On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Read online

  ON BEING BLUE

  A P H I L O S O P H I C A L I N Q U I R Y

  ON BEING BLUE

  WILLIAM GASS

  DAVID R. G O D I N E - B O S T O N

  I

  BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that's dismal—low-down gloomy music. Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky's turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it's stood for fidelity. Blue laws took their hue from the paper they were printed on. Blue noses were named for a potato. E. Haldeman-Julius' little library, where I first read Ellen Key's Evolution of Love, vainly hoping for a cock stand, had such covers. In the same series, which sold for a dime in those days, were the love letters of that Portuguese nun, Mar-iana Alcoforado, an overwrought and burdensome lady, certainly, whose existence I callously forgot until I read of her again in Rilke.

  The first of these pocket pamphlets was, inevitably, the Rubdi-ydt. It had the right sentiments. It was the right length. It came in pretty quatrains. And like a pair of polished shoes, it had just the right world-weariness and erotic sheen. No. 19, the nearest I got to The J ug and Bough, was entitled, Nietzsche: Who He Was and What He Stood For, by M. A. Mugge, Ph.D. All those capitals were formerly for God. There was another, I remember, that reproduced the wartime speeches of Woodrow Wilson in a type which sometimes sagged toward the bottom of the page as though weakened by the weight of the words above. The blue of these books is pale by now, the paper brittle as communion bread, while my association of Wilde and Darrow with the color, once so intense, has faded too. My cock did not stand for Nietzsche either, nor did Mrs. Annie Besant's essay on the future of marriage cause a stir. One had to go to Liveright for that—to other colors: Black and Gold—where you could be w a r m e d by Stendhal, Huneker, and Jules Romain, by Balzac and R e m y de Gourmont, and where the decadence of Pierre Louys was genu-ine and not a bit of blueness dripped on scarcely curdled cheese.

  John Middleton M u r r y edited The Blue Review for the three distinguished issues of its life, and something called The Blue Calen-dar predicted the weather f r o m 1895 to 1898 without ever being right. Only a nickel, also blue, out of the same dry attic box, The Bibelot, a Lilliputian periodical with a Gothically lettered cover which fairly cried out ART, rose into my unhealthy hands.

  It came down f r o m Maine instead of in f r o m Kansas, and re-printed pieces that had previously vanished in the pages of The Dark Blue, a vague Pre-Raphaelite monthly with a title as frus-tratingly incomplete as a broken musical phrase. These rhap-sodies°went into print and out of sight the way trout, I ' m sure, still disappear among the iridescences of my childhood Ohio's cold, bottomless Blue Hole, suddenly to emerge again in the clear, swift streams and shallow ponds it feeds as if nothing magical had happened to them. Each of the magazine's meager issues featured a single, slightly sacred, faintly wicked, and always delicately perfumed work by William Morris or Francis T h o m p -

  son, Andrew Lang or others. T h e set I saw concluded quietly with Swinburne's tribute to the painter Simeon Solomon (even then in bluish oblivion). N o w this fading poet's forgotten essay furnishes us with our first example, before we are quite ready for any: the description of two figures in a painting . . . the prose of a shade of blue I leave to you.

  One girl, white-robed and radiant as white water-flowers, has half let fall the rose that droops in her hand, dropping leaf by leaf like tears; both have the languor and the fruitful air of flowers in a sultry-place; their leaning limbs and fervent faces are full of the goddess; their lips and eyes allure and await the invisible attendant Loves.

  The clear pearl-white cheeks and tender mouths have still about them the subtle purity of sleep; the whole drawing has upon it the heavy incumbent light of summer but half awake. Nothing of more simple and brilliant beauty has been done of late years.

  Lang, plainly fond of the color, edited The Blue Poetry Book.

  From her window Katherine Mansfield sees a garden full of wall-flowers and blue enamel saucepans, and sets the observation down in a letter to Frieda Lawrence she'll never mail. Stephen Crane wrote and posted The Blue Hotel, Malcolm Cowley Blue Juniata, and Conrad Aiken Blue Voyage. Like rainwater and white chickens, KM exclaims:

  Very beautiful, O God! is a blue tea-pot with two white cups attending; a red apple among oranges addeth fire to flame—in the white book-cases the books fly up and down in scales of colour, with pink and lilac notes recurring, until nothing remains but them, sounding over and over.

  Then there is the cold Canadian climate and the color of deep ice.

  The gill of a fish. Lush grass. The whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin.

  * * *

  Among the derivations of the word, I especially like blavus, from medieval Latin, and the earlier, more classical, flavus, for the discolorations of a bruise, so that it sometimes meant yellow, with perhaps a hint of green beneath the skin like naughty underclothes. Once, one blushed blue, though to blush like a blue dog, as the cliche went then, was not to blush at all. Covenanters, against royal red, flaunted it. They were true blue, they said.

  And Boswell tells us, out of his blue life, that Benjamin Stilling-fleet wore blue wool undress hose to Elizabeth Montague's literary tea-at-homes. Perhaps to Elizabeth Carter's too. And even Hannah More's.

  BLUE.—Few words enter more largely into the composition of slang, and colloquialisms bordering on slang, than does the word BLUE. Expressive alike of the utmost contempt, as of all that men hold dear-est and love best, its manifold combinations, in ever varying shades of meaning, greet the philologist at every turn. A very Proteus, it defies all attempts to trace the why and wherefore of many of the turns of expression of which it forms a part. . . .

  (Farmer and Henley: Slang and Its Analogues) So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that. A single word, a single thought, a single thing, as Plato taught. We cover our concepts, like fish, with clouds of net. Cops and bobbies wear blue. We catch them and connect. Imagined origins reduce the sounds of clash and contradiction, as when one cries out blue murder in the street. There's the blue for baby boy, the blue of blue sky laws, blue for jeans, blue for hogs. The coal fish, a salmon, the glut-herring, a kind of trout, are said to have blue-backs and are named so in Yorkshire, Maryland, Virginia, Maine. From earliest times it's been the badge of servitude: among the Gauls, to humiliate harlots in houses of correction, as the color of
a tradesman's apron, for liveries and uniforms of all kinds, the varlet's costume.

  Blue: bright, with certain affinities for bael (fire, pyre), with certain affinities for bald ( ballede), with certain affinities for bold.

  Odd. Well, a bald brant is a blue goose. And these slippery bluegreen sources ease, like sleeves of grease, each separate use into a single—we think—fair and squarely ordered thought machine.

  Never mind degrees, deep differences, contrasting sizes. The same blue sock fits every leg. Never mind the noses of those Nova Scotian potatoes, blue noses are the consequence of sexual freeze, or they are noses buried far too long in bawdy books, or rubbed too often harshly up and down on wool-blue thighs. Not alone is love the desire and pursuit of the whole. It is one of the passions of the mind. Furthermore, if among a perfect melange of meanings there is one which has a more immediate appeal, as among the contents of a pocket one item is a peppermint, it will assume a center like the sun and require all others take their docile turn to go around.

  This thought is itself a center. I shall not return to it.

  Blue postures, attitudes, blue thoughts, blue gestures . . . is it the form or content that turns blue when these are? . . . blue words and pictures: a young girl posed before the door of her family's trailer, embarrassed breasts and frightened triangle, vacant stare . . . I wonder what her father sold the snapshots for?

  I remember best the weed which grew between the steps. But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy. What is form, in any case, but a bumbershoot held up against the absence of all cloud?

  Stringy hair, head out of plumb, smile like a scratch across her face . . . my friends brought her image with them from their camping trip, and I remember best the weed which grew between the steps. My sensations were as amateur as her photo. A red apple among oranges. Very beautiful. O God.

  Remember how the desperate Molloy proceeds: I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones I distrutibed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pockct of my greatcoat, and putting it in mv mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat bv a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had fin-ished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones.... But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about.

  Beckett is a very blue man, and this is a very blue passage.

  Several brilliant pages are devoted to the problem. The penulti-mate solution requires that fifteen stones be kept in one pocket at a time, and moved together—all the stones, that is, which are not being sucked. There is, however, an unwelcome side effect: that of having the body weighted down, on one side, with stones.

  . . . I felt the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other. So it was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not hap-hazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But deep down I didn't give a tinker's curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand or the left, backwards and forwards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same.

  De Sade in a harem of quints could not have faced the issue of love's little nourishments more squarely, or that of the faceless fuck, or equal treatment (stones, wives, Jews, portions of anat-omy, don't forget, turn and turn about), and how could one better describe our need for some security in this damn disagree-able/dull dark difficult/disorderly life? And then the resolution, when it comes—is it not a triumph of both will and reason?

  And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.

  As we shall see, and be ashamed because we aren't ashamed to say it, like that unpocketed peppermint which has, from fingering, become unwrapped, we always plate our sexual subjects first. It is the original reason why we read . . . the only reason why we write.

  It is therefore appropriate that blow and blue should be—at our earliest convenience—utterly confused.

  So I shall, keeping one in each of my four pockets while one is in my mouth, describe five common methods by which sex gains an entrance into literature . . . as through French doors and jim-mied windows thieves break in upon our dreams to rape our women, steal our power tools, and vandalize our dreams. The commonest, of course, is the most brazen: the direct depiction of sexual material—thoughts, acts, wishes; the second involves the use of sexual words of various sorts, and I shall pour one of each vile kind into the appropriate porches of your ears, for pronounc-ing and praising print to the ear is what the decently encouraged eye does happily. The third can be considered, in a sense, the very heart of indirection, and thus the essence of the artist's art—displacement: the passage of the mind with all its blue elastic ditty bags and airline luggage f r o m steamy sexual scenes and sweaty bodies to bedrooms with their bedsteads, nightstands, water-glasses, manuals of instruction, thence to sheets and pillowcases, hence to dents in these, and creases, stains and other cries of passion which have left their prints, and finally to the painted chalk-white oriental face of amorously handled air and mountains,, lewdly entered lakes. The fourth I shall simply refer to now as the skyblue eye (somewhere, it seems to me, there should be a brief pinch of suspense), and the fifth, well, it's really what I'm running into all my inks about, so I had better mention it: the use of language like a lover . . . not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.

  * * *

  So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp's breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look. There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too. There's the blue pill that is the bullet's end, the nose, the plum, the blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of death.

  Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? what brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief. . . each is an absence in us. We have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the hp that meets our lip is always one half of our own. Our state is exactly the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces, come to view us and to say to one another that we never looked better; that we seem at last at peace; that our passing was—well—sad—still—doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the dead should hear). Disappointment, constant loss, despair . . . a taste, a soft quality in the air, a color, a flutter: permanent in their passage. We were not up to it. We missed it. We could not retain it. It will never be back. Joy-breaking gloom continues to hammer. So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

  Just as blue pigment spread on canvas
may help a painter ac-curately represent nature or give to his work the aforesaid melancholy cast, enhance a pivotal pink patch, or signify the qualities of heavenly love, so our blue colors come in several shades and explanations. Both Christ and the Virgin wear mantles of blue because as the clouds depart the Truth appears. Many things are labeled blue, thought blue, made blue, merely because there's a spot of the color here and there somewhere on them like the bluecap salmon with its dotted head; or things are called blue carelessly because they are violet or purple or gray or even vaguely red, and that's close enough for the harassed eye, the way the brownish halo which surrounds the flame of a miner's safety lamp to warn of firedamp is said to be a bluecap too. Or they are misnamed for deeper reasons: in the ninth century, when the Scandinavians raided Africa and Spain, they carried off samples of the blue men who lived there all the way to Ireland, hence nig-ger-blue is applied to an especially resinous darkness sometimes by those who are no longer Vikings. And Partridge reports the expression: the sky as blue as a ra^or. Find an eye as blue as indecency itself, an indecency as blue as the smoke of battle, or a battle as blue as the loss of blood. We might remain with such wonders: as blue as . . . as blue as . . . for good and forever.

  Anyway, sixth (since the first week had as many working days), I shall describe and distinguish three functions for blue words, modes of production, a Marxist might describe them, and I shall argue that they are equally fundamental. Finally, 1 shall try to list the major motives, from reader's, work's, and writer's point of view, for introducing blue material in the first place. As blue-blaw, blue-blazer, and bluebush. By my private count, you may not be surprised to learn, that makes sixteen separate thoughts I hope to wind my Quink-stained mouth around—turn, of course, and turn about.

  II

  LET US begin with a brief account of what happened when pirates overtook the whoreship Cyprian,