Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.

each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe.

The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it.

while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others.

first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world.

You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to...

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.

I don’t care if it’s colorless.

We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.

it is more like you have been mortally ill, and these correspondents send pieces of blue news as if last-ditch hopes for a cure.

what goes on in you when you talk about color as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.

It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence.

But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded.

Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either.

So I stayed behind, and became known as the lady who waits, the sad sack of town with hair that smells like an animal.

A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.

I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating.

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

If a color cannot cure, can it at least incite hope?

If a color could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair?

but for the moment, I can’t think of any times that blue has caused me to despair.

When I say “hope,” I don’t mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open.

Does the world look bluer from blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement).

Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. “It may be said to disturb rather than enliven.” Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is.

How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter.

Try, if you can, not to talk as if colors emanated from a single physical phenomenon.

You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we “get around” in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

other accounts wonder whether they were in fact punishing themselves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation.

“Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci).

we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze.

I like to look, too.

After asserting that the blue we want from life is in fact found only in fiction, he counsels the writer to “give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them.”

Generally speaking I do not hunt blue things down, nor do I pay for them. The blue things I treasure are gifts, or surprises in the landscape.

I like blues that keep moving.

It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. 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.

I had come all this way, and I could barely look. Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment. “From the mountain you see the mountain,” wrote Emerson.

just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it.

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

The implication of the title is that men get blue, but women get the deepest blue.

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

The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.

she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

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

please don’t write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping.

a glass bead may flush the world with color, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace.

though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.

at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.

has diffuse nerve pain along the surface of her skin which no doctor understands, pain she says makes her skin feel like crinkly, burning Saran Wrap.