On being blue

William Gass (1975)

• I.
  • Very beautiful, O God! is a blue tea-pot with two white cups attending; a red apple among oranges addeth fire to flame—in the white book-cases the books fly up and down in scales of colour, with pink and lilac notes recurring, until nothing remains but them, sounding over and over.
  • Remember how the desperate Molloy proceeds: I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones I distrutibed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pockct of my greatcoat, and putting it in mv mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat bv a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had fin-ished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones.... But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about.
  • . . . I felt the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other. So it was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not hap-hazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But deep down I didn't give a tinker's curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand or the left, backwards and forwards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same.
  • And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.
  • As we shall see, and be ashamed because we aren't ashamed to say it, like that unpocketed peppermint which has, from fingering, become unwrapped, we always plate our sexual subjects first. It is the original reason why we read . . . the only reason why we write. It is therefore appropriate that blow and blue should be—at our earliest convenience—utterly confused.
  • 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.
• II.
  • Furthermore, the sexual, in most works, disrupts the form; 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.
  • 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.
  • '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.
  • I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.
  • The worship of the word must be pagan and polytheistic. It cannot endure one god.
  • The dictionary is as disturbing as the world, full of teasing parallels and misleading coincidence.
  • THE AUSTRALIAN POEM: A sunburnt bloody stockman stood, And in a dismal, bloody mood, Apostrophized his bloody cuddy: 'This bloody moke's no bloody good, He doesn't earn his bloody food, Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!', He leapt upon his bloody horse And galloped off of bloodv course. The road was wet and bloody muddy: It led him to the bloody creek; The bloody horse was bloody weak, 'Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!' He said, 'This bloodv steed must swim, The same for me as bloody him!' The creek was deep and bloody floody. So ere they reached the bloody bank The bloody steed beneath him sank The stockman's face a bloody study Ejaculating Bloody! bloody! bloody!
  • There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren't nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they're not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough.
  • I am firmly of the opinion that people who can't speak have nothing to say. It's one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues...allow them a language as lousy as their lives.
  • We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming. In fact our entire vocabulary for states of consciousness is critically impoverished.
  • 'I've beat girls before,' whispering, holding the truncheon in the dark, bracing himself with one fat hand against the wall, 'and I don't leave bruises And if I happened to be without my weapon. . . the next best thing is a newspaper rolled and soaking wet. But here, get the feel of it, Miss.' He reached down for her and she felt the truncheon nudging against her thigh, gently, like a man's cane in a crowd. 'It ain't so bad,' he whispered. She was lying face up and hardly trembling, not offering to pull her leg away. The position she was tied in made her think of exercises she had heard were good for the figure. She smelled gun oil - the men who visited the room had guns—and a sour odor inside the mattress. . . . There was a shadow on the wall like a rocking chair; her fingers were going to sleep; she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable. Then something happened to his face. . . . His arm went up quivering, over his head with the truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each blow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at ab-domen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.
  • A muff, a glove, a stocking, the glass a lover's lips have touched, the print of a shoe in the snow: how is it that these simple objects can receive our love so well that they increase it? I answer: because they become concepts, lighter than angels, and all the more meaningful because they began as solids, while the body of the beloved, dimpled and lined by the sheeted bed, bucks, sweats, freezes, alters under us, escapes our authority and powers, lacks every dimension, in that final moment, but the sexual, yet will not remain in the world it's been sent to, and is shortly complaining of an ache. The man with his fetish, like a baby with its blanket, has security—not the simple physical condition (with locks on the doors who is safe?) but the Idea itself. Those pink shells, the curtain-rods ending in arrows, the great balls of the lire-dogs: how absurd they would be in reality, how meaningless, how lacking in system, all higher connection. It's not the word m j d e flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
  • The word itself has another color. It's not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and I, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn't the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow's deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn't violet's rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the ir-regularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pan-cake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the as-sertive brevity of red, the whine of green. What did Rimbaud know about the vowels we cannot also find outside the lines in which the poet takes an angry piss at Heaven? The blue perhaps of the aster or the iris or the air a fist has bruised?
  • but I have been dropping hints all along like heavy shoes that the ultimate and essential displacement is to the word, and that the true sexuality in literature—sex as a positive aesthetic q u a l i t y - lies not in any scene and subject, nor in the mere appearance of a vulgar word, not in the thick smear of a blue spot, but in the consequences on the page of love well made—made to the medium which is the writer's own, for he—for she—has only these little shapes and sounds to work with, the same saliva surrounds them all, every word is equally a squiggle or a noise, an abstract designation (the class of cocks, for instance, or the sub-class of father-defilers), and a crowd of meanings as randomly connected by time and use as a child connects his tinkertoys. On this basis, not a single thing will distinguish Tuck' from Traise du bois'; 'blue' and 'triangle' are equally abstract; and what counts is not what lascivious sights your loins can tie to your thoughts like Lucky is to Pozzo, but love lavished on speech of any kind, re-gardless of content and intention.
  • Stones will never nourish us however patiently or hard we suck them.
• III.
  • So—in short—color is consciousness itself, color is feeling, and shape is the distance color goes securely, as in our life we extend ourselves through neighborhoods and hunting grounds; while form in its turn is the relation of these inhabited spaces, in or out or up or down, and thrives on the difference between kitchen and pantry. This difference, with all its sameness, is yet another quality, alive in time like the stickiness of honey or the gently rough lap of the cat, for color is connection. The deeds and sufferings of light, as Goethe says, are ultimately song and celebration. Praise is due blue, the preference of the bee.
  • Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.
• IV.
  • Furthermore, like those logical layers I touched upon earlier (blue the color, 'blue* the word, and Blue the Platonic Idea), our feelings have levels, and many are metapathetic. These logically remoter emotions are soon equal with the others (my desire for another man's wife commingles with the disgust I feel at my taste for flaccid boobs), and this new mix is felt afresh as still another feeling which, when the complete self is in fine fettle, with incredible immediacy and ease, disposes qualities correctly over the embattled Europe of my experience much as we crayoned countries in sixth-grade History in order to learn who had won what in the First World War: cleavage for the eye, martini on the tongue, heat to the head, aching in the belly, swelling within the prick, envy of the husband's proprietary arm now wrapped indecently under the heavy fall of her breasts, and contempt from the critical self shaken out like salt on everything. None of these inclusive responses is purely public, purely private; each of them is cognitive, the sum of whatever we know and are at any moment. We experience the world, balanced on our noses like the ball it is, turn securely through the thunder of our own applause.
  • But she is still preparing salad at the sink. Why doesn't she slip out of those blue jeans and roll upon the floor in an agony of desire? Because she is preparing salad at the sink.
  • Intimacy. The movies have relieved this pressure somewhat, but writers remain unduly responsive to it. As readers, that's what we want: the penetration of privacy. We want to see under the skirt. And while we are peering at the page, though invisible to Prudence who is scratching her thigh, we are not invisible in fact—again an improvement over the ring which costs us the sight of ourselves.
  • Books whose blueness penetrates the pages between their covers are books which, without depriving us of the comfort of our own commode or the sight of our liberal selves, place us inside a manufactured privacy. This privacy is really not that of someone else. It must be artificial because the real world plainly bores us. Impatient, we can't wait for nature to take its course. When we take our textual tour through the slums, we want crime, violence, starvation, disease, not hours of just sitting around. We want the world to be the world we read about in the papers; all news. What good is my ring if the couple I am using it to spy on make love in darkness once a month, and then are quick, inept, and silent? Better rob banks. The money is always there. What good is my peek at her pubic hair if I must also see the red lines made by her panties, the pimples on her ramp, broken veins like the print of a lavender thumb, the stepped-on look of a day's-end muff? I've that at home. No. Vishnu is blue in all his depictions. Lord Krishna too. Yes. The blue we bathe in is the blue we breathe. The blue we breathe, I fear, is what we want from life and only find in fiction. For the voyeur, fiction is what's called going all the way.
  • The privacy which a book makes public is nevertheless made public very privately—not like the billboard which shouts at the street, or the movie whose image is so open we need darkness to cover the clad-ass and naked face that's settled in our seat. A fictional text enters consciousness so discreetly it is never seen outdoors . . . from house to house it travels like a whore . . . so even on a common carrier I can quite safely fill my thoughts with obscene adjectives and dirty verbs although the place I occupy is thigh-sided by a parson. We like that.
  • Blue as you enter it disappears. Red never does that. Every article of air might look like cobalt if we got outside ourselves to see it. The country of the blue is clear.
  • It is not simple, not a matter for amateurs, making sentences sexual; it is not easy to structure the consciousness of the reader with the real thing, to use one wonder to speak of another, until in the place of the voyeur who reads we have fashioned the reader who sings; but the secret lies in seeing sentences as containers of consciousness, as constructions whose purpose it is to create conceptual perceptions—blue in every area and range: emotion moving through the space of the imagination, the mind at gleeful hop and scotch, qualities, through the arrangement of relations, which seem alive within the limits they pale and red-den like spanked cheeks, and thus the bodies, objects, happen-ings, they essentially define.
  • The misleading miracle of the movies can nevertheless instruct us about prose. The silent film was full of magnificent action and exaggerated gestures as the actors strove to overcome the mute-ness of their medium. A Chaplin might occasionally manage, but most emotions cannot survive breast-beating. The talkie, on the other hand, while showing us how complicated thoughts and subtle feelings had been nearly snuffed out by the airless absence of speech, also demonstrated how cheap, thin, and stupid both became when the script was weak. Of course the camera fidgets in front of the speaking face. The telephone, a tire screech, the smash of glass, a ringing exchange of shots: these sounds issue from their images; but any conversation which rises above cliche like the first bird requires every photo in its neighborhood to be obedient and serve it. Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal. The camera understands its enemy, and shuts its eye.
  • So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there's one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not un-chaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings its own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them: blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear , . . chant and pray, since the day may begin badly, in a soggy light that moist-ens the soul before consciousness has cracked so every thought is damp as an anxious forehead, desire won't spark, and the morning prick is limp . , , consequently speak and praise, for the fall of the spirit, descending like a diver toward the floor of the ocean, is marked by increasing darkness, green giving way to navy, then a hair-wide range of hues which come to rest, among snowing fish and plants pale as paper, in a sightless night; and our lines are long when under water, loose and weedy, turning back upon themselves like the legs of a dying spider; we grow slack of feature in our melancholy, and the blue which marks the change is heavy, thick as ooze . . . so shout and celebrate before the shade conceals the window: blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese . . . while there is time and you are able, because when blue has left the edges of its objects as if the world were bleached of it, when the wide blue eye has shut down for the season, when there's nothing left but language . . . watered twilight, sour sea . . . don't find yourself clergy'd out of choir and chorus . . . sing and say . . . despite the belly ache and loneliness, new bump led fat and flaking skin and drunkenness and helpless rage, despite dumps, mopes, Mondays, sheets like dirty plates, tomorrow falling toward you like a tower, lie in wait for that miraculous moment when in your mouth teeth turn into dragons and you do against the odds what Demos-thenes did by the Aegean: shape pebbles into syllables and make stones sound; thus cautioned and encouraged, commanded, warned, persist,., even though the mattress where you mourns been tipped and those corners where the nickels roll slide open like a slot to swallow them, clocks slow, and there's been perhaps a pouring rain, or factory smoke, an aging wind and winter air, and everything is gray.

Page last revised on: 2024-05-10