Read On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Online

Authors: William H. Gass

Tags: #General, #Literary Criticism, #Art, #Philosophy, #Semiotics & Theory, #Blue, #Aesthetics, #Color, #Color Theory, #Sex in Literature

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (7 page)

BOOK: On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
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So sentences are copied, constucted, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through

'and' as it opens—there—there—we're h e r e ! . . . in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences

—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality trans-mogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech . . . ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.

* * *

Half-breeds belong to the blue squadron. Sometimes they are called 'blue skins,' as Protestants once were.
Blue Boy
is the popular title of a painting by Gainsborough, the name of a prize hog in
State Fair,
and the abscess from a venereal disease. Under the vilifying gaze of fluorescent light, the heads of pimples turn blue, as do the rings around the eyes, and the lips grow cold. Although the form, 'blueness,' signifies the quality of being blue in any sense, it usually refers only to indecency:
les horreurs, les betises,
les gueulies.
Will it profit us to wonder why? Jackson Pollock painted
Blue Poles,
the name of any magnet's southern dart.

Earlier he'd covered a canvas he labeled
The Blue Unconscious.

Here the color is sparingly used. A group of Germans got itself called the
Blaue Reiter,
and Piero della Francesca did indeed make the Virgin's mantle blue in his
Annunciation
. . . in his
Nativity,
too. Nor did the Lorenzettis neglect her, Giotto neither, though he colored his pit-of-hell devils blue as a soul dismantled. Con-tending that art is a product of pain, Picasso passed through such a period, painting
The Blue Room, Woman in Blue,
and many others: stem-like bodies on which long faces gather like solidifying smoke.

'For our blues,' Hoogstraten says, 'we have English, German, and Haarlem ashes, smalts, blue lakes, indigo, and the invaluable ultramarine.' It is of course the sky. It is the sky's pale deep endlessness, sometimes so intense at noon the brightness flakes like a fresco. Then at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us, not like dew but settling dust or poisonous exhaust from all the life burned up while we were busy being other than ourselves. For our blues we have the azures and ceruleans, lapis lazulis, the light and dusty, the powder blues, the deeps: royal, sapphire, navy, and marine; there are the pavonian or peacock blues, the reddish blues: damson, madder and cadet, hyacinth, periwinkle, wine, wisteria and mulberry; there are the sloe blues, a bit purpled or violescent, and then the green blues, too: robin's egg and eggshell blue, beryl, cobalt, glaucous blue, jouvence, turquoise, aquamarine. A nice light blue can be prepared f r o m silver, and when burned, Prussian blue furnishes a very fine and durable brown. For our blues we have those named for nations, cities, regions: French blue, which is an artificial ultramarine, Italian, Prussian, Swiss and Brunswick blues, Chinese blue, a pigment which has a peculiar reddish-bronze cast when in lump-form and dry, in contrast to China blue which is a simple soluble dye; we have Indian blue, an indigo, Hungarian, a cobalt, the blues of Parma and Saxony, Paris, Berlin, and Dresden, those of Bremen and Antwerp, the ancient blues of Armenia and Alexandria, the latter made of copper and lime and sometimes called Egyptian, the blue of the Nile, the blue of the blue sand potters use. Are there so many states of mind and shades of feeling? In a dress riddled with polka dots, Colette, arthritic and frizzy in her final photographs, sits with the profile of Cocteau,
le fanal bleu,
her papers and her pain. And for our blues we have those named for persons, processes, and earths: Hortense, Croupier, Blackley blue and Chemic, Imperial or spirit-blue, Raymond or Napoleon blue, Night blue or Victoria, Leitch's blue, Schweinfurth's or Reboulleau's blue, Monthier's blue, which uses ammonia, Elber-feld, Eschel, Gentiana blue, Gold blue, Guernsey, Guimet, Hum-boldt and the coal-tar colors, Aniline, Alkali, Anthracene blue.

Alizarin blue, paste blue, vat blue, fast blue, the fluorescent re-sorcinol blues, milori, vitriol, blue verditer, slate and steel blue, all the grays, gun-metal, asbestos, and then the bluish shades of verdigris appearing subtly in the same way that our attitudes slowly acetify our bodies. Fra Angelico, that sweet man, did not ignore the Virgin either, though her mantle, alas, is never blue, but sometimes lavender or even green. 'Green' is another name, though now forgotten, long unused, for things obscene.

Long unused. Still, the disappearance from literature of words and subjects (or their appearance there) simply because writers and readers have strong feelings about them is never an aesthetically promising cause. And the principal difficulty with using sexual material in literature is that the motives of all concerned are usually corrupt.

Because of the values we place on sexuality in life, because of the terrible taboos which surround it, the endless lies, the for-lorn wishes, the sad fantasies we wind around it like gauze about a wound (whether these things are due to the way we are brought up, or are the result of something graver—an unalterable quality in our nature), everyone's likeliest area of psychological weakness is somewhere in the sexual. Writers, whose work is actually an analogue anyway, are still more susceptible to the blue disease, so that even those whose mastery of their medium is otherwise incontestible will—with a serious air—plait flowers in their hero's pubic hair and stumble over a little fornication like a tod-dler climbing stairs. Any author's wisdom here consists of the correct assessment of his own weaknesses and the discovery of technical ways to circumvent them. Not an enterprise for amateurs. Colette used the blue paper she wrote on to shade her writing l i g h t . . . to shine bluely through the curtains at pedest-rians crossing the Palais-Royal a notice of her presence day and night.

But we are perfectly familiar with these things.

* * *

Those dressed in blue

Have lovers true;

In green and white,

Forsaken quite.

Touch blue,

If you love me, love me true, Your wish will come true.

Send me a ribbon, and let it be blue;
If you hate me, let it be seen,

Send me a ribbon, a ribbon of green.

It is intriguing to wonder whether the difficulties children have with color, the quickness with which they pick up forms and functions and learn the names for bye-bye, truck, and auntie, yet at a late age (even five), without a qualm, call any color by the name of any other, aren't found again in the history of our words, for oysters could not be oozier than these early designa-tions. Blue is blue or green or yellow: what the hell. Or so it seems. Colors flood our space so fully that there isn't any. They allow us to discriminate among otherwise identical things (gold and green racing cars, football teams, jelly beans, red- brown-blond- and black-haired girls); however, our eye is always at the edge, establishing boundaries, making claims, so that colors principally enable us to discern shapes and define relations, and it certainly appears that patterns and paths—first, last, and in between—are what we want and what we remember: useful contraptions, useful controls, and useful connections.

Yet the pig in the pigment is missing. Well, what do we need with all that fat? Our world could be gray as the daily paper and we'd not miss much in the way of shapes and ,,izes. An occasional bluebird might be overlooked fleeing ext'nction through a meadow—so what. As much an afterhue as afterthought, colors came to the movies as they came to the comics, and there they remain—surreal in their overlays—like bad printing. Hoopla is hoopla however it's hollered. Tinting that weed green or its trailer silver would not have improved my naked girl's gray and white image. No. Who cares for color in a world of pure trans-missions?

Children collect nouns, bugs, bottlecaps, seashells, verbs: what's that? what's it doing now? who's this? and with the greed which rushes through them like like rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possession. But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kind, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving, indiscreet, how sour?

Measures, not immersions, concerned our sciences almost f r o m the beginning, and we were scarcely out of the gate before Democritus was declaring fiercely that 'color exists by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth nothing exists but the atoms and the void.' Although Anaxagoras had already claimed that we see nothing but light reflected in the pupil of the eye, the real organ of perception, all along, was Mind. It was the soul that saw for Plato, too, yet color was a dissembling cosmetic, the tinted 'marble and the gilded thigh, perfume for the iris, spice for spoiled meat, and when the mind put a public face on, as Protagoras might, or Gorgias did, in pursuit of persuasion, it painted itself like an old whore for the light, and with one finger gooey from the color pot circled its sockets with the pale cream and gray-blue grit of the shaven pubis, smearing on each cheek a paste'which matched the several pallors of de-bauchery, though these undertoning blues and violets were startled sometimes by spots of cantharidian red, or else with the whole hand it spread a melancholy which gently purpled the spent body like a bruise.

For Democritus, shape was the principal cause of color, especially the shape of what might be considered the reflecting or emitting surface: white atoms were smooth, black jagged (shadow-casting, Theophrastus suggests); though his account is hardly consistent since the atoms of red are compared to those of flame and simply said to be larger, while the ones which produce green are made, like the statues of Henry Moore, of the solid and the void itself—thing and no thing—which, according to his own teaching, is the way the whole of reality is put together and not just the greenish part. Moreover, Democritus omitted blue from the list of his primary colors at the cost of our admiration.

On the other hand, Epicurus claimed that the positions and arrangements of the atoms were as important as their isolated shape, and that, in effect, color's cause was molecular, an opinion more correct than he could ever have imagined, since hue is not the simple effect of a stimulus, it is the actual perception of a whole series or set of relations.

In any case, as Galen observed, very early the philosophers kicked quality out of science. Aristotle insisted that qualities were accidents and could not be a part of essence. Lucretius faith-fully followed the lead of Epicurus. Galileo was equally concerned to reserve physics for mathematics, and, as we know, Descartes delivered, as a Frenchman should, the
coup de grace.

The campaign against quality was a campaign against consciousness, because that's where quality was thrown like trash in a can. Although Descartes' public purpose was to certify faith, his successful secret purpose was to clean up thought for the sur-geries of science. For the most part, then, qualities were removed from the external world and given over to that same soul which was once said merely to perceive them, as though the telescope with its lenses had swallowed the stars. It is important to notice, however, that Plato's complaint about color was not that it was illusory whereas the physical world which it concealed was real.

No, for him the dancer was as deceitful as her veils. The inter-course of eye and object, which involves the voluptuous inter-twining of two rays (these were his own blue metaphors), en-genders twins: the eye is filled with seeing (an activity), while simultaneously the object seen becomes luminous with color (a condition). Eye and sky together are then blue and its apprehension. Goethe—great pagan that he was—sounds the same note: The eye owes its very existence to light. From inert animal ancillary organs light evokes an organ which shall become light; and so the eye learns to give light for light, emitting an internal ray to encounter that from without.

Plato's brilliant and beautiful suggestion avoids the insoluble projection problem. Of course, in philosophy, you settle one bill only by neglecting another, a strategy which must eventually be seen to fail since all of them fall due at the same time. Nevertheless, Plato was never guilty of such unempirical foolishness as the rag-taggle of doctrines which crowded along afterward required.

BOOK: On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
9.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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