Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty.

Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.

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

I will not choose between the blue things of the world and the words that say them: you might as well be heating up the poker and readying your eyes for the altar. Your loss.

One afternoon in 2006, at a bookstore in Los Angeles. I pick up a book called The Deepest Blue. Having expected a chromatic treatise, I am embarrassed when I see the subtitle: How Women Face and Overcome Depression. I quickly return it to its shelf. Eight months later, I order the book online.

“Great suffering, joy, exertion, is not for [woman]; her life should flow by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man’s without being essentially happier or unhappier,” wrote Schopenhauer. What women, one would like to ask, did he know? At any rate, would that it were so.

88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that 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. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)

Vincent van Gogh, whose depression, some say, was likely related to temporal lobe epilepsy, famously saw and painted the world in almost unbearably vivid colors. After his nearly unsuccessful attempt to take his life by shooting himself in the gut, when asked why he should not be saved, he famously replied, “The sadness will last forever.” I imagine he was right.

When I first heard of the cyanometer, I imagined a complicated machine with dials, cranks, and knobs. But what de Saussure actually “invented” was a cardboard chart with 53 cut-out squares sitting alongside 53 numbered swatches, or “nuances,” as he called them, of blue: you simply hold the sheet up to the sky and match its color, to the best of your ability, to a swatch. As in Humboldt’s Travels (Ross, 1852): “We beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith appeared to correspond to 41° of the cyanometer.” This latter sentence brings me great pleasure, but really it takes us no further—either into knowledge, or into beauty.

We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.

“Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged,” a man tells the narrator in the opening lines of Duras’s The Lover. For many years, I took these to be the words of a wise man.

It should be noted that the Tuareg do not call themselves Tuareg. Nor do they call themselves the blue people. They call themselves Imohag, which means “free men.”

Joan Mitchell, for one, customarily chose her pigments for their intensity rather than their durability—a choice that, as many painters know, can in time bring one’s paintings into a sorry state of decay. (Is writing spared this phenomenon?)

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.

I 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. Is it a flattering portrait? This is a conscious, clearly ego-directed, activity.” I find myself in agreement with him on all counts. Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or anyone else for that matter. “I think both the theater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology” (Artaud).

For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird’s folded wing, or a fan never opened.

Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

Goethe also worries over the destructive effects of writing. In particular, he worries over how to “keep the essential quality [of the thing] still living before us, and not to kill it with the word.” I must admit, I no longer worry much about such things. For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is. What does your poetry do?—I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language (John Ashbery).

But I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage.

Imagine someone saying, “Our fundamental situation is joyful.” Now imagine believing it.