William Gass - On Being Blue - A Philosophical Inquiry

‘The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight,’ Shakespeare wrote. ‘Pinch the maids as blue as bilberry…’ ‘Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue/A pair of maiden worlds unconquered…’ And so to the worst: ‘Her two blue windows’ (here he means the eyelids of reviving Venus) ‘faintly she up-heaveth.’ Blue Eagle. Blue crab. Blue crane. Blue pill. Blue Cross.

But our sexual schemes scarcely need the encouragement of a common word, the blues with which I began, for instance: blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies… Throw down any pair of terms like dice; speak of arrogant bananas; command someone, as Gertrude Stein once did, to ‘argue the earnest cake,’ and the mind will do more than mix them in its ear. It will endeavor a context in which the command is normal, even trite. Our grammars give us rules for doing that, but sometimes these are no more than suggestions. Our interests do the same. Just as a man who is sick with suspicion may suppose that even the billboards are about him, any text can be regarded as a metaphorical description of some subject hidden in the reader’s head. In that blue light which lust (or orgone energy) is said to shine on everything, we begin to see what an arrogant banana might be. Adolescent boys may live for weeks within a single sexual giggle, and when political life feels the thumb, then any innocent surface (poor Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook ) can conceal a call to arms. Suppressed material contaminates the free like fecal water. Ernani or The Marriage of Figaro become revolutionary.

Out of aching puberty, I remember very well a burlesque skit to which I was a breathless, puzzled witness much the way I once watched, through a slit, slogans scribbled on a washroom wall by a large rotund little man who held his hand to his heart as though he were warming it, and rolled down his lower lip. Pressed Pants is telling Baggy of his wonderful trip to Venice, and how a beautiful woman invited him to take a ride in her gondola (a word which both pronounced gone-dough-la ).

You’re kidding. You actually got in her gondola.

She invited me, I told you. She practically insisted.

Listen… hey… tell me: what was her gondola like?

Oh, you know, they’re all pretty much the same — long and narrow,

a bit flat-bottomed, with a tall ornamental stem.

Boy. Oh boy. I can’t believe it. And you got in?

Spent the whole afternoon.

In her gondola?

Sure. Saw all the sights.

Ah, come on… naw… not all afternoon.

Sure. At first we went fast but later we just took it easy and lay

there kinda lazy. She was well built, soft and cushiony inside.

We had tea and cake, too, and a good long discussion about art.

While you was still in her gondola?

Certainly. She didn’t rock much. And there was a fiddler — huge guy

— who played lively little tunes the whole time. And sang a few

romantic songs, and pointed out the points of interest.

Wow. I’ll bet. But he wasn’t in her gondola too?

Sure he was — where would he be?

Ah, come on now… Naw… Naw… He was in there while you

was? at the same time?

Naturally. To fiddle. Yeah. It was a big gondola. There was plenty

of room.

For the prude, or his political equivalent, there are dangerous suggestions in the most carefully processed air; there are lewd insinuations, Commie connivance; any word may yawn indecently, or worse, a gondola may engulf us; yet unless we are privately obsessed, something in the text or context must sound the proper political or sexual alert (Condition Blue is the second stage of any warning system), and if the soberness of some occasions is sufficiently impressive, even loud alarms may clang quite vainly, as you often have to tug the reader’s sleeve before he’ll hear a bladder making Joyce’s Chamber Music, or, while fingering one of the Tender Buttons Miss Stein has designed, feel somewhere a little tingle.

Mental sets are essential to every art, and various cheap jokes can be made of them. Here is one such which Sir John Suckling, who was capable of better, should never have composed:

There is a thing which in the light

Is seldom us’d; but in the night

It serves the female maiden crew,

The ladies and the good-wives too;

They used to take it in their hand,

And then it will uprightly stand;

And to a hole they it apply,

Where by its goodwill it would die;

It spends, goes out, and still within

It leaves its moisture thick and thin.

There have been many riddles of this kind, although, led to expect that the answer to the question, ‘What is it?’ will be ‘penis,’ and being told with a triumphant smirk that it is ‘candle’ instead, we may with some annoyance put that dubious object back into the poem to function as a dildo rather than a light.

The purest tale can still be blue, given a big blue eye, as that crafty old pornographer, Samuel Richardson, demonstrated more than once; for instance, when he wrote Pamela, the edifying history of a prick tease — a book bluer than any movie.

• • •

Aching puberty indeed. The awkward figure in that snapshot I referred to earlier was the first completely naked woman I had ever seen, and her very awkwardness, the cheapness of the camera, the amateurishness of print, pose, and light, the commonplace reality of the trailer, made her bewildered breasts and puffy pubic hair yearningly real too, as if the photograph were a doorway or a window opening toward a nudity so ordinary it might have been anyone’s — mine — yours — yes, in just that way it was a window, became a door, and although I felt sorry for the girl and even shared her humiliation, I stared — ashamed of my own heat — her helplessness as exciting as her sex — I stared — I lapped her up, left the picture-paper clean as a cat’s saucer; because finally, when one day I looked, she was no longer there, not even the weed caused any commotion. The window had pulled its own shade. So like a sultan I soon gave her away since she was once again only a fifty-cent image, an eyeful at the boy-pull and occasion for a furtive jerk.

Yet what had I seen when I stared? She was so girlish and so naked, so simply there, that a description of her, had I attempted it, would have failed for want of attention. Too real to be pornographic, I saw not the forbidden image but the forbidden object of that image, the great mystery itself, the subject of a thousand dreams, a hundred thousand stories. I saw what all my organs seemed to stir for… and I took fright. Were her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, then? were they a pair of maiden worlds unconquered? Of course not, but I would have wanted to think so. Fuddle-eyed innocence can only say, Gee Whiz. And the knowing writer — whose carnal knowledge begins with Gee Whiz and ends at Ho Hum without apparently stopping at any station in between — hunts among his comparisons like Wilde through his wardrobe for something he may have handy of a suitably similar color, size, softness, and value.

Perhaps mounds of ice cream topped by a cherry? slopes of virginal snow, alabaster idols, golden apples, hills and hum-mocks, berries? ah, of course, a plump pair of pillows.

The singer of the Song of Solomon declares that the breasts of his beloved are two graceful young roes, that they are clusters of grapes, that they are towers; but I am not prepared to believe this crook-carrying poet, whose mind is exclusively on money, food, drink, and the increase of his herds.

1 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.