10. Bluets themselves are cornfowers. Blue?

11. This, it seems to me, is an unresolvable question. In any case we do not emerge with an answer. Like light, blue is ungraspable. Transient. Also like relative time: moving, difficult to record.

12. In its 240 sections, Bluets records a period of suffering. These sections also record a search for
understanding (scientifc, philosophic, writerly, personal) of the fact of loss. Maggie Nelson relates her heartbreaking research to us, and her heartbreak to her research.

13. The accounting in Bluets is often personal, even private. At times it is melodramatic, but it is honest about its own melodrama: “Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept in some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts… I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it” (§90).

14. Implicated in what Nelson relates is the body at its most vulnerable — unrecognizable in a hospital bed; mortifed at the sight of the broken or dying body; enraptured or frenzied in sex or the memory of sex. The body, the mouth, and the hand relate these stories.

As a testimonial to a period of personal loss, the book speaks like a still-shocked witness. In fragments, we receive the story of a lost relationship and of other loss… but also, eventually of a kind of healing, or at least of possibility.

15. To relate can mean to give an account of something, and certainly Bluets does this. As a testimonial to a period of personal loss, the book speaks like a still-shocked witness. In fragments, we receive the story of a lost relationship and of other loss (a friend in an accident; the more general fact of impermanence), but also, eventually of a kind of healing, or at least of possibility.

16. Possibility is one attribute of an accumulative form. Deprived of the causal relationships inherent to less fragmented forms, accretion does provide to the writer, to the reader as well, the refuge of possibility. Anything can happen next, because no one knows what goes on in the gaps.

17. Relate also means to connect. To be connected. As in the integration of other writers’ words within
Maggie Nelson’s text. As in her willingness to cram Goethe, Henry James, Emmylou Harris, Billie Holiday, Cézanne, Simone Weil, Isaac Newton, Schopenhauer, self-help books, Maurice Merleau-Ponty into one space. Her willingness to draw a slender line through all these works (and others), marking out where blue appears.

18. Nelson connects her loss, her experiences of what she calls blue, to a greater world of writing and thinking. She builds relationships between the things she fnds. Somewhere inside this construct she begins also to rebuild a world — one where she, along with her friend, is “asking, in this changed form, what makes a liveable life, and how she can live it” (§217). Working out what blue might be, making a collection of blues “in folders, in notebooks, in memory” and in “an imagined blue tome, an encyclopedic compendium of blue observations, thoughts, and facts” (§226) does not in fact lead to an absolute understanding of blue, but it does lead to “no longer counting the days” (§237). Connection — illumination — leading out of the darkness of loss.

19. “Love is not consolation,” Simone Weil wrote. “It is light.” Nelson, in the last pages of Bluets, takes care to remind us of this. She refuses to misrepresent the ongoing difficulty of living with loss and impermanence in their daily forms. She refuses love as a consolation and imagines it as light. She asserts the continuity of suffering even as she asserts the value of light and the possibility of change.

20. I sat in the dimness of the English evening and read Bluets. I could hear the muffled voices of my recent history somewhere outside the window. In the west, cracks let in some bright yellow rays. The last page, the last section: “All right then, let me try to rephrase,” writes Nelson. “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light” (§240).

21. Irresistible, blue. But equally so that light.