On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Read Free Page B

his memory is made of suspiciously precise lies, the over-large anecdotal detail—yowl, stance, and quim size, garlic and onion, vestibule or stairway—like one of those guides at the Vatican.

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The common deer in its winter coat is said by hunters to be in the blue. To be in the blue is to be isolated and alone. To be sent to the blue room is to be sent to solitary, a chamber of confine-ment devoted to the third degree. It's to be beaten by police, or, if you are a metal, heated until the more refrangible rays pre-dominate and the ore is stained like those razor blades the sky is sometimes said to be as blue as, for example, when you're suddenly adrift on a piece of cake or in a conversation feel a wind from outer space chill your teeth like a cube of ice. Ah, but what is form but a b u m wipe anyhow? Let us move our minds as we must, for form was once only the schoolyard of a life, the simple boundary of a being who, pulsating like an artery, drew a dark line like Matisse drew always around its own pale breath. Blue oak. Blue poplar. Blue palm. There are no blue bugs of note, although there are blue carpenter bees, blue disk longhorn beetles, blue-winged wasteland grasshoppers, one kind of butterfly, bottle-fly, the bird, and not a single wasp or spider. The muff, the fur, the forest, and the grot.
    So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend, sight, the sovereign sense and concept's chief content, blurs. 'The lover,' Rilke wrote, 'is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordin-ation of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.'
    A flashlight held against the skin might just as well be off. Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content, that the intensity of that content quickly outruns its apparent cause, that the full experience becomes finally inarticulate, and that there is no major art that works close in. Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed.
    Caspar Goodwood suddenly takes Isabel Archer in his arms:
    'His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread and spread again, and stayed . . . ' and Henry James, quite unconsciously, goes on to say that 'it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession.' But he never made this mistake again.
    The blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue john is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are Yankee boys. Mer-curial ointment, used for the destruction of parasites, is called blue butter, although that greenish-blue fungus we've all seen cover bread is named blue-mold instead.
    So Barth wisely remarks that the lady was ravished unmercifully and turns his hero sadly away. But the deck of the Cyprian is not in this world. Would we be content here, where we are, napkin at neck, to stare distantly at our beef, to receive reports that we had eaten without the pleasures of the chewing? No only close-ups will content us here. We approach, indeed, until it's entered us. The difference between 'the beef' and 'the blue'
    may seem at the same time too wide and too narrow to be of significance. Although, in many ways, these appetites are quite alike, there is no comparable literary mode dedicated to the seared and steaming flank; the mark of every tooth is nowhere with joy recorded; the floods of saliva, the growls which