On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass Page B

weather is dangerous—tell me one thing! . . . What moves, impels or induces you to believe what you do? Who told you that white means faith, and blue strength?
    'A shoddy book,' you reply, 'sold by peddlers in remote mountain hamlets and by weatherbeaten hawkers God knows where. Its title? In Praise of Colors.'
    or the blues we rebreathe, ahvays for the same reason: because the word in each case finds its place within a system so supremely organized it cannot be improved upon—what we would not replace and cannot change. Of how many racy tales or hairy photos can that be said?
    So sentences are copied, constucted, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through
    'and' as it opens—there—there—we're h e r e ! . . . in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences
    —sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality trans-mogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech . . . ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.

    * * *
Half-breeds belong to the blue squadron. Sometimes they are called 'blue skins,' as Protestants once were. Blue Boy is the popular title of a painting by Gainsborough, the name of a prize hog in State Fair, and the abscess from a venereal disease. Under the vilifying gaze of fluorescent light, the heads of pimples turn blue, as do the rings around the eyes, and the lips grow cold. Although the form, 'blueness,' signifies the quality of being blue in any sense, it usually refers only to indecency: les horreurs, les betises, les gueulies. Will it profit us to wonder why? Jackson Pollock painted Blue Poles, the name of any magnet's southern dart.
    Earlier he'd covered a canvas he labeled The Blue Unconscious.
    Here the color is sparingly used. A group of Germans got itself called the Blaue Reiter, and Piero della Francesca did indeed make the Virgin's mantle blue in his Annunciation . . . in