me your necklace.’

  And shortly this remarkable book has begun, like a head between breasts, to surround us with Colette’s unsurpassed sensuality.

  There was no response from the enormous bed of wrought-iron and copper which shone in the shadow like a coat of mail.

  ‘Why don’t you give me your necklace . . . ?’

  As the clasp snapped, the laces on the bed were roused and two naked arms, magnificent, with thin wrists, lifted two lovely lazy hands.

  ‘Let it alone, Chéri . . .’

  The images are chosen as the pearls were: the bed, the light, the sheets, the pearls, the laces which rouse . . .

  In front of the pink curtains barred by the sun he danced, black as a dainty devil on a grill. But as he drew near the bed he became white again in silk pyjamas above doe-skin mules.

  There is anger in the eyebrows knotted above his nose, a mutinous mouth, the deep bed like a warm pond . . .

  He opened his pyjamas on a chest that was lusterless, hard and curved like a shield: and the same pink high-light played on his teeth, on the whites of his black eyes and on the pearls of the necklace.

  Not a single indecency defines this indecent scene.

  Colette has the cat’s gaze. Unhurried contemplation is her forte. Hunger cannot give us such precision.

  Meanwhile the shadows lengthened on the beach; the blackness deepened. The iron black boot became a pool of deep blue. The rocks lost their hardness. The water that stood round the old boat was dark as if mussels had been steeped in it. The foam had turned livid and left here and there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand.

  The nouns in this passage are all nailed too firmly to their t
hes; otherwise Virginia Woolf’s construction here is sensuous in the same way as Colette’s: observant, thoughtful, loving, calm.

  • • •

  Pink and white and the blackbird black of Chéri’s glistening hair are the colors Colette has chosen for Léa’s and his encounter—pink, black, and white, and the copper decoration of the bed—but blue is our talisman, the center of our thought. Yet what blue? which? the blue that settles in the throat before the cough? that rounds from our mouth like a ring of smoke as we announce A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu? Not the blue of place names like Blue Island or Blue Bay. The Blue Hens Chickens. Not the blue of all the fish or flowers which have obtained it, the trees, the minerals, or the birds, not even the blue of blue pigeon, the sounding lead, which is none of these. Perhaps it is the blue of reality itself:

  Blue is the specific color of orgone energy within and without the organism. Classical physics tries to explain the blueness of the sky by the scattering of the blue and of the spectral color series in the gaseous atmosphere. However, it is a fact that blue is the color seen in all functions which are related to the cosmic or atmospheric or organismic orgone energy:

  Protoplasm of any kind, in every cell or bacterium is blue. It is generally mistaken as ‘refraction’ of light which is wrong, since the same cell under the same conditions of light loses its blueness when it dies.

  Thunder clouds are deeply blue, due to high orgone charges contained in the suspended masses of water.

  A completely darkened room, if lined with iron sheet metal (the so-called ‘Orgone Room’), is not black, i.e., free of any light, but bluish or bluish-gray. Orgone energy luminates spontaneously; it is ‘luminescent.’

  Water in deep lakes and in the ocean is blue.

  The color of luminating, decaying wood is blue; so are the luminating tail ends of glowworms, St. Elmo’s fire, and the aurora borealis.

  The lumination in evacuated tubes charged with orgone energy is blue.

  (Wilhelm Reich: The Orgone Energy Accumulator—Its Scientific and Medical Use)

  The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and I, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green. What did Rimbaud know about the vowels we cannot also find outside the lines in which the poet takes an angry piss at Heaven? The blue perhaps of the aster or the iris or the air a fist has bruised?

  ‘The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight,’ Shakespeare wrote. ‘Pinch the maids as blue as bilberry . . .’ ‘Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue/A pair of maiden worlds unconquered . . .’ And so to the worst: ‘Her two blue windows’ (here he means the eyelids of reviving Venus) ‘faintly she up-heaveth.’ Blue Eagle. Blue crab. Blue crane. Blue pill. Blue Cross.

  But our sexual schemes scarcely need the encouragement of a common word, the blues with which I began, for instance: blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies . . . Throw down any pair of terms like dice; speak of arrogant bananas; command someone, as Gertrude Stein once did, to ‘argue the earnest cake,’ and the mind will do more than mix them in its ear. It will endeavor a context in which the command is normal, even trite. Our grammars give us rules for doing that, but sometimes these are no more than suggestions. Our interests do the same. Just as a man who is sick with suspicion may suppose that even the billboards are about him, any text can be regarded as a metaphorical description of some subject hidden in the reader’s head. In that blue light which lust (or orgone energy) is said to shine on everything, we begin to see what an arrogant banana might be. Adolescent boys may live for weeks within a single sexual giggle, and when political life feels the thumb, then any innocent surface (poor Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook) can conceal a call to arms. Suppressed material contaminates the free like fecal water. Ernani or The Marriage of Figaro become revolutionary.

  Out of aching puberty, I remember very well a burlesque skit to which I was a breathless, puzzled witness much the way I once watched, through a slit, slogans scribbled on a washroom wall by a large rotund little man who held his hand to his heart as though he were warming it, and rolled down his lower lip. Pressed Pants is telling Baggy of his wonderful trip to Venice, and how a beautiful woman invited him to take a ride in her gondola (a word which both pronounced gone-dough-la).

  You’re kidding. You actually got in her gondola.

  She invited me, I told you. She practically insisted.

  Listen . . . hey . . . tell me: what was her gondola like?

  Oh, you know, they’re all pretty much the same—long and narrow,

  a bit flat-bottomed, with a tall ornamental stem.

  Boy. Oh boy. I can’t believe it. And you got in?

  Spent the whole afternoon.

  In her gondola?

  Sure. Saw all the sights.

  Ah, come on . . . naw . . . not all afternoon.

  Sure. At first we went fast but later we just took it easy and lay

  there kinda lazy. She was well built, soft and cushiony inside.

  We had tea and cake, too, and a good long discussion about art.

  While you was still in her gondola?

  Certainly. She didn’t rock much. And there was a fiddler—huge guy

  —who played lively little tunes the whole time. And sang a few

  romantic songs, and pointed out the points of interest.

  Wow. I’ll bet. But he wasn’t in her gondola too?

  Sure he was—where would he be?

  Ah, come on now . . . Naw . . . Naw . . . He was in there while you

  was? at the same time?

  Naturally. To fiddle. Yeah. It was a big gondola. There was plenty

  of room.

  For the prude, or his political equivalent, there are dangerous suggestions in the most carefully processed air; there are lewd insinuations, Commie connivance; any word may yawn indecently, or worse, a gondola may engulf us; yet unless we are privately obsessed, something in the text or context must sound the proper political or sexual alert (Condition Blue is the second stage of any warning system), and if the soberness of some occasions is sufficiently impressive, even loud alarms may clang quite vainly, as you often have to tug the reader’s sleeve before he’ll hear a bladder making Joyce’s Chamber Music, or, while fingering one of the Tender Buttons Miss Stein has designed, feel somewhere a little tingle.

  Mental sets are essential to every art, and various cheap jokes can be made of them. Here is one such which Sir John Suckling, who was capable of better, should never have composed:

  There is a thing which in the light

  Is seldom us’d; but in the night

  It serves the female maiden crew,

  The ladies and the good-wives too;

  They used to take it in their hand,

  And then it will uprightly stand;

  And to a hole they it apply,

  Where by its goodwill it would die;

  It spends, goes out, and still within

  It leaves its moisture thick and thin.

  There have been many riddles of this kind, although, led to expect that the answer to the question, ‘What is it?’ will be ‘penis,’ and being told with a triumphant smirk that it is ‘candle’ instead, we may with some annoyance put that dubious object back into the poem to function as a dildo rather than a light.

  The purest tale can still be blue, given a big blue eye, as that crafty old pornographer, Samuel Richardson, demonstrated more than once; for instance, when he wrote Pamela, the edifying history of a prick tease—a book bluer than any movie.

  • • •

  Aching puberty indeed. The awkward figure in that snapshot I referre
d to earlier was the first completely naked woman I had ever seen, and her very awkwardness, the cheapness of the camera, the amateurishness of print, pose, and light, the commonplace reality of the trailer, made her bewildered breasts and puffy pubic hair yearningly real too, as if the photograph were a doorway or a window opening toward a nudity so ordinary it might have been anyone’s—mine—yours—yes, in just that way it was a window, became a door, and although I felt sorry for the girl and even shared her humiliation, I stared—ashamed of my own heat—her helplessness as exciting as her sex—I stared—I lapped her up, left the picture-paper clean as a cat’s saucer; because finally, when one day I looked, she was no longer there, not even the weed caused any commotion. The window had pulled its own shade. So like a sultan I soon gave her away since she was once again only a fifty-cent image, an eyeful at the boy-pull and occasion for a furtive jerk.

  Yet what had I seen when I stared? She was so girlish and so naked, so simply there, that a description of her, had I attempted it, would have failed for want of attention. Too real to be pornographic, I saw not the forbidden image but the forbidden object of that image, the great mystery itself, the subject of a thousand dreams, a hundred thousand stories. I saw what all my organs seemed to stir for . . . and I took fright. Were her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, then? were they a pair of maiden worlds unconquered? Of course not, but I would have wanted to think so. Fuddle-eyed innocence can only say, Gee Whiz. And the knowing writer—whose carnal knowledge begins with Gee Whiz and ends at Ho Hum without apparently stopping at any station in between—hunts among his comparisons like Wilde through his wardrobe for something he may have handy of a suitably similar color, size, softness, and value.