Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse,

philosophy is worth one hour of pain.

It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious.

And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

A voluntary delusion, you might say.

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.)

That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst.

Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it?

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

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.

One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond.

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

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

Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma

Viagra, one of whose side effects is to see the world tinged with blue.

“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?

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.

“We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object”—this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love.

two Christian princesses who were pursued by undesirable pagan lovers—lovers who professed to be unable to live without their beloveds’ beautiful blue eyes. To rid herself of the unwanted attention, Medana supposedly plucked her eyes out and threw them at her suitor’s feet; Triduana was slightly more inventive, and tore hers out with a thorn, then sent them to her suitor on a skewer.

“give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them.”

I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses and light.

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.

Experienced builders and performers can attract up to thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show, have built up enough good blue in their bower, and have the contrast with the yellow straw down right. Less experienced builders sometimes don’t attract any females at all. Each female mates only once. She incubates the eggs alone.

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.

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

the miners use dynamite to bleed a vein, in hopes of starting a “blue rush.”

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

I looked at dozens of apartments and when I entered the hallway of the one I moved into next I knew I could live there because it was cheap and the hallway was baby blue. My friends all told me it smelled as bad there as it did in the last one but I found a heads-up penny on the threshold

That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

composing almost everything I write as a letter.

“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.

“How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted,”

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

“I just don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough,” one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?

how blue gives way to darkness—and then how, without warning, the darkness grows up into a cone of light.

I feel confident enough of the specificity and strength of my relation to it to share.

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

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.

They are not the stars—their orifices are. Let them open.

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.

the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fucking—a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart.

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.

197. I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us. This seems unimaginable, but the fact is that it happens all the time.

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone— and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms— if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?