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

by William H. Gass

  Consequently, there is not only filmy cover-color like fur and clothing, as Adrian Stokes suggests, or color which leaps from things like sparks from hammered spikes or sifts through the atmosphere like dust or crowds near the eye like a swarm of gnats, in contrast to objects which appear self-lit, but the surfaces of painted figures can be so utterly replaced by passion that each shade and contour seem to be the inside brought to light at its own urging, as sexuality is seen sometimes through swelling and congestion.

  So—in short—color is consciousness itself, color is feeling, and shape is the distance color goes securely, as in our life we extend ourselves through neighborhoods and hunting grounds; while form in its turn is the relation of these inhabited spaces, in or out or up or down, and thrives on the difference between kitchen and pantry. This difference, with all its sameness, is yet another quality, alive in time like the stickiness of honey or the gently rough lap of the cat, for color is connection. The deeds and sufferings of light, as Goethe says, are ultimately song and celebration.

  Praise is due blue, the preference of the bee.

  But how many critics mimic Aristotle instead, although Aristotle’s eyes were always in his reason: ‘ . . . in painting: if someone should smear the picture with the most beautiful colors, but at random, he would not please us as much as if he gave us a simple outline on a white ground.’ The Philosopher has his thumb on the scales. Which is more likely to hold our interest, he should have asked: beautiful colors laid on randomly, or any delicately graven scribble? because, to be fair, line should be matched against color, not color against outline. The unity of an outline is derivative anyway, borrowed from the object it presumably limns, and that unity may be quite imaginary. What unifies the shape of a typed ‘t’ but function and familiarity? There is none in the mark itself. A color’s unity is inherent, however, since it is continuously, insistently, indivisibly present in what it is. Furthermore, every color is a completed presence in the world, a recognizable being apart from any object, while a few odd lines (since a line is only an artificial edge), a few odd lines are: nothing—thin strings of hue . . . and what of that white ground Aristotle asks for? deny him that and give him a black base for a white design instead . . . then perhaps violet with green . . . chartreuse with red, so he can see how character comes and goes with color.

  Well, we might march the halls of all the Old Schools and find few versions of these views. Winckelmann is as indifferent to quality as Kant. However, let us allow this statement of Berenson’s, an echo with its echoes, to complete the case against color:

  It appears . . . as if form was the expression of a society where vitality and energy were severely controlled by mind, and as if colour was indulged in by communities where brain was subordinated to muscle. If these suppositions are true, we may cherish the hope that a marvelous outburst of colour is ahead of us.

  In all the varieties of visual representation and reproduction of objects that are assumed to be outside ourselves, and of images flitting through our minds, colour must necessarily be the servant, first of shape and pattern, and then of tactile values and movement. Colour cannot range free but must serve rapid recognition and identification, facilitate the interpretation of shapes and the articulation of masses, and accelerate the perception of form, or tactile values, and movement. (Aesthetics and History)

  Again and again we strike the same bigotry about blue, the same confusion of categories, the same errors of mind . . . and the same disastrous lapses of taste:

  Pink and green horses may be tolerated in an incunabulous experimenter like Paolo Uccello, but I remember wincing at the sight of Impressionist portraits with faces and bosoms and hands blotched with vivid vegetable green reflected from the surrounding foliage, orange and scarlet from the sunshades held by the subjects. If the clearly expressed intention of Uccello, or Besnard, or Rolle, or Zorn had been to study the effect of reflections on horses’ hides or women’s skins, we should have adjusted ourselves accordingly. That was not the case. The portraits referred to will scarcely find now the admirers they had when their mere newness excited and, for an instant, fascinated the spectator. (Aesthetics and History)

  • • •

  Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.

  Kandinsky claims that a circle of yellow will seem to ooze from its center and even warmly approach us, while a similar circle of blue ‘moves into itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator. The eye feels stung by the first circle while it is absorbed into the second’ (Concerning the Spiritual in Art).

  Yellow cannot readily ingest gray. It clamors for white. But blue will swallow black like a bell swallows silence ‘to echo a grief that is hardly human.’ Because blue contracts, retreats, it is the color of transcendence, leading us away in pursuit of the infinite. From infra-red to ultra-violet, the long waves sink and the short waves rise. ‘Just as orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow, so violet is red withdrawn from humanity by blue.’

  When the trumpet brays, Kandinsky hears vermilion. The violin plays green on its placid middle string. Blues darken through the cello, double bass, and organ, for him, and the bassoon’s moans are violet like certain kinds of gloom. He believes that orange can be rung from a steeple sometimes, while the joyous rapid jingle of the sleigh-bell reminds him of raspberry’s light cool red. If color is one of the contents of the world as I have been encouraging someone—anyone—to claim, then nothing stands in the way of blue’s being smelled or felt, eaten as well as heard. These comparisons are only slightly relative, only somewhat subjective. No one is going to call the sounds of the triangle brown or accuse the tympanist of playing pink.

  Some spices are true scarlets, I suppose, as pepper seems to be, and surely the richness of fine food often borders on brown. Earth tones appropriately rule the stove, and the carefully conceived kitchen will let porcelain and stainless steel stand for cleanliness, blue tile for planning and otherwise taking thought, while wood, clay, and copper, the mustards, reds, and deeper greens, signify the work itself, although one should notice that the grander a cuisine is the less robust its hues will be.

  Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vegetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or a squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant’s taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.

  That space in paper sacks which are too small to be re-used is blue. Sucking stones, too. Even if the sacks themselves are often tan and sandy, the sto
nes are ovals of gray-blue granite. Molloy’s sentences of calculation, so calm, so formed, so desperate, are blue to the pale core they contain, and at the bottom of the paper bags, as if waterlogged, there is always a little slip with the price of purchase. The pockets of the greatcoat and the pockets of the trousers, the tireless fist which is at itch to trade one for another, are blue like the empty sacks they resemble. There is a swim of blue in the toothbrush glass. The loneliness of clothes draped over the backs of chairs is blue; undies, empty lobbies, rumpled spreads are blue, especially when chenille and if orange; not body warmth or body smell or the acidulous salts of the vagina—no—blue belongs to the past—to the minutes after masturbation, to thought, to detachment and removal, fading, to the inside side of sex and the self that in the midst of pitch and toss has slipped away like a lucky penny fallen from a dresser.

  IV

  IMAGINE for a moment that I have gained possession of the famous talisman of Gyges, a ring (as Plato tells) which confers invisibility upon its wearer when the bezel’s turned. Of course I can kiss, kill, and steal easily. Without paying, I can get in all the games. I can play tricks in a world of rubes. But what else?

  My neighbors. I can spy: there’s that buxom wench with the inviting eyes, and her husband, a stout, red-faced, and unappealing lout who wears, I’ve noticed, both a pair of suspenders and a belt. While they’re hugging groceries from car to kitchen, I slip inside their house. I wish the ring eliminated sounds. They’ll hear my breathing, and how my stiff clothes scrape. There she is, innocent and unaware, preparing salad at the sink.

  Come. Walk through Blue Willow. There are pavilions, birds, green boughs like blue grapefruit, leaves like hanging lanterns, foliage like mascara’d eyes in midwink. I’m told it tells a story. And it may be the most popular pattern ever manufactured. Why? Stacks of them, fresh from Woolworth’s, fill my neighbor’s china closet. See the doves? When we twist the ring, we’re in. There are peacock feathers, sunflowers blue in the face, ferny streamers, fuzzy puffs, each fastened above the blue wiggle of a streaked trunk, the ground beneath like a foamy wave. There are nowhere any normal shapes. It is in fact a land afloat on milk-white water. There are blue boats out, and best of all there is a bridge where three sages cross, island to island, carrying, as one makes it out, a shepherd’s crook, a board or box, a string upon a handle. They know what it is: being blue; but who can feel how this world was once, counterfeiting has so changed it. Beyond the zagging fence a walk like a white shadow leads to wrinkled steps which have abruptly been unfolded from the portico of the great pagoda. We can see the inner windows, fanned and nowhere repetitious, then funny hatted houses in the distance, while the encircling calm of blue doodled borders—squares, scrolls, circles, diamonds, dots, checks, curls—drawn as if on the empty edge of the earth, keeps us lazily underneath the willow, by its water, the way the saucer which carries the pattern rests its cup.

  She is still preparing salad at the sink.

  Not very interesting.

  What is fatso doing? reading the paper? My shoes squeak. I am too nervous to pay attention. What have they to say to one another?

  Nothing.

  Not very interesting.

  I can’t help holding my breath and soon I’ve all that forceful air to hiss. Why won’t they quarrel, gossip, joke?

  But suppose instead that suddenly I am scorched by a blue flame. I put my pain where the wound is and color where the flame is. Is this cleverness? My pain is not a detached affliction of the soul, and the philosopher, when he says the hurt’s in me, should mean it’s in my arm or elbow, because that’s where I am, and in that area of air around me I call home.

  If I’ve been bound by wires, and if I am now being burned with matches struck by my wife or some former friend or, worse, my son, the sorrow this causes me is another perception, although of a different kind: it is the realization of my relation to the world or at least to a part of it. The sorrow contains the flame, the pain, the revengeful person, disappointment about the past, guilt, horror, anger, awe, grief with regard to the future, fear, shame, plans for retribution, apprehension, pity, disbelief, pain again, and then once again, pain. My emotions may be mistaken sometimes, but each is the integration of a very complex and continually changing set of relations only temporarily stabilized this time in a blinding run of tears.

  Thus, just as seeing blue involves a comparison between longer and shorter wavelengths over the total visual field, being blue consists of a set of comparisons too. And just as it is necessary for me to have the right visual equipment, good light and easy distance, an appropriately unpreoccupied mind, et cetera, simply to see in the most ordinary way, so I must be able to receive reports from all of my senses, estimate the character of my mental calculations, like Schopenhauer’s genius, deepen toward the origin of every signal, shed prejudice, overcome any number of threatening neuroses, before my feelings, like my eyes, can be trusted; but this only means that feelings are much more complex than sensations by themselves (though by themselves they do not exist—what does?), and consequently that more—much more—can go wrong with them.

  Furthermore, like those logical layers I touched upon earlier (blue the color, ‘blue’ the word, and Blue the Platonic Idea), our feelings have levels, and many are metapathetic. These logically remoter emotions are soon equal with the others (my desire for another man’s wife commingles with the disgust I feel at my taste for flaccid boobs), and this new mix is felt afresh as still another feeling which, when the complete self is in fine fettle, with incredible immediacy and ease, disposes qualities correctly over the embattled Europe of my experience much as we crayoned countries in sixth-grade History in order to learn who had won what in the First World War: cleavage for the eye, martini on the tongue, heat to the head, aching in the belly, swelling within the prick, envy of the husband’s proprietary arm now wrapped indecently under the heavy fall of her breasts, and contempt from the critical self shaken out like salt on everything. None of these inclusive responses is purely public, purely private; each of them is cognitive, the sum of whatever we know and are at any moment. We experience the world, balanced on our noses like the ball it is, turn securely through the thunder of our own applause.

  But she is still preparing salad at the sink.

  Why doesn’t she slip out of those blue jeans and roll upon the floor in an agony of desire?

  Because she is preparing salad at the sink.

  And now I notice that there is an important element missing from my perception of her. Invisible, I can’t see the faint fuzz of my cheeks or the framing fringe of my hair. Suppose, as I had wished a moment ago, I were inaudible. I should find, very quickly, how much I need to hear the sound of my own breathing. To hear the scene, but not myself: how odd . . . how horrible . . . how whimsical . . . how unnerving. Now I understand what a difference any kind of distance makes. How could I taste her lips and not taste my own, or run my hand upon her arm without its fingers being felt? Do I wish us both odorless in bed? (Fat persons, incidentally, are advised to wear blue. It will squeeze them in, as Kandinsky said, better than a corset. Have a plum.) The naked little girlfriend in the photo could not hear me, see me, either, and the woman I want undressed right now, this kitchen with its silly running water which I wish removed by lightning van, hubbie and paper wanded away to Nevernever Land, are stubbornly indifferent photographs which stare behind me like the polar bears.

  Meanwhile I wait, releasing my breath beneath my shirt.

  And meanwhile she continues to prepare salad at the sink.

  Then it is not blue I see but myself seeing blue.

  Perhaps I should come back at bedtime to watch them bathe in the dusk-blue light of the set, chew potato chips and other crunchies as they slowly sink . . . sag . . . settle like their pillows into grateful sleep.

  No. I should go to a play. The characters will enter with their entrails already showing. No salads. Sinks. No squeaks. Whole lives will be compressed into a gesture . . . and
then another. Or I should slip into a novel. My invisibility’s complete. Unless I get caught in something like a Warhol movie, there won’t be those long stretches watching people sleep. I can observe poor Portnoy beat his meat. And in fiction I can rub a ring which Gyges would have traded his to wear: one which painlessly permits a peek in any consciousness I care to.

  The push toward blue in fiction has persisted from the beginning. It was immediately recognized that fiction could carry us, as the bride over the threshold, into domesticity. Suddenly there are sinks and sofas, hats and dresses, table manners. Intimacy. The movies have relieved this pressure somewhat, but writers remain unduly responsive to it. As readers, that’s what we want: the penetration of privacy. We want to see under the skirt. And while we are peering at the page, though invisible to Prudence who is scratching her thigh, we are not invisible in fact—again an improvement over the ring which costs us the sight of ourselves. Words are one-way mirrors, and we can safely breathe, hoot, holler all we like to assure ourselves of our existence, and never once disturb Prudence easing her itch.

  So at the sink, what is she thinking? Let her wash her greens, I go where it’s blue . . . as blue as the Bloomsday book. ‘Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers.’ But she is thinking: tomorrow I have to remember to buy more salad oil. Frank likes the green kind with the white specks. It’s on sale. And get some Woolite for the sheep.

  Nonsense. I won’t have it. She is thinking of her role as a woman in the world. She has a thing for the fellow next door. That’s me. She is about to embark on an hour-long sexual fantasy during which time she’ll petal up the radishes. We want to know. At once. Everything. And if it’s going to be boring, we want the truth replaced by lies. Most novelists are bought. They will oblige. And even if our own neurotic natures prevent us from enjoying scenes of sodomy and fellatio, we will allow the hero time to ring a pencil with his teeth, or sit—ooo, aaaaah, teehee, oh boy, surprise!—upon a burr or pin or thumb or spike.