Bluets: wallows

Bluets by Maggie Nelson is 240 permutations of the colour blue.

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Colour is something that we solely experience through our own perception, and ancient philosophers like Pythagoras, Euclid, and Hipparchus once believed our eyes emitted light that transilluminated what we saw, that colour was within us.

Perception of colour is deeply private. And yet this colour blue covers the vast expanses of the sky, somehow everpresent, somehow ubiquitous.

Why blue? We don’t get to choose what or whom we love. We just don’t get to choose. This book is about pain, divinity, heartbreak, and wallowing in blues. Maggie Nelson’s writing is overtly intellecutal, even pretentious at times, weaving in T.S. Eliot, Goethe, Wittgenstein, sometimes with direct deference, yielding gingerly to their authority, other times, braiding them invisibly into her own lyrical, self-conscious prose.

Bluets is a deeply sad book. But the sadness is not violent or jarring; it does not seek to provoke. It’s a calm sadness. The deepest of deepest blues. Almost indulgent at times. And even if there’s a certain performance to the depiction of pain, it is still pain.

The blue is about a person, but also about his absence. It’s about grief. About a close friend becoming quadriplegic. About loss. Bluets asks how something so universally felt can still be experienced so strikingly differently by each person.

It’s a compendium of gaps:

• between language and reality
• between reality and memory
• and the impossible pursuit of meaning through art

Because when writing, you are visibly reconciling your thoughts, and thus when you spilling them into the open, you lay yourself bare.

54. A therapist will say to me, If he hadn’t lied ot you, he would have been a different person than he is. She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

55. This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can’t answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced ot admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter.

I hold these two paragraphs gingerly. I love how Maggie Nelson collapses therapy language because anyone who has ever been in love will understand that not everything can be tidied into a clean summary. Yet this process of grappling with thoughts as thoughts are constantly evolving and memories are shifting themselves becomes a unique experience to itself. As Maggie beautifully illustrates:

193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory — that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things — I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.

199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone — and then, to actually forget — can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of al things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

Nelson writes from the in-between. There is no solid ground, no firm conclusion. Everything exists in partial buoyancy. In semi-flotation. There is kicking involved to stay afloat, but never a moment of standing still and saying with certainty: this was the mistake, or this is now forgotten.

212. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.

I took this book in slowly. I wonder if something like this is true, like seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, irrevocably alters you. Then how does one know when to refuse, or how to recover? Similar to Nelson musing on when crack gets smoked once, the unbelievable high would remain on in your system, and that you may never be able to live contently, without it. It is a blessing, or is it truly, experience something, to touch this blue.

Nelson’s writing is exquisite but distant. She maintains space between her, and her past lover, and herself, and her writing. She writes:

184. Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times — won that they have ben made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river — how could either of us tell the difference?

In contrast, I think of Wallows, a band that captures a similar level of introspection, but through a very different lens. If Bluets is drenched in blue, Wallows plays in shades of yellow, the opposite colour on the colour wheel. They don’t frame emotion as philosophy. They just let it spill out: scrambled, casual, sometimes guarded, always accessible. Their lyrics aren’t trying to be profound, but sometimes they are anyway — like a thought that ambushes you mid-walk or mid-memory. Shrug it off because it’s just a song. Even if something profound just leaked out.

I always liked their song ‘Sidelines’. Because I see you loving on the sidelines means two things. The speaker could be on the sidelines watching his lover love someone else. But also, speaker could be on his own path, and he sees her loving him still, on the sidelines, but not altering his course in any way. And then I think about it at the wrong time because both are at wrong time points. It’s an emotional illusion, or an idealized version wishing someone to be near though not with him. An immensely juxtaposed feeling.

So levels of dissonance:

• dissonance between what we feel and when we feel it
• dissonance between that and the language as a medium
• more dissonance as it gets communicated, and transferred to someone else’s consciousness

And hence parallels between some whimsical lyrics and Bluets.