On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books Classics)

by William H. Gass

  Perhaps mounds of ice cream topped by a cherry? slopes of virginal snow, alabaster idols, golden apples, hills and hum-mocks, berries? ah, of course, a plump pair of pillows.

  The singer of the Song of Solomon declares that the breasts of his beloved are two graceful young roes, that they are clusters of grapes, that they are towers; but I am not prepared to believe this crook-carrying poet, whose mind is exclusively on money, food, drink, and the increase of his herds.

  1 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.

  2 Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

  3 Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks.

  4 Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

  5 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

  These comparisons are always unfairly one-sided and often reveal, as in the singer above, an unpleasant preference for perfume, property, and plunder. One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principle, gum bubble, mole, or birth wart, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.

  There’s something of the thimble to them (not enough), and they are frequently described as rosy or said to possess the color of young shoots, but why take the trouble when the trouble taken is so evident and audible and yields such frigid results? Perhaps they are like the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers. Yes. When brown, they are another pair of eyes. Or is it the eyes which promise me those rich wide aureoles? I have seen nipples so pulled on and flattened by nursing, they hung there like two tiny tongues.

  D’Annunzio may write that ‘long trailing vapours slid through the cypresses of the Monte Maria like waving locks through a comb of bronze,’ and though the comparison is highly decorative, it is not absurd to imagine on the obverse of the metal a maiden’s blond tresses, as she prepares her hair for a night of love, passing through the tines of her comb of bronze like trailing vapours through a row of cypresses. But may I comfortably think of those sheep as wandering teeth?

  There’s no tit for tat in this poetry, which is, after all, the sort of erotic verse preferred by those who once loved to listen (and if they could, would still, sweet dears) to Madame Melba, freshly risen from her death as Mimi and now surrounded by bouquets, while accompanying herself on a baby grand wheeled opportunely from the wings to the center of an emptied stage, warble ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in the intervals of silence between applauding palms.

  Oh! ah! ai! alack and alas! ahimè! but what is love? how best speak of the beauty of women? account for the soul’s deep swoons without confusing them with the greedy swoops of a gull after herring? explain the blue of serge or chicory, or ordinary sky, the iris and the pansy blue of melancholy, the still intenser blue of the imagination?

  It is Orlando’s problem too, and Orlando finds that every subject he (and he will not suffer his sex change until the eighteenth century) wishes to pursue so embroiled, cluttered, and betangled with every other that it appears impossible for him to say a single, simple, clear, true thing .

  . . . he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. ‘The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. ‘Upon my word,’ he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), ‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.’ And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.

  Conrad also rather bitterly complained, regarding the precision of his elected language, that writing in English was like throwing mud at a wall. But blueness fuddles every tongue like wine.

  Pierre Louys, whose credentials are impeccable, being both French and pagan, at least achieves originality:

  Thy breasts are two vast flowers, reversed upon thy chest, whose cut stems give out a milky sap. Thy softened belly swoons beneath the hand.

  However, I fear that Dr. Johnson would find his effort too metaphysical.

  We appear to be reduced to apostrophe: the elegant Gee Whiz. Certainly nothing else will do for fellatio, which has never had its poet. Even our aforementioned D’Annunzio, by training perfectly equipt, cannot do much more than moan ornately.

  O sinuous, moist and burning mouth, where my desire is intensified when I am sunk in deep oblivion, and which relentlessly sucks my life. O great head of hair strewn over my knees during the sweet act. O cold hand which spreads a shiver and feels me shivering.

  Yet in the moment that our situation seems to have become impossible (as bereft of hope as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando has imagined it to be), deus ex machina: we recollect the honest masters of our tongue, and in them, on occasion, we find the problem solved, the tribute paid, the vision pure, the writing done. In Ben Jonson, for instance:

  Have you seene but a bright Lillie grow,

  Before rude hands have touch’d it?

  Ha’ you mark’d but the fall o’ the Snow

  Before the soyle hath smutch’d it?

  Ha’ you felt the wooll of Bever?

  Or Swans Downe ever?

  Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the Brier?

  Or the Nard in the fire?

  Or have tasted the bag of the Bee?

  O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

  Initially I wrote of displacement as if it went from thing to thing—phallus to flower:

  Full gently now she takes him by the hand,

  A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow,

  Or ivory in an alabaster band;

  So white a friend engirts so white a foe. . .

  but I have been dropping hints all along like heavy shoes that the ultimate and essential displacement is to the word, and that the true sexuality in literature—sex as a positive aesthetic quality—lies not in any scene and subject, nor in the mere appearance of a vulgar word, not in the thick smear of a blue spot, but in the consequences on the page of love well made—made to the medium which is the writer’s own, for he—for she—has only these little shapes and sounds to work with, the same saliva surrounds them all, every word is equally a squiggle or a noise, an abstract designation (the class of cocks, for instance, or the sub-class of father-defilers), and a crowd of meanings as randomly connected by time and use as a child connects his tinkertoys. On this basis, not a single thing will distinguish ‘fuck’ from ‘fraise du bois’; ‘blue’ and ‘triangle’ are equally abstract; and what counts is not what lascivious sights your loins can tie to your thoughts like Lucky is to Pozzo, but love lavished on speech of any kind, regardless of content and intention.

  It is always necessary to deprive the subject of its natural strength just as Samson was, and blinded too, before recovering that power and replacing it within the words. Popeye is about to rape Temple Drake with a corn-cob (in a corn-crib, too, if you can bear the additional symbolism):

  . . . Popeye drew his hand from his coat pocket.

  To Temple, sitting in the cottonseed-hulls and the corn-cobs, the sound was no louder than the striking of a match: a short, minor sound shutting down upon the scene, the instant, with a profound finality, completely isolating it, an
d she sat there, her legs straight before her, her hands limp and palm-up on her lap, looking at Popeye’s tight back and the ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the door, the pistol behind him, against his flank, wisping thinly along his leg.

  He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes. ‘Something is happening to me!’ she screamed at him, sitting in his chair in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. ‘I told you it was!’

  Forty pages pass before Temple Drake begins to bleed.

  It wasn’t nice of Thick to beat Margaret either, and I really don’t know if he did it beautifully or not, but Hawkes’s account is beautiful. Stones will never nourish us however patiently or hard we suck them. What fills us then, in such a passage?

  It is Beckett’s wonderful rhythms, the way he weighs his words, the authority he gives to each, their measured pace, the silences he puts between them, as loving looks extend their objects into the surrounding space; it is the contrapuntal form, the reduced means, the simple clear directness of his obscurities, and the depth inside of every sentence, the graceful hurdle of every chosen obstacle, everywhere the lack of waste.

  Compare the masturbation scene in Ulysses with any one of those in Portnoy, then tell me where their authors are: in the scene as any dreamer, night or day, might be, or in the language where the artist always is and ought to be.

  If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we’d never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood? Who else would robe us so richly, take us to the best places, or guard our virtue as his own and defend our character in every situation? If we were his sentences, we’d sing ourselves though we were dying and about to be extinguished, since the silence which would follow our passing would not be like the pause left behind by a noisy train. It would be a memorial, well-remarked, grave, just as the Master has assured us death itself is: the distinguished thing.

  *It has the feel, the taste, of the Scots, even though it is French.

  III

  WHEN, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless, I enjoin a small offensive fellow to ‘fuck a duck,’ I don’t mean he should. Nothing of the sort is in my mind. In a way I’ve used the words, yet I’ve quite ignored their content, and in that sense I’ve not employed them at all, they’ve only appeared. I haven’t even exercised the form. The command was not a command. ‘Go fly a kite’ only looks like ‘shut the door.’ At first glance it seems enough that the words themselves be shocking or offensive—that they dent the fender of convention at least a little—but there is always more to anything than that.

  For example, when rice is thrown at a newly wedded pair, we understand the gesture to have a meaning and an object. Sand thrown at the best man misses its mark. Yet the rice, too, is being misused—neither milled, planted, nor boiled. Of course, rice signifies fertility for us. It resembles (indeed is) a seed. It is small and easily handled. It is light and lands lightly on its targets. It is plentiful and easily come by. And it is cheap. In short, rice is like three cheers, good luck, and God speed. Rice is like language. Similarly, when we swear we say we let off steam by throwing our words at someone or at something. ‘Fuck you,’ I mutter to the backside of the traffic cop, though I am innocent of any such intention.

  Crude as it is, the case allows us to separate what is meant from what is said, and what is said from what is implied, and what is implied from what is revealed. Cursing dares convention and defies the gods, yet, as conventional itself as the forms it flouts, cursing does not dare defy the conditions of wholesome clarity, and ‘fuck a duck’ is admirable in that regard. Nor did I labor to invent the phrase. No one invents them. ‘Jesus Christ on a raft,’ an expostulation of my youth, did not catch on. I may choose to throw rice at newlyweds, but I do not—cannot—create the gesture. ‘May shit fall upon you from a biplane’ will hardly earn a medal for the imagination; nevertheless it is clearly something someone composed, and therefore not a curse at all, but a joke (as ‘fuck a duck’ is). At great cost, comedians have such curses composed for them. They often concern camels.

  Although the expression says ‘hunt up a duck and fuck it,’ the command quite routinely means ‘go away; pursue some activity suitable to your talents, something disgusting and ineffectual like fucking a duck.’ Nonetheless, of all the fish and fowl, all the plants, animals, images, and other elements of the earth which provide some sort of aperture, it was the uck in ‘fuck’ that selected ‘duck.’ I might have said ‘fuck a fox’; however, the modulation of uck into ox is too sophisticated for swearing, and a fox has, in every way, the nobler entry. ‘Fuck a trucker’ is equally sound (though it tails off doggily), but the command calls for courage and so scarcely carries the same disdain. In these days when letters to the editor may contain instructions on how to masturbate with a vacuum cleaner, cucumber, or cantaloupe, the directive, ‘fuck a fruit,’ has become facetiously indeterminate. I happen to like ‘fuck a lock,’ nevertheless this phrase proves my point. One may admire its subtle comparison of ‘pick’ with ‘prick,’ or the happy resonance of ‘lot’ and ‘lock,’ ‘or that humorous reference to the chastity belt, but successful swearing can afford to be baroquely outrageous only if it also remains as straightforwardly open and sharp and quick as a slap.

  In ‘go to hell’ and ‘fuck you,’ the words have been glued together by thoughtless use and mindless custom. We do not speak them the way we speak ordinary sentences. They are not said, but recited, like ave marias; so if I say ‘damn you’ and really mean you to be damned by a vengeful god at my behest, I have said ‘damn you’ the way I daily say ‘let’s eat,’ and that is a way no one says ‘damn you’ any more, because curse-blue sentences are made of welded parts like the bumpers of automobiles, while with this revitalized ‘damn you,’ I have tried to make the phrase the way I once made ferris wheels and towers out of tinkertoy by following instructions.

  Swearing consists of a series of cultural quotations, and although others may have said ‘let’s eat’ before me, and although I may have said ‘let’s eat’ many times already myself, I am not reciting or quoting, repetition is no part of my intention, I am hungry again, that’s all; while if I say, to the lady lying under me, ‘hurry up, please, it’s time,’ I am quoting, and my fucking may be quoting, too, if it endeavors to recover another copulation and a previous joy by magical adherence to the past.

  Crude as it is, then, the case allows us to separate sentences and phrases which are truly created from those which are merely routine; and those which are squeezed out of daily life like the juice of a lime, however customary, from those which are tongued or sung or spelled or recited. The sentences of ordinary speech, of hunger and seduction, gossip and commerce, are sewn from patterns, put together according to blueprints and plans. We have been taught several simple ways to ask for water, grant physical favors, spare a dime. For water, ‘water!’ does very well, and anything much more complicated, anything original, discriminating, or interior, suggests that our thirst is not any deeper than the bottom of our throat.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I mutter to the backside of the traffic cop. Fuckyous are in fact the principal item of macho exchange. Since I do not want to fuck the cop I must want someone else to, and since that ubiquitous ‘you’ is almost certainly another male (as it is in this instance), I can only desire your sodomization. To be entered as a woman is, to be so demeaned and reduced and degraded: for us gaucho machos, what could be worse? In a business deal, if you find you have been scr
ewed, what should have been up theirs is disconcertingly up you. These aggressive wishes, expressed so fervently and often and in practiced ignorance of their meaning, reveal the depth of the desire for buggery among our bravos and our braves.

  So ‘fuckyous’ are welded and spelled rather than stitched or freely created. They say, ‘fuck you,’ but they mean, ‘may you suffer a sex change,’ They imply defiance, and reveal a desire for power. Furthermore, in the Freudian sense, they disguise certain sodomous inclinations. Fucked-up situations fuck us up. They make us ineffectual and passive. Since the power cursing requests is never forthcoming, one’s actual impotence is hid by a small act of verbal defiance. ‘Piss on you’ is a relatively straightforward dominance claim. ‘Shit on you’ serves the same function. All these anal-sex-and-smear swears serve the same function, and are largely interchangeable like turds, for one stool is as good as another in the democracy of the mouth.