Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette.

“false consciousness should be a cause for celebration.”

Children whose vision has been damaged have been known to smash their fingers into their eyes to recreate color sensations that have been lost to them. (That’s the spirit!)

described myself and my project as heathen, hedonistic, and horny. I never got any funding. My blues stayed local.

For starters, words do not look like the things they designate (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

Many people do not think the writing of Gertrude Stein “means” anything.

composing almost everything I write as a letter.

“When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object,”

This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart.

“Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth, that often it even passes for truth itself,” wrote Joseph Joubert, the French “man of letters” who recorded countless such fragments in notebooks for forty years in preparation for a monumental work of philosophy that he never wrote.

Think of it as an act of civil disobedience, he says. Let the police peel you

“Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire,” I read in another self-help book at the bookstore. What depression ever felt like a fire? I think, shoving the book back on the shelf.

The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, “The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.” In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

don’t go to the movies anymore. Please don’t try to convince me. When something ceases to bring you pleasure, you cannot talk the pleasure back into it. “My removal arose not out of a conscious decision, but was simply a natural fading away from film,” writes artist Mike Kelley. “We have become filmic language, and when we look at the screen all we see is ourselves. So what is there to fall into or be consumed by? When looking at something that purports to be you, all you can do is comment on whether you feel it is a good resemblance or not.

a bouquet is no homage to the bush.

wrote it because I had something to say to you.

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl.

It was in an effort to puncture precisely this sort of embellishment that the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire opted to call his 1913 book of poems not L’eau de vie, but the more precise, much “cooler,” Alcools.

(Please don’t start protesting here that there are no thoughts outside of language, which is like telling someone that her colored dreams are, in fact, colorless.)

or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably,

“Lots of space, nothing holy”: one Zen master’s definition of enlightenment (Bodhidharma).

If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.

“Compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.”

Love the one you’re with. Love the color green. But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.

Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you.

In any case, I am no longer counting the days.

I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.