Maggie Nelson confesses on the first page of her book Bluets that she had fallen in love with a color. The color blue. It is my recent pleasure of discovering for myself this lovely title. I already loved the color myself…but then again I’m rather polyamorous and insatiable when it comes to color.
Unassuming at less than a hundred pages, this book resists classification. In it Nelson describes what her relationship is like with the color, and what it is not. It is prose, poetry, social commentary, memoir of loss, and a treatise on desire both explicit and productive. It’s this last one that intrigues me the most as I believe it does for the author. After all, in her second statement she tells us not to “make the mistake that all desire is yearning”.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had decades ago made seemless the link between desire and production. Desire being an dress of creation that hangs on the somatic rack. I particularly liked this aspect of their work. Dispensing with the old notion of desire as a matter of yearning for what you lack, they set desire up as a necessity between our basic humanities, which is the need to create. To produce. In other words, meaning and worth are derived from the intimate connections of our hands being in the thick of it. I for one get a satisfying kick from kneading dough. I definitely can imagine a potter thinking the same about throwing clay. For how many academics have called the text a body and the body a book to be written upon? And really, how many chefs wouldn’t relish the opportunity to create something so sublime that people want to put in their mouth?
I suspect not many.
But aren’t we already in the thick of it? Are we not in the forest and we just need to see the trees with our own hands. Wood. Wood to build with. To fuck with.
At 57 I still get hard thinking on certain turns of phrase, passages of modulated color, and happy accidents of sound. I lick my lips yearning for the right combination between composition and color. Between substance and matter, the worm of thought loitering around my hands, arthritic as they are….and yet I still have a most private moment therewith.
But Nelson takes us way past mere surface appearances. She takes us into the substance, about three feet down the rabbit hole from where we all sprang from sin, oh Mother Mary, that is…Jesus in a blue robe. And more frankly, she points out that Jesus in the mandorla (an almond shaped patch of blue) is most certainly standing in for the vagina. “Blue pussy” is her word from her mischievous mind. She drops it there for us then backs away as if it’s a hot potato. Allowing the teenager in us to smirk and giggle.
I can lick my lips in anticipation for the moments in my life when work and play are indistinguishable from one another. Isn’t that what I desire?
For Maggie Nelson it also seems to be so, that sweet spot, that art into life nexus. A sexy nexus with only just enough matter omitted so the reader spackles the gaps and crevices for themselves. For instance, I’ve never really thought of the blue veins on a cock as anything other than an unfortunate side effect of an erection, a obscene protrusion not unlike a bodybuilder’s stretched skin over rigid gangways of blood. But her reverence for the color makes it seem almost that which makes the penis beautiful. And according to her, she unapologetically wants it inside of her.
So is it the cock or the blue of the vein that she desires? The color that is the seed or the timber of an oak? Or maybe she experiences the muscle memory of being fucked. Or maybe these are not unique dynamics, but rather all adjacent and multiple facets of desire and production. Maybe her act of creation is the remembering and not even necessarily the fucking. But then again, it is Maggie Nelson the writer, writing as an act of creation, after and beyond the fact of fucking.
You see, Nelson repeatedly sets us up for what seems like clever answers, but then turns us around with a reassessment, creating a fugue of observations, only after having just the possibility of finding what it is she wants From perspective to perspective. For example. She lets us know that staring at blue, ever deeper, one eventually comes to indigo, then further still into true darkness. However, elsewhere she reminds us that screwing up your closed eyes with your fists brings light and colored shapes, from the lidded darkness to the light. In fact she ends the book stating she must have always been looking for the light. But I find her confidence in that statement less than absolute, which is where I think she wants us to land. Snatching away the quandary, owning it, then proposing it is in fact the journey.
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| Blue Balls Tempera Circa 2000 |
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