On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (2 page)

It is therefore appropriate that
blow
and
blue
should be—at our earliest convenience—utterly confused.

So I shall, keeping one in each of my four pockets while one is in my mouth, describe five common methods by which sex gains an entrance into literature . . . as through French doors and jim-mied windows thieves break in upon our dreams to rape our women, steal our power tools, and vandalize our dreams. The commonest, of course, is the most brazen: the direct depiction of sexual material—thoughts, acts, wishes; the second involves the use of sexual words of various sorts, and I shall pour one of each vile kind into the appropriate porches of your ears, for pronounc-ing and praising print to the ear is what the decently encouraged eye does happily. The third can be considered, in a sense, the very heart of indirection, and thus the essence of the artist's art—displacement: the passage of the mind with all its blue elastic ditty bags and airline luggage f r o m steamy sexual scenes and sweaty bodies to bedrooms with their bedsteads, nightstands, water-glasses, manuals of instruction, thence to sheets and pillowcases, hence to dents in these, and creases, stains and other cries of passion which have left their prints, and finally to the painted chalk-white oriental face of amorously handled air and mountains,, lewdly entered lakes. The fourth I shall simply refer to now as the skyblue eye (somewhere, it seems to me, there should be a brief pinch of suspense), and the fifth, well, it's really what I'm running into all my inks about, so I had better mention it: the use of language like a lover . . . not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.

* * *

So
blue,
the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp's breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look. There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too. There's the blue pill that is the bullet's end, the nose, the plum, the blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of death.

Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? what brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief. . . each is an absence in us. We have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the hp that meets our lip is always one half of our own. Our state is exactly the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces, come to view us and to say to one another that we never looked better; that we seem at last at peace; that our passing was—well—sad—still—doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the dead should hear). Disappointment, constant loss, despair . . . a taste, a soft quality in the air, a color, a flutter: permanent in their passage. We were not up to it. We missed it. We could not retain it. It will never be back. Joy-breaking gloom continues to hammer. So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

Just as blue pigment spread on canvas may help a painter ac-curately represent nature or give to his work the aforesaid melancholy cast, enhance a pivotal pink patch, or signify the qualities of heavenly love, so our blue colors come in several shades and explanations. Both Christ and the Virgin wear mantles of blue because as the clouds depart the Truth appears. Many things are labeled blue, thought blue, made blue, merely because there's a spot of the color here and there somewhere on them like the bluecap salmon with its dotted head; or things are called blue carelessly because they are violet or purple or gray or even vaguely red, and that's close enough for the harassed eye, the way the brownish halo which surrounds the flame of a miner's safety lamp to warn of firedamp is said to be a bluecap too. Or they are misnamed for deeper reasons: in the ninth century, when the Scandinavians raided Africa and Spain, they carried off samples of the blue men who lived there all the way to Ireland, hence nig-ger-blue is applied to an especially resinous darkness sometimes by those who are no longer Vikings. And Partridge reports the expression:
the sky
as
blue as a ra^or.
Find an eye as blue as indecency itself, an indecency as blue as the smoke of battle, or a battle as blue as the loss of blood. We might remain with such wonders: as blue as . . . as blue as . . . for good and forever.

Anyway, sixth (since the first week had as many working days), I shall describe and distinguish three functions for blue words, modes of production, a Marxist might describe them, and I shall argue that they are equally fundamental. Finally, 1 shall try to list the major motives, from reader's, work's, and writer's point of view, for introducing blue material in the first place. As blue-blaw, blue-blazer, and bluebush. By my private count, you may not be surprised to learn, that makes sixteen separate thoughts I hope to wind my Quink-stained mouth around—turn, of course, and turn about.

II

LET US begin with a brief account of what happened when pirates overtook the whoreship
Cyprian,

. . . the scene on deck was too arresting for divided attention: the pirates dragged out their victims in ones and twos, a-swoon or awake, at pistol-point or by main strength. He saw girls assaulted on the decks, on the stairways, at the railings, everywhere, in every con-ceivable manner. None was spared, and the prettier prizes were clawed at by two and three at a time. Boabdil appeared with one over each shoulder, kicking and scratching him in vain: as he presented one to Captain Pound on the quarter-deck, the other wrig-gled free and tried to escape her monstrous fate by scrambling up the mizzen ratlines. The Moor allowed her a fair head start and then climbed slowly in pursuit, calling to her in voluptuous Arabic at every step. Fifty feet up, where any pitch of the hull is materially amplified by the height, the girl's nerve failed: she thrust bare arms and legs through the squares of the rigging and hung for dear life while Boabdil, once he had come up from behind, ravished her unmercifully. Down on the shallop the sail maker clapped his hands and chortled; Ebenezer, heartsick, turned away.

Barth is satisfied to say that the girl was ravished unmercifully, but so little is this whole scene tinged with blue that a lively newspaper might carry the account. Rape is on the rise, we read, nearly every day. Now Ebenezer Cooke's servant, Bertrand, an unreliable rogue, is a little distance behind him 'watching with undisguised avidity.' If he had written the passage we would have had a lengthy description of the great Moor's member. Our camera would zoom toward the netted wench until it passed, with him, into her womb. Nor should we find poor Bertram's interest odd, since most of us share it, and, like Gullivers in Brob-dingnag, inflate the objects of our greed, deify the origins of every itch, enlarge our lusts, as a coin in the palm of a miser becomes the whole orb of the earth. The deck of the
Cyprian,
however, is not in the world. It needs no hull beneath it, then, no ocean even. It has been wisely noted, in this regard, that we are quite obliged to eat, but there are some perfectly splendid books that never mention the matter.

A crowd of considerations gathers. Here I can pay heed only to a few. It will be observed that Barth, who is a master of the nar-rative art, modulates the size of his events very carefully, and monitors their pace. It's true that he singles out the girl in the rigging for slightly extended treatment, but this extension is discreet, and even then there is a reason for it: she may be the hero-ine, Joan Toast.

An author is responsible for everything that appears in his books. If he claims that reality requires his depiction of the sexual, in addition to having a misguided aesthetic, he is a liar, since we shall surely see how few of his precious passages are devoted to chewing cabbage, hand-washing, sneezing, sitting on the stool, or, if you prefer, filling out forms, washing floors, cheering teams.

Furthermore, the sexual, in most works, disrupts the form;

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there is an almost immediate dishevelment, the proportion of events is lost; sentences like
After the battle of Waterloo, I tied my
shoe,
appear; a sudden, absurd and otherwise inexplicable magnification occurs, with the shattering of previous wholes into countless parts and endless steps; articles of underclothing crawl away like injured worms and things which were formerly perceived and named as nouns cook down into their adjectives.

What a page before was a woman is suddenly a breast, and then a nipple, then a little ring of risen flesh, a pacifier, water bottle, rubber cushion. Without plan or purpose we slide from substance to sensation, fact to feeling, all
out
becomes
in,
and we hear only exclamations of suspicious satisfaction: the ums, the ohs, the ahs.

Unless we continue to drain through the cunt till we reach metaphor, as Henry Miller often does:

A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up with divans and cosy corners and rubber teeth and syringas and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent, and so soft and restful that I lay like a dolphin on the oyster banks. A slight twitch and I'd be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling sea-crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops.

It's true that Miller occasionally forgets himself. Still, he should be forgiven what we all want: forgetting within the fuck.

Love is a nervous habit. Haven't many said so? Snacking. Smok-ing. Talking. Joking. Alike as light bulbs. Drinking. Drugging.

Frigging. Fucking. Writing. Forgetting. Nerves. Nerves, nerves, nerves. Our author does not, in fact, get sufficiently inside his line, forget enough to be forgiven. He talks too much, compul-sively, his memory is made of suspiciously precise lies, the over-large anecdotal detail—yowl, stance, and quim size, garlic and onion, vestibule or stairway—like one of those guides at the Vatican.

* * *

The common deer in its winter coat is said by hunters to be in the blue. To be in the blue is to be isolated and alone. To be sent to the blue room is to be sent to solitary, a chamber of confine-ment devoted to the third degree. It's to be beaten by police, or, if you are a metal, heated until the more refrangible rays pre-dominate and the ore is stained like those razor blades the sky is sometimes said to be
as blue as,
for example, when you're suddenly adrift on a piece of cake or in a conversation feel a wind from outer space chill your teeth like a cube of ice. Ah, but what is form but a b u m wipe anyhow? Let us move our minds as we must, for form was once only the schoolyard of a life, the simple boundary of a being who, pulsating like an artery, drew a dark line like Matisse drew always around its own pale breath. Blue oak. Blue poplar. Blue palm. There are no blue bugs of note, although there are blue carpenter bees, blue disk longhorn beetles, blue-winged wasteland grasshoppers, one kind of butterfly, bottle-fly, the bird, and not a single wasp or spider. The muff, the fur, the forest, and the grot.

So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend, sight, the sovereign sense and concept's chief content, blurs. 'The lover,' Rilke wrote, 'is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordin-ation of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.'

A flashlight held against the skin might just as well be off. Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content, that the intensity of that content quickly outruns its apparent cause, that the full experience becomes finally inarticulate, and that there is no major art that works close in. Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed.

Caspar Goodwood suddenly takes Isabel Archer in his arms:

'His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread and spread again, and stayed . . . ' and Henry James, quite unconsciously, goes on to say that 'it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession.' But he never made this mistake again.

The blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue john is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are Yankee boys. Mer-curial ointment, used for the destruction of parasites, is called blue butter, although that greenish-blue fungus we've all seen cover bread is named blue-mold instead.

So Barth wisely remarks that the lady was ravished unmercifully and turns his hero sadly away. But the deck of the
Cyprian
is not in this world. Would we be content here, where we are, napkin at neck, to stare distantly at our beef, to receive reports that we had eaten without the pleasures of the chewing? No only close-ups will content us here. We approach, indeed, until it's entered us. The difference between 'the beef' and 'the blue'

may seem at the same time too wide and too narrow to be of significance. Although, in many ways, these appetites are quite alike, there is no comparable literary mode dedicated to the seared and steaming flank; the mark of every tooth is nowhere with joy recorded; the floods of saliva, the growls which empty from the throat, the delight of every bite and swallow, the slice of the knife, its grate on the plate beneath, the hot. .. the glands groan as I describe i t . . . the spicy hot sauce in which the sausage swims . . . there's no Homer for them; there's no Henry Miller either, or Akbar del Piombo; there's only James Beard and Julia Child, masters of the shopping list.