On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books Classics) Page 6

  Crude as they are, such cases force us to distinguish not only between use and mention, as logicians normally do, but also between these and what might be called simple utterance or outcry. Key chains, drapes, and dishes are used, wagonwheels, tuning forks, whistles, words. What else are they for? Drapes hang heavily from their bars. Chains key. Wheels turn. Pass the butter. Take off your bra. The Blue Ridge Mts. are in Virginia. Or they may instead be mentioned, as I shall this moment mention ‘swive,’ a term which Barth has beautifully blown his breath upon and thus attempted to revive. I, myself, have had no success with ‘grampalingus,’ ‘meatus foetus,’ or ‘mulogeny’—a sentence which, if you could not see the quotes around the words you might think meant I’d tried them all and failed. Well, no one listens to what they see.

  In babyhood and through moist infancy, the penis is a ‘peepee.’ When worn by boys, it becomes a ‘peter’ or a ‘dick.’ Later we refer to the instrument (even our own, and not, alas, unhappily) as a ‘whang.’ We call it a ‘dong.’ We say it is a ‘dork.’ Imagine. Meanwhile, the lovely Irish ‘langolee,’ or ‘wheedledeedle,’ my concoction, get no backers. Though ‘bluebeard’ and ‘blue-skin’ have once upon a time been used, no one is forgiven. Still, in a world of prick-skinning women, perhaps a twanger is what one needs. These days are drear. However . . . ‘fuck,’ in ‘go fuck a duck,’ is neither used nor mentioned; it is merely uttered. These ‘fucks’ are phatic like the delivery of ‘good morning,’ the wearing of evening clothes, giving of handshakes, painting of smiles, adding the complimentary close.

  Most of the time we are content to cry out ‘fuck!’ as if pinched, but the function of our wall words in slightly more elaborate curses, such as:

  may your cock continue life as a Canadian,

  or

  may the houseflies winter over in your womb,

  or

  may you be inhaled by your own asshole,

  is more complex. Although each expression is merely uttered (curses without a curse, they contain only archery and cleverness like a purse full of chocolates and needles), every element has an internal use, so that we can say that single words can be used within mention or mentioned within use, mentioned in an utterance or uttered in a mention, uttered in an utterance, mentioned in a mention, and so on like a fugue. This cleverness in one sense mitigates the shock by calling attention to the quirks and capabilities of the mind that shapes the mouth that makes them, just as those obnoxious little jokes which leap like startled frogs into the center of every conversation do, or those pointless puns some damply nervous souls are obsessively driven to compose. In any case, their being lies in their occurrence.

  It is not alone words about which these distinctions can be profitably made, and I hope the difference will help interpret many of my earlier remarks. If I shed my clothes to make love or take a shower, I am using my nakedness; if I wear a daring gown, I may be mentioning it; but the bared behinds on the modern stage aren’t mentioning themselves, nor are they ever used. They are merely uttered. I know situations where the devil has appeared with no more function than a shout. This is often the role of the star who doesn’t do anything but twinkle. In the Cantos, Pound only mentions his Chinese words, he rarely really uses them. Although the sexual descriptions of the pornographer are frankly employed to produce erection, and the sex in Kinsey or Kraft-Ebbing is mentioned for the sake of study, the sex in Oh, Calcutta! is simply sworn.

  The blue list with which I began was celebrational. I did not use the phrase ‘blue devil’ but I was delighted to mention it: blue line, blue note, blue plate. If I were uttering these words (as I am presently trying to formulate the distinction), I would not particularly care what they meant, I would only care what people thought of their appearance in my speech: would they think them friendly, or not; appropriate, or not; predictable, or not? And consequently I would only care what people thought of me for using them: blue nevus, blue vinny, bluetongue, blue tangle, blue star, blue bells. Noises or notes: what do I care? What is their public pay-off for me?

  Unfortunately these three—utterance, mention, and use—as well as the other distinctions I’ve dragged across the page, are overly crude, and have names which mislead beside. Their cuts are like cracks between buttocks, and philosophy should be ashamed to contain them in such an untrained, yappy, and pissy condition. There is, first of all, a more fundamental bifurcation, overriding every other, namely between those blues whose continued existence is as obnoxious as a pile of sanitary napkins, the blues we expect to dispose of after use (or utterance or mention), those we’ve set fire to, or eaten, or blown our noses in, those blues, in short, which appear to disappear, and are otherwise linguistic waste:

  gee, look at the little blue butterfly,

  or

  give us a B, give us an L, give us a BLU,

  or

  how am I? glad you asked, yes, well, yesterday I was kinda gray, but today I’m downright blue,

  or

  buster, baby, you bastard, you blew it.

  No one wants that sullied air and spoiled paper about. There are acts which we are glad are gone and gone without a trace, too: gaucheries, spit-ups and spraying sneezes, broken promises, prematurities of all kinds, arguments and chores, the one-night stands with fortunately not a single fuzzy Polaroid to bluemail them or piece of tape to tangle. There are thoughts, postures, attitudes of the same sort, consciousness itself, some say, who regard it as no more than the belching of the body . . . and who wants a collection of throat-farts fastened though floating around their source like a tree full of soft blue Italian plums?

  Then there are the blues we’d love to have loom large and linger long around us like deep sofas, accommodating women, and rich friends: the blues in dictionaries, grammars, spelling books; the blues in all the manuals that lay out figures, facts, and their relations, so definitively we continue to consult them . . .

  the Eastern Tailed Blue,

  Dwarf Blue,

  Pigmy Blue,

  Common Blue,

  or Spring Azure, whose larvae secrete what the ants call ‘honeydew,’ the Western Tailed Blue,

  Square-spotted Blue,

  Acmon Blue,

  Orange-bordered or Melissa Blue, which has two broods,

  Reakirt’s Blue, which feeds on mesquite, the Silvery Blue,

  Sonora Blue,

  Saepiolus Blue,

  Marine Blue,

  whose worms chew upon locoweed and the blossoms of the wisteria, or the blues of the great poems . . .

  ix

  And the color, the overcast blue

  Of the air, in which the blue guitar

  Is a form, described but difficult,

  And I am merely a shadow hunched

  Above the arrowy, still strings,

  The maker of a thing yet to be made;

  The color like a thought that grows

  Out of a mood, the tragic robe

  Of the actor, half his gesture, half

  His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

  Sodden with his melancholy words,

  The weather of his stage, himself.

  (Wallace Stevens: ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’)

  Or the emblematic blues, the color in which Joyce bound Ulysses, its title like a chain of white islands, petals shaken on a Greek sea, he thought, and the heraldic blues, the celebrational and symbolic . . .

  Gargantua’s colors were white and blue. . . . By these colors, his father wished to signify that the lad was a heavenly joy to him. White expresses joy, pleasure, delight and rejoicing; blue denotes things celestial.

  I realize quite well that, as you read these words, you are laughing at the old toper, for you believe this symbolic use of colors to be crude and extravagant. White, you say, stands for faith, and blue for strength. But without getting excited, losing your temper, flying into a rage or working yourself into a tongue-parched passion—the weather is dangerous—tell me one thing! . . . What moves, impels or induces you to b
elieve what you do? Who told you that white means faith, and blue strength?

  ‘A shoddy book,’ you reply, ‘sold by peddlers in remote mountain hamlets and by weatherbeaten hawkers God knows where. Its title? In Praise of Colors.’

  or the blues we rebreathe, always for the same reason: because the word in each case finds its place within a system so supremely organized it cannot be improved upon—what we would not replace and cannot change. Of how many racy tales or hairy photos can that be said?

  So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, .or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here! . . . in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech . . . ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.

  • • •

  Half-breeds belong to the blue squadron. Sometimes they are called ‘blue skins,’ as Protestants once were. Blue Boy is the popular title of a painting by Gainsborough, the name of a prize hog in State Fair, and the abscess from a venereal disease. Under the vilifying gaze of fluorescent light, the heads of pimples turn blue, as do the rings around the eyes, and the lips grow cold. Although the form, ‘blueness,’ signifies the quality of being blue in any sense, it usually refers only to indecency: les horreurs, les bêtises, les gueulées. Will it profit us to wonder why? Jackson Pollock painted Blue Poles, the name of any magnet’s southern dart. Earlier he’d covered a canvas he labeled The Blue Unconscious. Here the color is sparingly used. A group of Germans got itself called the Blaue Reiter, and Piero della Francesca did indeed make the Virgin’s mantle blue in his Annunciation . . . in his Nativity, too. Nor did the Lorenzettis neglect her, Giotto neither, though he colored his pit-of-hell devils blue as a soul dismantled. Contending that art is a product of pain, Picasso passed through such a period, painting The Blue Room, Woman in Blue, and many others: stem-like bodies on which long faces gather like solidifying smoke.

  ‘For our blues,’ Hoogstraten says, ‘we have English, German, and Haarlem ashes, smalts, blue lakes, indigo, and the invaluable ultramarine.’ It is of course the sky. It is the sky’s pale deep endlessness, sometimes so intense at noon the brightness flakes like a fresco. Then at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us, not like dew but settling dust or poisonous exhaust from all the life burned up while we were busy being other than ourselves. For our blues we have the azures and ceruleans, lapis lazulis, the light and dusty, the powder blues, the deeps: royal, sapphire, navy, and marine; there are the pavonian or peacock blues, the reddish blues: damson, madder and cadet, hyacinth, periwinkle, wine, wisteria and mulberry; there are the sloe blues, a bit purpled or violescent, and then the green blues, too: robin’s egg and eggshell blue, beryl, cobalt, glaucous blue, jouvence, turquoise, aquamarine. A nice light blue can be prepared from silver, and when burned, Prussian blue furnishes a very fine and durable brown. For our blues we have those named for nations, cities, regions: French blue, which is an artificial ultramarine, Italian, Prussian, Swiss and Brunswick blues, Chinese blue, a pigment which has a peculiar reddish-bronze cast when in lump-form and dry, in contrast to China blue which is a simple soluble dye; we have Indian blue, an indigo, Hungarian, a cobalt, the blues of Parma and Saxony, Paris, Berlin, and Dresden, those of Bremen and Antwerp, the ancient blues of Armenia and Alexandria, the latter made of copper and lime and sometimes called Egyptian, the blue of the Nile, the blue of the blue sand potters use. Are there so many states of mind and shades of feeling? In a dress riddled with polka dots, Colette, arthritic and frizzy in her final photographs, sits with the profile of Cocteau, le fanal bleu, her papers and her pain. And for our blues we have those named for persons, processes, and earths: Hortense, Croupier, Blackley blue and Chemic, Imperial or spirit-blue, Raymond or Napoleon blue, Night blue or Victoria, Leitch’s blue, Schweinfurth’s or Reboulleau’s blue, Monthier’s blue, which uses ammonia, Elberfeld, Eschel, Gentiana blue, Gold blue, Guernsey, Guimet, Humboldt and the coal-tar colors, Aniline, Alkali, Anthracene blue, Alizarin blue, paste blue, vat blue, fast blue, the fluorescent resorcinol blues, milori, vitriol, blue verditer, slate and steel blue, all the grays, gun-metal, asbestos, and then the bluish shades of verdigris appearing subtly in the same way that our attitudes slowly acetify our bodies. Fra Angelico, that sweet man, did not ignore the Virgin either, though her mantle, alas, is never blue, but sometimes lavender or even green. ‘Green’ is another name, though now forgotten, long unused, for things obscene.

  Long unused. Still, the disappearance from literature of words and subjects (or their appearance there) simply because writers and readers have strong feelings about them is never an aesthetically promising cause. And the principal difficulty with using sexual material in literature is that the motives of all concerned are usually corrupt.

  Because of the values we place on sexuality in life, because of the terrible taboos which surround it, the endless lies, the forlorn wishes, the sad fantasies we wind around it like gauze about a wound (whether these things are due to the way we are brought up, or are the result of something graver—an unalterable quality in our nature), everyone’s likeliest area of psychological weakness is somewhere in the sexual. Writers, whose work is actually an analogue anyway, are still more susceptible to the blue disease, so that even those whose mastery of their medium is otherwise incontestible will—with a serious air—plait flowers in their hero’s pubic hair and stumble over a little fornication like a toddler climbing stairs. Any author’s wisdom here consists of the correct assessment of his own weaknesses and the discovery of technical ways to circumvent them. Not an enterprise for amateurs. Colette used the blue paper she wrote on to shade her writing light . . . to shine bluely through the curtains at pedestrians crossing the Palais-Royal a notice of her presence day and night.

  But we are perfectly familiar with these things.

  Those dressed in blue

  Have lovers true;

  In green and white,

  Forsaken quite.

  Touch blue,

  Your wish will come
true.

  If you love me, love me true,

  Send me a ribbon, and let it be blue;

  If you hate me, let it be seen,

  Send me a ribbon, a ribbon of green.

  It is intriguing to wonder whether the difficulties children have with color, the quickness with which they pick up forms and functions and learn the names for bye-bye, truck, and auntie, yet at a late age (even five), without a qualm, call any color by the name of any other, aren’t found again in the history of our words, for oysters could not be oozier than these early designations. Blue is blue or green or yellow: what the hell. Or so it seems. Colors flood our space so fully that there isn’t any. They allow us to discriminate among otherwise identical things (gold and green racing cars, football teams, jelly beans, red- brown-blond- and black-haired girls); however, our eye is always at the edge, establishing boundaries, making claims, so that colors principally enable us to discern shapes and define relations, and it certainly appears that patterns and paths—first, last, and in between—are what we want and what we remember: useful contraptions, useful controls, and useful connections.

  Yet the pig in the pigment is missing. Well, what do we need with all that fat? Our world could be gray as the daily paper and we’d not miss much in the way of shapes and sizes. An occasional bluebird might be overlooked fleeing extinction through a meadow—so what. As much an afterhue as afterthought, colors came to the movies as they came to the comics, and there they remain—surreal in their overlays—like bad printing. Hoopla is hoopla however it’s hollered. Tinting that weed green or its trailer silver would not have improved my naked girl’s gray and white image. No. Who cares for color in a world of pure transmissions?