William Gass - On Being Blue - A Philosophical Inquiry

John Middleton Murry edited The Blue Review for the three distinguished issues of its life, and something called The Blue Calendar predicted the weather from 1895 to 1898 without ever being right. Only a nickel, also blue, out of the same dry attic box, The Bibelot, a Lilliputian periodical with a Gothically lettered cover which fairly cried out ART, rose into my unhealthy hands. It came down from Maine instead of in from Kansas, and reprinted pieces that had previously vanished in the pages of The Dark Blue, a vague Pre-Raphaelite monthly with a title as frustratingly incomplete as a broken musical phrase. These rhapsodies went into print and out of sight the way trout, I’m sure, still disappear among the iridescences of my childhood Ohio’s cold, bottomless Blue Hole, suddenly to emerge again in the clear, swift streams and shallow ponds it feeds as if nothing magical had happened to them. Each of the magazine’s meager issues featured a single, slightly sacred, faintly wicked, and always delicately perfumed work by William Morris or Francis Thompson, Andrew Lang or others. The set I saw concluded quietly with Swinburne’s tribute to the painter Simeon Solomon (even then in bluish oblivion). Now this fading poet’s forgotten essay furnishes us with our first example, before we are quite ready for any: the description of two figures in a painting… the prose of a shade of blue I leave to you.

One girl, white-robed and radiant as white water-flowers, has half let fall the rose that droops in her hand, dropping leaf by leaf like tears; both have the languor and the fruitful air of flowers in a sultry place; their leaning limbs and fervent faces are full of the goddess; their lips and eyes allure and await the invisible attendant Loves. The clear pearl-white cheeks and tender mouths have still about them the subtle purity of sleep; the whole drawing has upon it the heavy incumbent light of summer but half awake. Nothing of more simple and brilliant beauty has been done of late years.

Lang, plainly fond of the color, edited The Blue Poetry Book . From her window Katherine Mansfield sees a garden full of wall-flowers and blue enamel saucepans, and sets the observation down in a letter to Frieda Lawrence she’ll never mail. Stephen Crane wrote and posted The Blue Hotel, Malcolm Cowley Blue Juniata, and Conrad Aiken Blue Voyage . Like rainwater and white chickens, KM exclaims:

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.

Then there is the cold Canadian climate and the color of deep ice. The gill of a fish. Lush grass. The whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin.

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Among the derivations of the word, I especially like blavus, from medieval Latin, and the earlier, more classical, flavus, for the discolorations of a bruise, so that it sometimes meant yellow, with perhaps a hint of green beneath the skin like naughty under-clothes. Once, one blushed blue, though to blush like a blue dog, as the cliché went then, was not to blush at all. Covenanters, against royal red, flaunted it. They were true blue, they said. And Boswell tells us, out of his blue life, that Benjamin Stilling-fleet wore blue wool undress hose to Elizabeth Montague’s literary tea-at-homes. Perhaps to Elizabeth Carter’s too. And even Hannah More’s.

BLUE. — Few words enter more largely into the composition of slang, and colloquialisms bordering on slang, than does the word BLUE. Expressive alike of the utmost contempt, as of all that men hold dearest and love best, its manifold combinations, in ever varying shades of meaning, greet the philologist at every turn. A very Proteus, it defies all attempts to trace the why and wherefore of many of the turns of expression of which it forms a part. ..

(Farmer and Henley: Slang and Its Analogues )

So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that. A single word, a single thought, a Single thing, as Plato taught. We cover our concepts, like fish, with clouds of net. Cops and bobbies wear blue. We catch them and connect. Imagined origins reduce the sounds of clash and contradiction, as when one cries out blue murder in the street. There’s the blue for baby boy, the blue of blue sky laws, blue for jeans, blue for hogs. The coal fish, a salmon, the glut-herring, a kind of trout, are said to have blue-backs and are named so in Yorkshire, Maryland, Virginia, Maine. From earliest times it’s been the badge of servitude: among the Gauls, to humiliate harlots in houses of correction, as the color of a tradesman’s apron, for liveries and uniforms of all kinds, the varlet’s costume.

Blue: bright, with certain affinities for bael (fire, pyre), with certain affinities for bald ( ballede ), with certain affinities for bold. Odd. Well, a bald brant is a blue goose. And these slippery blue-green sources ease, like sleeves of grease, each separate use into a single — we think — fair and squarely ordered thought machine. Never mind degrees, deep differences, contrasting sizes. The same blue sock fits every leg. Never mind the noses of those Nova Scotian potatoes, blue noses are the consequence of sexual freeze, or they are noses buried far too long in bawdy books, or rubbed too often harshly up and down on wool-blue thighs. Not alone is love the desire and pursuit of the whole. It is one of the passions of the mind. Furthermore, if among a perfect mélange of meanings there is one which has a more immediate appeal, as among the contents of a pocket one item is a peppermint, it will assume a center like the sun and require all others take their docile turn to go around.

This thought is itself a center. I shall not return to it.

Blue postures, attitudes, blue thoughts, blue gestures… is it the form or content that turns blue when these are?… blue words and pictures: a young girl posed before the door of her family’s trailer, embarrassed breasts and frightened triangle, vacant stare… I wonder what her father sold the snapshots for? I remember best the weed which grew between the steps. But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy. What is form, in any case, but a bumbershoot held up against the absence of all cloud? Stringy hair, head out of plumb, smile like a scratch across her face… my friends brought her image with them from their camping trip, and I remember best the weed which grew between the steps. My sensations were as amateur as her photo. A red apple among oranges. Very beautiful. O God.

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 distributed 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 pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by 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 finished 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.