Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

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

No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like “pebbles in water,” they remain ours; us, theirs.

At times I have heard it said that we don’t dream in color. But surely this is a mistake. Not only can we dream in color, but more importantly: how could anyone else know if we do or do not?

Eventually you will have to give up this love, she told me one night while I made us dinner. It has a morbid

At times I think it quite possible that it lies, as if a sleight of hand, at the heart of all my writing.

“Truth. To surround it with figures and colors, so that it can be seen,” wrote Joubert, calmly professing a heresy.

Reading her account, I feel at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand years ago, so as to see this parade for myself.

here we are in great danger—the danger of being jealous of the blues of others, or of blues of times past. For while one may repeatedly insist that all one wants is to be satisfied and happy, the truth is that one can often find oneself clinging to samsara with a vengeance.

truth be told: I saw them as purple.

I don’t know how the jacarandas will make me feel next year. I don’t know if I will be alive to see them, or if I will be here to see them, or if I will ever be able to see them as blue, even as a type of blue.

We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a...

Let the police peel you up.

I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.

It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death’s approach as the swell of a wave—a towering wall of blue.

If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.

I have also imagined my life ending, or simply evaporating, by being subsumed into a tribe of blue people.

perhaps it does feel like a fire—the blue core of it, not the theatrical orange crackling.

if “saturation” means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does “saturation” not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience?

It had to be made holy, by the wicked logic that renders the expensive sacred. So first it had to be made expensive.

the story of indigo is, at least in part, the story of slavery, riots, and misery. Blue does, however, always have a place at the carnival.

my love for blue has never felt to me like a maturing, or a refinement, or a settling.

It does not really bother me that half the adults in the Western world also love blue, or that every dozen years or so someone feels compelled to write a book about it. I feel confident enough of the specificity and strength of my relation to it to share. Besides, it must be admitted that if blue is anything on this earth, it is abundant.

the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it.

In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

the shape that, in pagan times, unabashedly symbolized Venus and the vulva.

I do not know the reason for this blue pussy, meant to convey both divine bewilderment and revelation. But I do feel that its color is right. For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.

As the digital age steamrolls ahead, most films are being rapidly digitized. And as the digitization process privileges green over both red and blue, the correspondents have decided to collect the blues that “fall out” of film during the transfer.

When something ceases to bring you pleasure, you cannot talk the pleasure back into it.

“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?

a bouquet is no homage to the bush.

though I can’t remember where most of them came from, I love them nonetheless.

Who cares why these people have found themselves in this banal, suburban track home in Burbank? He is not a delivery man; she is not a bored housewife. They are not the stars—their orifices are. Let them open.

For Warhol, fucking was less about desire than it was about killing time: it is take-it-or-leave-it work, accomplished similarly by geniuses and retards, just like everything else at the Factory.

Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times —now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river—how could either of us tell the difference?

Perhaps this is why writing all day, even when the work feels arduous, never feels to me like “a hard day’s work.” Often it feels more like balancing two sides of an equation—occasionally quite satisfying, but essentially a hard and passing rain. It, too, kills the time.

Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory?

How often I’ve imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face.

How often, in my private mind, have I choreographed ribbons of black and red in water, two serious ropes of heart and mind. The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking.

who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.

I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.

if writing does displace the idea—if it extrudes it, as it were, like grinding a lump of wet clay through a hole— where does the excess go?

Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool.

this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.”

Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.

Out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty—if one can be cruel to objects—I have given them up to their diminishment.

Perhaps writing is not really pharmakon, but more of a mordant—a means of binding color to its object—or of feeding it into it, like a tattoo needle drumming ink into skin.

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.

It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional.

pain much more painful than we expected.”

As her witness, I can testify to no reason, no lesson. But I can say this: in watching her, sitting with her, helping her, weeping with her, touching her, and talking with her, I have seen the bright pith of her soul. I cannot tell you what it looks like, exactly, but I can say that I have seen it.