Bluets
BY Maggie Nelson
(Wave Books, 2009)

1. In May, in England, it is gray as often as it is blue. This year it was heavy gray. The thermometer stayed below 60° Fahrenheit. I was in the throes of a doctoral dissertation. If you had told me there were other things out there, beyond the weight and darkness of spring, I would not have believed. Enter, into this gray, Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets.

2. Bluets comprises 240 short poems or pieces of prose (the book is designated “essay/literature” in the back matter, but the writing could be a long poem or an essay in 240 pieces). As Lyn Hejinian writes, quoting Wittgenstein, “in the end, it is as philosophy — as the making and seeing of connections… that poetry participates in knowing what we can and can’t know about the world and how to live in it.” Whether essay or poem, philosophy or poetry, Bluets participates in the organization of the world and attempts to render it, if not known, at least bearable in the face of unpredictable loss.

3. Early in Bluets, Nelson writes “Above all, I want to stop missing you” (§8). Accumulation arises as a substitute for other kinds of obsession.

4. One thing Bluets taught me was to trust the form. I learned this as I read it — trusting the form to tell me things that the narrative avoided (about obsession and lack and neglect, but also about love and commitment and the pleasure of learning and even about truth). I am learning this again, as I write about the book. Trusting accumulation to carry meaning.

5. Bluets, I could say, is about blue. I would be both right and wrong. I am tempted to say it is about blue, but I want to convince you that you want to read this book, and I worry that there are those for whom blue is not an understandable way of being and who might be put off by a book about blue. In the words of the book, then, not blue, but hope, vision, philosophy, death, faith, sex, love, pharmakon, light. In the words of the book, that is, blue, meaning: hope, vision, philosophy, death, faith, sex, love, pharmakon, light.

In Bluets, blue is a process of accretion and a way to make sense of loss — an assemblage of connections, coincidences, references, notes that never pin blue down, but evoke and constellate it.

6. Blue in a public, scientific, and historical sense, but also blue in the most personal sense; blue in the sense of can you see this? The things I see, feel, know — are those the things you see, feel, know? Does what I believe exist? The subject turning to the listener to affirm her own existence. The observer wondering whether her observations are — or ever can be — matched by anyone else’s. The outer world of blue — the presence of cyanometers and cyanosis and indigo turning blue in the air outside the dye vat and the writing of Goethe, Wittgenstein, Derrida. The inner world where “I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world” (§238). Blue an instigation to collection (to accretion, in Nelson’s words).

7. We enter the book via Pascal (“we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain”) and obsession and loneliness and Mallarmé’s struggles with God. The early sections, in particular, are a consideration of desire, and especially of desire for those things which will either do us no good or will harm us (“blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid,” §7). In Nelson’s hands, things which are desired despite their danger are blue. Early in the book she tells us that this desire is not a choice, that we “don’t get to choose what or whom we love” (§13). Love for blue is as ungraspable as blue itself.

8. Nelson writes about blue that it “has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates” (§164).

9. The question of what blue is is the center of Bluets. Blue becomes method and subject, a way of understanding the world and that which Nelson attempts to understand. In Bluets, blue is a process of accretion and a way to make sense of loss — an assemblage of connections, coincidences, references, notes that never pin blue down, but evoke and constellate it. Blue stands for the lack which brings about the writing of this work, but it is also the thing that flls that emptiness. Blue is both the lost relationship and the new correspondence to the world found by the writer, in the writing. Blue is also simply blue — a color, a feeling, something perpetually escaping the grasp of those who write about it, Nelson included.

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.