William Gass: On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry

Thin in content, few in number, constantly abused: what chance do the unspeakables have? Change is resisted fiercely, additions are denied. I have introduced ‘squeer,’ ‘crott,’ ‘kotswinkling,’ and ‘papdapper,’ with no success. Sometimes obvious substitutes, like ‘socksucker,’ catch on, but not for long. What we need, of course, is a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine fuck from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one — a fack from a fick, a fick from a fock — but we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses, and our earthy words are all… well… ‘dirty.’ It says something dirty about us, no doubt, because in a society which had a mind for the body and other similarly vital things, there would be a word for coming down, or going up, words for nibbles on the bias, earlobe loving, and every variety of tongue track. After all, how many kinds of birds do we distinguish?

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.

The forbidden words may be forbidden, but we sneak them in. First we pretend to be using another word which happens to resemble the forbidden one exactly, as in this exchange between Romeo and Mercutio. Romeo begins:

Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,

Too rude, too boistrous, and it pricks like thorn.. .

To which Mercutio replies:

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.. .

Prick, cock, screw, balls, bust, bang, suck, lick… the list is endless, and endlessly uninteresting.

The raw rude word may appear submerged, as when an angry Hamlet asks Ophelia if he may lie in her lap, and she says:

No, my lord .

I mean, my head upon your lap .

Aye, my lord .

Do you think I meant country matters?

… a line in which ‘cunt’ is concealed by a tree.

I think nothing, my lord .

That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs .

What is, my lord?

Nothing .

There is the love inside of glove, the ass in brass, the dung in dungeon, and even the pee in perspective. It is necessary to rub the little-boy smirk off these words before they can be used with any success, and introducing them in these angular ways sometimes helps. Although rarely.

The fact is: they aren’t loved enough. Almost every English poet writes of love and fornication, enjoys describing women as if they were fields awaiting subdivision. Does not our Dr. Donne, himself, cry out: Oh, my America, my new-found-land? Indeed. But he keeps the language clean. When it comes to sexual directness and plain speech, Burns probably surpasses, but even he has the advantage of a dialect extraordinarily rich in sweet blue words like gamahuche* and

Then gie the lass her fairin’, lad,

O gie the lass her fairin’,

An’ she’ll gie you a hairy thing,

An’ of it be na sparin’;

But lay her o’er amang the creels,

An’ bar the door wi’ baith your heels,

The mair she gets, the mair she squeals,

An’ hey for houghmagandie.

… which may account for the fact that I could never take Mahatma Gandhi very seriously.

Walt Whitman, who was indeed daring in his day, was rarely convincing. In truth, America’s great maker of lists was usually sappy:

This is the female form.

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,

It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,

I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,

Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,

Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,

Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,

Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,

Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,

Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,

Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

Poets who would never meter their stick or brag of their balls; who would never vulgarly vaunt of their lady’s vaginal grip or be publicly proud of her corpulent tits, succumb to the menace of measurement. Rossetti, while he kisses, counts.

Her arms lie open, throbbing with their throng

Of confluent pulses, bare and fair and strong:

And her deep-freighted lips expect me now

Amid the clustering hair that shrines her brow

Five kisses broad, her neck ten kisses long…

Lately, Yeats approached the problem, and Pound had occasional success, the most notable, I suppose, this passage from Canto XXXIX:

Desolate is the roof where the cat sat,

Desolate is the iron rail that he walked

And the corner post whence he greeted the sunrise.

In hill path: ‘thkk, thgk’

of the loom

‘Thgk, thkk’ and the sharp sound of a song

under olives

When I lay in the ingle of Circe

I heard a song of that kind.

Fat panther lay by me

Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,

All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards,

Lions loggy with Circe’s tisane,

Girls leery with Circe’s tisane…

Lovely as this is, the rest of his frankness is in Latin and Greek.

No, they are not well-enough loved, and the wise writer watches himself, for with so much hate inside them — in ‘bang,’ in ‘screw,’ in ‘prick,’ in ‘piece,’ in ‘hump’—how can he be sure he has not been infected — by ‘slit,’ by ‘gash’—and his skills, supreme while he’s discreet, will not fail him? Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed. Lawrence is perhaps the saddest example.

• • •

There’s the blue skin of cold, contusion, sickness, fear… absent air, morbidity, the venereals, blue pox… gloom…

There are whole schools of fish, clumps of trees, flocks of birds, bouquets of flowers: blue channel cats, the ash, beech, birch, bluegills, breams, and bass, Andalusian fowl, acaras, angels in decorative tanks, the bluebill, bluecap, and blue billy (a petrel of the southern seas), anemone, bindweed, bur, bell, mullet, salmon, trout, cod, daisy, and a blue leaved and flowered mountain plant called the blue beardtongue because of its conspicuous yellow-bearded sterile stamens.

The mad, as we choose to speak of others who do not share our tastes, provide cases galore of color displacement: they think pink is blue, that brown is blue, that sounds are blue, that over-shoes are condoms, and we have only to describe these crazies directly and they will smuggle the subject in all by themselves. Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented room. The techniques, in any case, are similar.

Here is Thick, in The Lime Twig of John Hawkes, beating Margaret:

‘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.