On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass Page A
Authors: William H. Gass
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Art, Color Theory, Aesthetics, blue, color, Semiotics & Theory, Sex in Literature
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only care what people thought of their appearance in my speech: would they think them friendly, or not; appropriate, or not; predictable, or not? And consequently I would only care what people thought of me for using them: blue nevus, blue vinny, bluetongue, blue tangle, blue star, blue bells. Noises or notes: what do I care?
What is their public pay-off for me?
Unfortunately these three—utterance, mention, and use—as well as the other distinctions I've dragged across the page, are overly crude, and have names which mislead beside. Their cuts are like cracks between buttocks, and philosophy should be ashamed to contain them in such an untrained, yappy, and pissy condition. There is, first of all, a more fundamental bifurcation, overriding every other, namely between those blues whose continued existence is as obnoxious as a pile of sanitary napkins, the blues we expect to dispose of after use (or utterance or mention), those we've set fire to, or eaten, or blown our noses in, those blues, in short, which appear to disappear, and are otherwise linguistic waste:
gee, look at the little Hue butterfly,
or
give us a B, give us an L, give us a BLU, or
how am I? glad you asked, yes, well, yesterday I was kind a gray, but today I'm downright blue, or
buster, baby, you bastard, you blew it.
No one wants that sullied air and spoiled paper about. There are acts which we are glad are gone and gone without a trace, too: gaucheries, spit-ups and spraying sneezes, broken promises, prematurities of all kinds, arguments and chores, the one-night stands with fortunately not a single fuzzy Polaroid to bluemail them or piece of tape to tangle. There are thoughts, postures, attitudes of the same sort, consciousness itself, some say, who regard it as no more than the belching of the body . . . and who wants a collection of throat-farts fastened though floating around their source like a tree full of soft blue Italian plums?
Then there are the blues we'd love to have loom large and linger long around us like deep sofas, accommodating women, and rich friends: the blues in dictionaries, grammars, spelling books; the blues in all the manuals that lay out figures, facts, and their relations, so definitively we continue to consult them . . .
the Eastern Tailed Blue,
Dwarf Blue,
Pigmy Blue,
Common Blue,
or Spring Azure, whose larvae secrete what the ants call "honeydew,"
the Western Tailed Blue,
Square-spotted Blue,
Acmon Blue,
Orange-bordered or Melissa Blue,
which has two broods,
Reakirt's Blue,
which feeds on mesquite,
the Silvery Blue,
Sonora Blue,
Saepiolus Blue,
Marine Blue,
whose worms chew upon locoweed and the blossoms of the wisteria, or the blues of the great poems . . .
ix
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.
(Wallace Stevens: 'The Man with the Blue Guitar') or the emblematic blues, the color in which Joyce bound Ulysses, its title like a chain of white islands, petals shaken on a Greek sea, he thought, and the heraldic blues, the celebrational and symbolic . . .
Gargantua's colors were white and blue. . . . By these colors, his father wished to signify that the lad was a heavenly joy to him. White expresses joy, pleasure, delight and rejoicing; blue denotes things celestial.
I realize quite well that, as you read these words, you are laughing at the old toper, for you believe this symbolic use of colors to be crude and extravagant. White, you say, stands for faith, and blue for strength. But without getting excited, losing your temper, flying in-to a rage or working yourself into a tongue-parched passion—the
What is their public pay-off for me?
Unfortunately these three—utterance, mention, and use—as well as the other distinctions I've dragged across the page, are overly crude, and have names which mislead beside. Their cuts are like cracks between buttocks, and philosophy should be ashamed to contain them in such an untrained, yappy, and pissy condition. There is, first of all, a more fundamental bifurcation, overriding every other, namely between those blues whose continued existence is as obnoxious as a pile of sanitary napkins, the blues we expect to dispose of after use (or utterance or mention), those we've set fire to, or eaten, or blown our noses in, those blues, in short, which appear to disappear, and are otherwise linguistic waste:
gee, look at the little Hue butterfly,
or
give us a B, give us an L, give us a BLU, or
how am I? glad you asked, yes, well, yesterday I was kind a gray, but today I'm downright blue, or
buster, baby, you bastard, you blew it.
No one wants that sullied air and spoiled paper about. There are acts which we are glad are gone and gone without a trace, too: gaucheries, spit-ups and spraying sneezes, broken promises, prematurities of all kinds, arguments and chores, the one-night stands with fortunately not a single fuzzy Polaroid to bluemail them or piece of tape to tangle. There are thoughts, postures, attitudes of the same sort, consciousness itself, some say, who regard it as no more than the belching of the body . . . and who wants a collection of throat-farts fastened though floating around their source like a tree full of soft blue Italian plums?
Then there are the blues we'd love to have loom large and linger long around us like deep sofas, accommodating women, and rich friends: the blues in dictionaries, grammars, spelling books; the blues in all the manuals that lay out figures, facts, and their relations, so definitively we continue to consult them . . .
the Eastern Tailed Blue,
Dwarf Blue,
Pigmy Blue,
Common Blue,
or Spring Azure, whose larvae secrete what the ants call "honeydew,"
the Western Tailed Blue,
Square-spotted Blue,
Acmon Blue,
Orange-bordered or Melissa Blue,
which has two broods,
Reakirt's Blue,
which feeds on mesquite,
the Silvery Blue,
Sonora Blue,
Saepiolus Blue,
Marine Blue,
whose worms chew upon locoweed and the blossoms of the wisteria, or the blues of the great poems . . .
ix
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.
(Wallace Stevens: 'The Man with the Blue Guitar') or the emblematic blues, the color in which Joyce bound Ulysses, its title like a chain of white islands, petals shaken on a Greek sea, he thought, and the heraldic blues, the celebrational and symbolic . . .
Gargantua's colors were white and blue. . . . By these colors, his father wished to signify that the lad was a heavenly joy to him. White expresses joy, pleasure, delight and rejoicing; blue denotes things celestial.
I realize quite well that, as you read these words, you are laughing at the old toper, for you believe this symbolic use of colors to be crude and extravagant. White, you say, stands for faith, and blue for strength. But without getting excited, losing your temper, flying in-to a rage or working yourself into a tongue-parched passion—the
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