1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen inlove with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as thoughit were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as wespoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then,one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into anempty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrementcoiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehowpersonal. 2. And so I fell in love with a color--in this case, the colorblue--as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay underand get out from under, in turns. 3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you mightsay. That each blue object could be a kind of burningbush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a maptoo diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that containsthe knowable universe. How could all the shreds ofblue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright bluetarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in theworld, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will tryto explain this. 4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that lonelinesscan produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stayshot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or toprovoke--take your pick--an apprehension of the divine.(This ought to arouse our suspicions.) 5. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet StéphaneMallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis:"These last months have been terrifying. My Thoughthas thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. Whatthe rest of me has su++ered during that long agony, is in-describable." Mallarmé described this agony as a battlethat took place on God's "boney wing." "I struggled withthat creature of ancient and evil plumage--God--whomI fortunately defeated and threw to earth," he told Cazaliswith exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarmé beganreplacing "le ciel" with "l'Azur" in his poems, in an effortto rinse references to the sky of religious connotations."Fortunately," he wrote Cazalis, "I am quite dead now." 6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is thislove's primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life aremarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen suchbeautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst.Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood againupon the mountain. 7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourselfand call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front ofa little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glasscup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to dowhat? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so littleblue food in nature--in fact blue in the wild tends tomark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)--that culinaryadvisers generally recommend against blue light,blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food.But while the color may sap appetite in the most literalsense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach outand disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first stainingyour fingers with it, then staining the world. Youmight want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want torouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin'srobe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing theblue of it. Not exactly. 8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that alldesire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not becauseit advances to us, but because it draws us after it,"wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interestedin longing to live in a world in which I alreadylive. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbidfor any "blueness."Above all, I want to stop missing you. 9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautifulblue things. To be fair, this book will not tell youabout any, either. It will not say, Isn't X beautiful? Suchdemands are murderous to beauty. 10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my indexfinger. Its muteness. Excerpted from Bluets by Maggie Nelson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
