In a Sense of Blue

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (2009)

18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

When I turned on this computer to write these words of blue, the computer screen, for just a second, opened to a field of blue, and it felt like blindness. A medium blue, it was not a sea always sculpting itself out of blue or receding from the shoreline in ever-darkening bands. It was a blank, a nothingness, the mind filled past suppression with what it couldn't take in over and over again.

Maggie Nelson, in her book Bluets , presents something else, something not just a wash of blue, though she is focused on blue in all its shades and connotations, and blue takes its vengeance out upon her, and we receive the glow that results. It is hard to say exactly what this book is. It is a sequence of 240 numbered paragraphs or sentences, prose, a fragmented personal essay, but clearly a poem, clearly poetic. It exists as small satellites of thought around the planet of blue. Some of the satellites orbit close to the idea of blue and others orbit at such a distance that they come within sight of that blue only briefly.

But everything comes out of blue, and blue guides the book. Insofar as thinking is never linear even when focused on a single topic, it is no surprise or disappointment that the book ranges over topics, starting with blue, but concerned with a lost love, with a friend who's become quadriplegic, with perception, with writing, with desire and sadness.

And this is a sad book, though one leavened with some insight gained over time, one enhanced by a sharp intellect, and a keen interest in searching not just for blue objects but also for blue facts, trivia about blue, connections between blue and everything it colors.

Bluets is a powerful work of art, a beautiful blue and glinting mosaic that seems to be many things at once and that is made out of many things as well. The book remains unromantic about romance, about love, lost or made, but it is filled with desire, desire for the color blue, desire for contact, desire for sex, and it is explicit in its details about sex, using (for instance) the term "making love" in place of the word "fuck" only once in 95 pages.

42. Sitting in my office before teaching a class on prosody, trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? How can it be? Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue. I look down at my lecture notes: Heártbréak is a spondee. Then I lay my head down on the desk and start to weep. —Why doesn't this help?

The issue of confessionalism never leaves the realm poetry, and it comes to us full force in this book. Maggie Nelson confesses her life to us, her loves, her sex, her genitals and those slipped into her, the terror and tenderness of caring for a physically crippled friend, her weeping, her emptiness at the empty explanations of her ex-lover. It is not her whole life or even a river leading out of that life, but it is a significant tendency, or set of tendencies, of her life. We learn, as we always must, that we cannot expunge the self without deleting the body, that even the most aloof of texts carries the self of the creator within it, for it remains an expression of that self. In this book, this expression is a wrenching revelation.

This morning, up until 2 am reading this book and writing, I wrote a brief note to my friend Tom Beckett, who made me aware of this book, and this inarticulate sequence of sentences I sent him is probably all I can valuably say about this book:

But I wasn't ready for it.

I ordered it. It arrived on a day that seems like today but was yesterday. I started reading it immediately.

I read slowly.

It is so painful to me. So beautiful. I'm not strong enough for a book like this.

As my poety friend Anne Gorrick says, "The best work leaves me the most inarticulate." So it is that I am inarticulate now.

I saw the film Shutter Island last night for the first time and learned that all of its tropes (its jittery editing, its saturated color, is echoing music, its ornate storytelling) served the final purposes of the film. Everything is of a piece, even if it is in pieces. But I was hit hardest during the credits when the final song began. It was a mix of two tunes, "This Bitter Earth" performed by Dinah Washington and Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight," a mashup and so an original work by Robbie Robertson, whose work as music supervisor for the film was astounding. The lyrics are almost nothing more than spoken for most of the song, but at times Washington's voice turns into a note of a bird's song and the violins come in in waves to and over the shore of her voice.

I purchased that song last night and listened to it as I wrote a poem to H.L. Hix and as I read Bluets, going back and forth between the two activities, because writing is just a version of reading. This spliced song, beautiful to the point of aching, became the soundtrack to this book, beautiful to the point of aching. Both when I stopped reading the book this early morning and when I finished reading the book later this morning, after a shortened slumber, I shook, my body shook. Maggie Nelson's words made me shake. Somehow, I'd become human through those words, which seems good enough praise to me.

The book is covered now by my penciled notations (underlines, brackets, check marks, words), and I was sure to make note of every quotation from Emerson, who always speaks to me. Everything is of a piece, even if it is in pieces.

239. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

_____

Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books: np, 2009.

ecr. l'inf.