Prose/poetry collection by Maggie Nelson
- One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.
- Try, if you can, not to talk as if colors emanated from a single physical phenomenon. Keep in mind the effects of all the various surfaces, volumes, light-sources, films, expanses, degrees of solidity, solubility, temperature, elasticity, on color… Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess “color.” You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering.
- Long before either wave or particle, some (Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus) thought that our eyes emitted some kind of substance that illuminated, or “felt,” what we saw. (Aristotle pointed out that this hypothesis runs into trouble at night, as objects become invisible despite the eye’s purported power.) Others, like Epicurus, proposed the inverse — that objects themselves project a kind of ray that reaches out toward the eye, as if they were looking at us (and surely some of them are). Plato split the difference, and postulated that a “visual fire” burns between our eyes and that which they behold. This still seems fair enough.
- After asserting that the blue we want from this life is in fact found only in fiction, he counsels the writer to “give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them”
- Implication being the fiction of is always better than itself
- “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau)
- For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. “Life is a train of moods like a string of breads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,” wrote Emerson. To find one-self trapped in any one bead, no matter what its hue, can be deadly.
- If often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But thought I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.
- I polled several friends to see how much time they would grant between “a blinding, bad time” and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. The bespeaks the generosity of my friends — I imagine that most Americans would give themselves about a year, maybe two, before they castigated themselves into some form of yanking up the bootstraps. On September 21, 2001, for example, George Bush II told the country that the time for grief had passed, and the time for resolute action had taken its place.
- But perhaps there is no real mystery here at all. “Life is usually stronger than people’s love for it” (Adam Phillips): this is what Holiday’s voice makes audible. To hear it is to understand why suicide is both so easy and so difficult: to commit it one has to stamp out this native triumphant, either by training oneself, over time, to dehabilitate or disbelieve it (drugs help here), or by force of ambush.
- “Why is the sky blue?” — A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.
- The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, “The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.” In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.
- Today is the fifth anniversary, the radio says, of the day on which “everything changed.” It says this so often that I turn it off. Everything changed. Everything changed. Well, what changed? What did the blade reveal? For whom did it come? “I grieve the grief can teach me nothing,” wrote Emerson.