On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry

by William H. Gass

  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,

  0 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 Ma-hatma 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,

  *it has the feel, the taste, of the Scots, even though it is French.

  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.

  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 lav 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,5

  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 offish, clamps 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 crpwd.

  '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 ab-domen 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 E m m a Bovary commits her adul-teries, 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 chim-ney 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 lire-dogs: how absurd they would be in reality, how meaningless, how lacking in system, all higher connection. It's not the word m j d e flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.

  'Lea. Give me your pearls. Do you hear me, Lea? 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, Cheri. .

  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 muti-nous mouth, the deep bed like a w a r m pond . . .

  He opened his pyjamas on a chest chat 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 thes; 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 Ch£ri's glistening hair are the colors Colette has chosen for Lea'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 f r o m 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 'lumi-nescent.'

  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 bore-alis.

  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 ir-regularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pan-cake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the as-sertive 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. Ado-lescent 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 gcme-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,'