BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit — dumps, mopes, Mondays — all that’s dismal — low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese… the pedantic, indecent and censorious… watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity. Blue laws took their hue from the paper they were printed on. Blue noses were named for a potato. E. Haldeman-Julius’ little library, where I first read Ellen Key’s Evolution of Love, vainly hoping for a cock stand, had such covers. In the same series, which sold for a dime in those days, were the love letters of that Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, an overwrought and burdensome lady, certainly, whose existence I callously forgot until I read of her again in Rilke.

The first of these pocket pamphlets was, inevitably, the Rubáiyát. It had the right sentiments. It was the right length. It came in pretty quatrains. And like a pair of polished shoes, it had just the right world-weariness and erotic sheen. No. 19, the nearest I got to The Jug and Bough, was entitled, Nietzsche: Who He Was and What He Stood For, by M. A. Mugge, Ph.D. All those capitals were formerly for God. There was another, I remember, that reproduced the wartime speeches of Woodrow Wilson in a type which sometimes sagged toward the bottom of the page as though weakened by the weight of the words above. The blue of these books is pale by now, the paper brittle as communion bread, while my association of Wilde and Darrow with the color, once so intense, has faded too. My cock did not stand for Nietzsche either, nor did Mrs. Annie Besant’s essay on the future of marriage cause a stir. One had to go to Liveright for that — to other colors: Black and Gold — where you could be warmed by Stendhal, Huneker, and Jules Romain, by Balzac and Remy de Gourmont, and where the decadence of Pierre Louys was genuine and not a bit of blueness dripped on scarcely curdled cheese.

John Middleton Murry edited The Blue Review for the three distinguished issues of its life, and something called The Blue Calendar predicted the weather from 1895 to 1898 without ever being right. Only a nickel, also blue, out of the same dry attic box, The Bibelot, a Lilliputian periodical with a Gothically lettered cover which fairly cried out ART, rose into my unhealthy hands. It came down from Maine instead of in from Kansas, and reprinted pieces that had previously vanished in the pages of The Dark Blue, a vague Pre-Raphaelite monthly with a title as frustratingly incomplete as a broken musical phrase. These rhapsodies went into print and out of sight the way trout, I’m sure, still disappear among the iridescences of my childhood Ohio’s cold, bottomless Blue Hole, suddenly to emerge again in the clear, swift streams and shallow ponds it feeds as if nothing magical had happened to them. Each of the magazine’s meager issues featured a single, slightly sacred, faintly wicked, and always delicately perfumed work by William Morris or Francis Thompson, Andrew Lang or others. The set I saw concluded quietly with Swinburne’s tribute to the painter Simeon Solomon (even then in bluish oblivion). Now this fading poet’s forgotten essay furnishes us with our first example, before we are quite ready for any: the description of two figures in a painting… the prose of a shade of blue I leave to you.

One girl, white-robed and radiant as white water-flowers, has half let fall the rose that droops in her hand, dropping leaf by leaf like tears; both have the languor and the fruitful air of flowers in a sultry place; their leaning limbs and fervent faces are full of the goddess; their lips and eyes allure and await the invisible attendant Loves. The clear pearl-white cheeks and tender mouths have still about them the subtle purity of sleep; the whole drawing has upon it the heavy incumbent light of summer but half awake. Nothing of more simple and brilliant beauty has been done of late years.

Lang, plainly fond of the color, edited The Blue Poetry Book. From her window Katherine Mansfield sees a garden full of wall-flowers and blue enamel saucepans, and sets the observation down in a letter to Frieda Lawrence she’ll never mail. Stephen Crane wrote and posted The Blue Hotel, Malcolm Cowley Blue Juniata, and Conrad Aiken Blue Voyage. Like rainwater and white chickens, KM exclaims:

Very beautiful, O God! is a blue tea-pot with two white cups attending; a red apple among oranges addeth fire to flame — in the white book-cases the books fly up and down in scales of colour, with pink and lilac notes recurring, until nothing remains but them, sounding over and over.

Then there is the cold Canadian climate and the color of deep ice. The gill of a fish. Lush grass. The whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin.

• • •

Among the derivations of the word, I especially like blavus, from medieval Latin, and the earlier, more classical, flavus, for the discolorations of a bruise, so that it sometimes meant yellow, with perhaps a hint of green beneath the skin like naughty under-clothes. Once, one blushed blue, though to blush like a blue dog, as the cliché went then, was not to blush at all. Covenanters, against royal red, flaunted it. They were true blue, they said. And Boswell tells us, out of his blue life, that Benjamin Stilling-fleet wore blue wool undress hose to Elizabeth Montague’s literary tea-at-homes. Perhaps to Elizabeth Carter’s too. And even Hannah More’s.

BLUE. — Few words enter more largely into the composition of slang, and colloquialisms bordering on slang, than does the word BLUE. Expressive alike of the utmost contempt, as of all that men hold dearest and love best, its manifold combinations, in ever varying shades of meaning, greet the philologist at every turn. A very Proteus, it defies all attempts to trace the why and wherefore of many of the turns of expression of which it forms a part. ..

(Farmer and Henley: Slang and Its Analogues)

So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that. A single word, a single thought, a Single thing, as Plato taught. We cover our concepts, like fish, with clouds of net. Cops and bobbies wear blue. We catch them and connect. Imagined origins reduce the sounds of clash and contradiction, as when one cries out blue murder in the street. There’s the blue for baby boy, the blue of blue sky laws, blue for jeans, blue for hogs. The coal fish, a salmon, the glut-herring, a kind of trout, are said to have blue-backs and are named so in Yorkshire, Maryland, Virginia, Maine. From earliest times it’s been the badge of servitude: among the Gauls, to humiliate harlots in houses of correction, as the color of a tradesman’s apron, for liveries and uniforms of all kinds, the varlet’s costume.

Blue: bright, with certain affinities for bael (fire, pyre), with certain affinities for bald (ballede), with certain affinities for bold. Odd. Well, a bald brant is a blue goose. And these slippery blue-green sources ease, like sleeves of grease, each separate use into a single — we think — fair and squarely ordered thought machine. Never mind degrees, deep differences, contrasting sizes. The same blue sock fits every leg. Never mind the noses of those Nova Scotian potatoes, blue noses are the consequence of sexual freeze, or they are noses buried far too long in bawdy books, or rubbed too often harshly up and down on wool-blue thighs. Not alone is love the desire and pursuit of the whole. It is one of the passions of the mind. Furthermore, if among a perfect mélange of meanings there is one which has a more immediate appeal, as among the contents of a pocket one item is a peppermint, it will assume a center like the sun and require all others take their docile turn to go around.

This thought is itself a center. I shall not return to it.

Blue postures, attitudes, blue thoughts, blue gestures… is it the form or content that turns blue when these are?… blue words and pictures: a young girl posed before the door of her family’s trailer, embarrassed breasts and frightened triangle, vacant stare… I wonder what her father sold the snapshots for? I remember best the weed which grew between the steps. But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy. What is form, in any case, but a bumbershoot held up against the absence of all cloud? Stringy hair, head out of plumb, smile like a scratch across her face… my friends brought her image with them from their camping trip, and I remember best the weed which grew between the steps. My sensations were as amateur as her photo. A red apple among oranges. Very beautiful. O God.

Remember how the desperate Molloy proceeds:

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones…. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones…. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about.

Beckett is a very blue man, and this is a very blue passage. Several brilliant pages are devoted to the problem. The penultimate solution requires that fifteen stones be kept in one pocket at a time, and moved together — all the stones, that is, which are not being sucked. There is, however, an unwelcome side effect: that of having the body weighted down, on one side, with stones.

… I felt the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other. So it was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But deep down I didn’t give a tinker’s curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand or the left, backwards and forwards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same.

De Sade in a harem of quints could not have faced the issue of love’s little nourishments more squarely, or that of the faceless fuck, or equal treatment (stones, wives, Jews, portions of anatomy, don’t forget, turn and turn about), and how could one better describe our need for some security in this damn disagreeable/dull dark difficult/disorderly life? And then the resolution, when it comes — is it not a triumph of both will and reason?

And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.

As we shall see, and be ashamed because we aren’t ashamed to say it, like that unpocketed peppermint which has, from fingering, become unwrapped, we always plate our sexual subjects first. It is the original reason why we read… the only reason why we write.

It is therefore appropriate that blow and blue should be — at our earliest convenience — utterly confused.

So I shall, keeping one in each of my four pockets while one is in my mouth, describe five common methods by which sex gains an entrance into literature… as through French doors and jimmied windows thieves break in upon our dreams to rape our women, steal our power tools, and vandalize our dreams. The commonest, of course, is the most brazen: the direct depiction of sexual material — thoughts, acts, wishes; the second involves the use of sexual words of various sorts, and I shall pour one of each vile kind into the appropriate porches of your ears, for pronouncing and praising print to the ear is what the decently encouraged eye does happily. The third can be considered, in a sense, the very heart of indirection, and thus the essence of the artist’s art — displacement: the passage of the mind with all its blue elastic ditty bags and airline luggage from steamy sexual scenes and sweaty bodies to bedrooms with their bedsteads, nightstands, water-glasses, manuals of instruction, thence to sheets and pillowcases, hence to dents in these, and creases, stains and other cries of passion which have left their prints, and finally to the painted chalk-white oriental face of amorously handled air and mountains; lewdly entered lakes. The fourth I shall simply refer to now as the skyblue eye (somewhere, it seems to me, there should be a brief pinch of suspense), and the fifth, well, it’s really what I’m running into all my inks about, so I had better mention it: the use of language like a lover… not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.

• • •

So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look. There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too. There’s the blue pill that is the bullet’s end, the nose, the plum, the blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of death.

Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? what brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief… each is an absence in us. We have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the lip that meets our lip is always one half of our own. Our state is exactly the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces, come to view us and to say to one another that we never looked better; that we seem at last at peace; that our passing was — well — sad — still — doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the dead should hear). Disappointment, constant loss, despair… a taste, a soft quality in the air, a color, a flutter: permanent in their passage. We were not up to it. We missed it. We could not retain it. It will never be back. Joy-breaking gloom continues to hammer. So it’s true: Being without Being is blue.

Just as blue pigment spread on canvas may help a painter accurately represent nature or give to his work the aforesaid melancholy cast, enhance a pivotal pink patch, or signify the qualities of heavenly love, so our blue colors come in several shades and explanations. Both Christ and the Virgin wear mantles of blue because as the clouds depart the Truth appears. Many things are labeled blue, thought blue, made blue, merely because there’s a spot of the color here and there somewhere on them like the bluecap salmon with its dotted head; or things are called blue carelessly because they are violet or purple or gray or even vaguely red, and that’s close enough for the harassed eye, the way the brownish halo which surrounds the flame of a miner’s safety lamp to warn of firedamp is said to be a bluecap too. Or they are misnamed for deeper reasons: in the ninth century, when the Scandinavians raided Africa and Spain, they carried off samples of the blue men who lived there all the way to Ireland, hence nigger-blue is applied to an especially resinous darkness sometimes by those who are no longer Vikings. And Partridge reports the expression: the sky as blue as a razor. Find an eye as blue as indecency itself, an indecency as blue as the smoke of battle, or a battle as blue as the loss of blood. We might remain with such wonders: as blue as… as blue as… for good and forever.

Anyway, sixth (since the first week had as many working days), I shall describe and distinguish three functions for blue words, modes of production, a Marxist might describe them, and I shall argue that they are equally fundamental. Finally, I shall try to list the major motives, from reader’s, work’s, and writer’s point of view, for introducing blue material in the first place. As blue-law, blue-blazer, and bluebush. By my private count, you may not be surprised to learn, that makes sixteen separate thoughts I hope to wind my Quink-stained mouth around — turn, of course, and turn about.

LET US begin with a brief account of what happened when pirates overtook the whoreship Cyprian.

… the scene on deck was too arresting for divided attention: the pirates dragged out their victims in ones and twos, a-swoon or awake, at pistol-point or by main strength. He saw girls assaulted on the decks, on the stairways, at the railings, everywhere, in every conceivable manner. None was spared, and the prettier prizes were clawed at by two and three at a time. Boabdil appeared with one over each shoulder, kicking and scratching him in vain: as he presented one to Captain Pound on the quarter-deck, the other wriggled free and tried to escape her monstrous fate by scrambling up the mizzen ratlines. The Moor allowed her a fair head start and then climbed slowly in pursuit, calling to her in voluptuous Arabic at every step. Fifty feet up, where any pitch of the hull is materially amplified by the height, the girl’s nerve failed: she thrust bare arms and legs through the squares of the rigging and hung for dear life while Boabdil, once he had come up from behind, ravished her unmercifully. Down on the shallop the sailmaker clapped his hands and chortled; Ebenezer, heartsick, turned away.

Barth is satisfied to say that the girl was ravished unmercifully, but so little is this whole scene tinged with blue that a lively newspaper might carry the account. Rape is on the rise, we read, nearly every day. Now Ebenezer Cooke’s servant, Bertrand, an unreliable rogue, is a little distance behind him ‘watching with undisguised avidity.’ If he had written the passage we would have had a lengthy description of the great Moor’s member. Our camera would zoom toward the netted wench until it passed, with him, into her womb. Nor should we find poor Bertram’s interest odd, since most of us share it, and, like Gullivers in Brobdingnag, inflate the objects of our greed, deify the origins of every itch, enlarge our lusts, as a coin in the palm of a miser becomes the whole orb of the earth. The deck of the Cyprian, however, is not in the world. It needs no hull beneath it, then, no ocean even. It has been wisely noted, in this regard, that we are quite obliged to eat, but there are some perfectly splendid books that never mention the matter.

A crowd of considerations gathers. Here I can pay heed only to a few. It will be observed that Barth, who is a master of the narrative art, modulates the size of his events very carefully, and monitors their pace. It’s true that he singles out the girl in the rigging for slightly extended treatment, but this extension is discreet, and even then there is a reason for it: she may be the heroine, Joan Toast.

An author is responsible for everything that appears in his books. If he claims that reality requires his depiction of the sexual, in addition to having a misguided aesthetic, he is a liar, since we shall surely see how few of his precious passages are devoted to chewing cabbage, hand-washing, sneezing, sitting on the stool, or, if you prefer, filling out forms, washing floors, cheering teams.

Furthermore, the sexual, in most works, disrupts the form; there is an almost immediate dishevelment, the proportion of events is lost; sentences like After the battle of Waterloo, I tied my shoe, appear; a sudden, absurd and otherwise inexplicable magnification occurs, with the shattering of previous wholes into countless parts and endless steps; articles of underclothing crawl away like injured worms and things which were formerly perceived and named as nouns cook down into their adjectives. What a page before was a woman is suddenly a breast, and then a nipple, then a little ring of risen flesh, a pacifier, water bottle, rubber cushion. Without plan or purpose we slide from substance to sensation, fact to feeling, all out becomes in, and we hear only exclamations of suspicious satisfaction: the ums, the ohs, the ahs.

Unless we continue to drain through the cunt till we reach metaphor, as Henry Miller often does:

A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up with divans and cosy corners and rubber teeth and syringas and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent, and so soft and restful that I lay like a dolphin on the oyster banks. A slight twitch and I’d be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling sea-crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops.

It’s true that Miller occasionally forgets himself. Still, he should be forgiven what we all want: forgetting within the fuck. Love is a nervous habit. Haven’t many said so? Snacking. Smoking. Talking. Joking. Alike as light bulbs. Drinking. Drugging. Frigging. Fucking. Writing. Forgetting. Nerves. Nerves, nerves, nerves. Our author does not, in fact, get sufficiently inside his line, forget enough to be forgiven. He talks too much, compulsively, his memory is made of suspiciously precise lies, the over — large anecdotal detail — yowl, stance, and quim size, garlic and onion, vestibule or stairway — like one of those guides at the Vatican.

• • •

The common deer in its winter coat is said by hunters to be in the blue. To be in the blue is to be isolated and alone. To be sent to the blue room is to be sent to solitary, a chamber of confinement devoted to the third degree. It’s to be beaten by police, or, if you are a metal, heated until the more refrangible rays predominate and the ore is stained like those razor blades the sky is sometimes said to be as blue as, for example, when you’re suddenly adrift on a piece of cake or in a conversation feel a wind from outer space chill your teeth like a cube of ice. Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow? Let us move our minds as we must, for form was once only the schoolyard of a life, the simple boundary of a being who, pulsating like an artery, drew a dark line like Matisse drew always around its own pale breath. Blue oak. Blue poplar. Blue palm. There are no blue bugs of note, although there are blue carpenter bees, blue disk longhorn beetles, blue-winged wasteland grasshoppers, one kind of butterfly, bottle-fly, the bird, and not a single wasp or spider. The muff, the fur, the forest, and the grot.

So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend, sight, the sovereign sense and concept’s chief content, blurs. ‘The lover,’ Rilke wrote, ‘is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.’

A flashlight held against the skin might just as well be off. Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content, that the intensity of that content quickly outruns its apparent cause, that the full experience becomes finally inarticulate, and that there is no major art that works close in. Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed.

Caspar Goodwood suddenly takes Isabel Archer in his arms: ‘His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread and spread again, and stayed…’ and Henry James, quite unconsciously, goes on to say that ‘it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession.’ But he never made this mistake again.

The blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue john is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are Yankee boys. Mercurial ointment, used for the destruction of parasites, is called blue butter, although that greenish-blue fungus we’ve all seen cover bread is named blue-mold instead.

So Barth wisely remarks that the lady was ravished unmercifully and turns his hero sadly away. But the deck of the Cyprian is not in this world. Would we be content here, where we are, napkin at neck, to stare distantly at our beef, to receive reports that we had eaten without the pleasures of the chewing? No — only close-ups will content us here. We approach, indeed, until it’s entered us. The difference between ‘the beef’ and ‘the blue’ may seem at the same time too wide and too narrow to be of significance. Although, in many ways, these appetites are quite alike, there is no comparable literary mode dedicated to the seared and steaming flank; the mark of every tooth is nowhere with joy recorded; the floods of saliva, the growls which empty from the throat, the delight of every bite and swallow, the slice of the knife, its grate on the plate beneath, the hot… the glands groan as I describe it… the spicy hot sauce in which the sausage swims… there’s no Homer for them; there’s no Henry Miller either, or Akbar del Piombo; there’s only James Beard and Julia Child, masters of the shopping list.

As writers we don’t hesitate to interrupt murders, stand time on its tail, put back to front, and otherwise arrange events in our chosen aesthetic order, but how many instances of such coitus interruptus are there in the books which speak to us so frankly of the life we never frankly lead? how often does insertion come before erection, weak knees anticipate the kiss?

I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing.

• • •

The worship of the word must be pagan and polytheistic. It cannot endure one god. The Scots use blue brilliantly, for instance, and have their own term, blae, for gray blue, lead blue, and livid. The hedge-chanter is better known to them as the blue hafit, and if we pursue their names for the lumpsucker or sea owl, a fish of uncouth appearance, we come upon bluepaidle, or the even more common cockpaidle. The dictionary is as disturbing as the world, full of teasing parallels and misleading coincidence. The same fish is called a paddlecock on account of the tubercular skin which envelopes its dorsal ridge and which resembles the comb of that barnyard lord.

Suppose the name of any maiden’s private part were known to her alone. Suppose the name of Ellen’s pout were Rosalie. Then that name, if we came into possession of it, would argue an intimacy for us no parent or lover could overlook, as though we had been privy to the mole on her mount of Venus. From the first ‘In the beginning…’ words have been thought to have magical properties. They can, we are assured by authorities, persuade, snare, frighten, bless. They can stimulate, damn, anger, kill, caress. If signs are not the same as the things they designate, they are at least an essential segment, so that to speak the word, Rosalie, is to be halfway to Ellen’s occupation. Look how the blood rises in her bottle-skinny neck. What was naïve in the magician was the belief that things have names at all, but equally naïve are the learned and reasonable who reject any connection beyond the simply functional between blue and blue, Ellen’s beard and Rosalie. Words are properties of thoughts, and thoughts cannot be thought without them. We are truly in the blue, and if we try to think blue without thinking blue, we are forced into euphemism: Ellen’s pretty promenade, we say, Ellen’s merry whiskered friend, the South Pole Santa Claus, and so forth.

Which brings us to Fanny Hill, a dirty book without a dirty word; nor is the work as successfully suggestive as its title. There are plenty of explicitly sexual scenes, but ‘amorous engine’ is as blunt as Cleland can bring himself to be. He had a deep sense for the blush in blue language. As Christian Enzensberger has recently observed:

Its [language’s] reaction to smut is inevitably one of impotence if not downright hostility. It resists, begins to stammer, if dirty words have to be pronounced it does so, but sulkily, dutifully as it were, in the most unfeeling way, which is to say by means of onomatopoeia; in short, language becomes as embarrassed as the speaker himself and prefers to take refuge in indirect speech. (Smut: an Anatomy of Dirt)

Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language, a slight light blue book, was written in the twenties. There its author, Robert Graves, repeats Samuel Butler’s definition of Nice People as ‘people with dirty minds’ in order to point out that his book was written for Nice People like that, and partly to apologize for its discretions.

Observe with what delicacy I have avoided and still avoid writing the words x— and y—, and dance round a great many others of equally wide popular distribution. I have yielded to the society in which I move, which is an obscene society: that is, it acquiesces emotionally in the validity of the taboo, while intellectually objecting to it. I have let a learned counsel go through these pages with a blue pencil and strike through paragraph after paragraph of perfectly clean writing.

These scrupulosities are no longer necessary. I do not practice them. Yet I cannot honestly say I see any noteworthy improvement in our life, thought, or writing, now that ‘fuck’ can be heard and seen in public, because its appearance is as unmeant and hypocritical as its former absence was. We fear to seem a prude. We fear also the loss of revenues. So we green pencil in the penis, then yellow it out for prick. Cock is okay but only schoolboys have dicks. Thus civilization advances by humps and licks.

Of course every soldier-sport-and-buddy book believes that you can’t kill either animals or people without swearing at something first. Since one honors the animals one is about to murder, you must swear at your beaters. There are no girls in foxholes, as everyone knows, so there’s no occasion for sex (we should smile in our amorous wisdom at this remark); there is much manliness, however, which consists of saying ‘shit’ with every breath you haven’t used up spitting. Each rifle is erect. It would be hard to imagine a work in which there were all sorts of words for dogs, cats, and cows, their natures and parts (as in the expression, ‘by doggies’), without a single animal appearing in it (certainly not a dog, a cat, or a cow), but this is normal in the literature of strong (that is to say, embarrassed) speech. Strength of this kind, of course, is the visible side of weakness, and requires a special use for language which I should like to set aside for mention later.

The following verses from World War I, which Graves quotes, illustrate nicely the imaginative meanness of tough talk.

THE AUSTRALIAN POEM

A sunburnt bloody stockman stood,

And in a dismal, bloody mood

Apostrophized his bloody cuddy:

‘This bloody moke’s no bloody good,

He doesn’t earn his bloody food,

Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!’

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 screwed, 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.

Crude as they are, such cases force us to distinguish not only between use and mention, as logicians normally do, but also between these and what might be called simple utterance or outcry. Key chains, drapes, and dishes are used, wagonwheels, tuning forks, whistles, words. What else are they for? Drapes hang heavily from their bars. Chains key. Wheels turn. Pass the butter. Take off your bra. The Blue Ridge Mts. are in Virginia. Or they may instead be mentioned, as I shall this moment mention ‘swive,’ a term which Barth has beautifully blown his breath upon and thus attempted to revive. I, myself, have had no success with ‘grampalingus,’ ‘meatus foetus,’ or ‘mulogeny’—a sentence which, if you could not see the quotes around the words you might think meant I’d tried them all and failed. Well, no one listens to what they see.

In babyhood and through moist infancy, the penis is a ‘peepee.’ When worn by boys, it becomes a ‘peter’ or a ‘dick.’ Later we refer to the instrument (even our own, and not, alas, unhappily) as a ‘whang.’ We call it a ‘dong.’ We say it is a ‘dork.’ Imagine. Meanwhile, the lovely Irish ‘langolee,’ or ‘wheedledeedle,’ my concoction, get no backers. Though ‘bluebeard’ and ‘blue-skin’ have once upon a time been used, no one is forgiven. Still, in a world of prick-skinning women, perhaps a twanger is what one needs. These days are drear. However… ‘fuck,’ in ‘go fuck a duck,’ is neither used nor mentioned; it is merely uttered. These ‘fucks’ are phatic like the delivery of ‘good morning,’ the wearing of evening clothes, giving of handshakes, painting of smiles, adding the complimentary close.

Most of the time we are content to cry out ‘fuck!’ as if pinched, but the function of our wall words in slightly more elaborate curses, such as:

may your cock continue life as a Canadian,

or

may the houseflies winter over in your womb,

or

may you be inhaled by your own asshole,

is more complex. Although each expression is merely uttered (curses without a curse, they contain only archery and cleverness like a purse full of chocolates and needles), every element has an internal use, so that we can say that single words can be used within mention or mentioned within use, mentioned in an utterance or uttered in a mention, uttered in an utterance, mentioned in a mention, and so on like a fugue. This cleverness in one sense mitigates the shock by calling attention to the quirks and capabilities of the mind that shapes the mouth that makes them, just as those obnoxious little jokes which leap like startled frogs into the center of every conversation do, or those pointless puns some damply nervous souls are obsessively driven to compose. In any case, their being lies in their occurrence.

It is not alone words about which these distinctions can be profitably made, and I hope the difference will help interpret many of my earlier remarks. If I shed my clothes to make love or take a shower, I am using my nakedness; if I wear a daring gown, I may be mentioning it; but the bared behinds on the modern stage aren’t mentioning themselves, nor are they ever used. They are merely uttered. I know situations where the devil has appeared with no more function than a shout. This is often the role of the star who doesn’t do anything but twinkle. In the Cantos, Pound only mentions his Chinese words, he rarely really uses them. Although the sexual descriptions of the pornographer are frankly employed to produce erection, and the sex in Kinsey or Kraft-Ebbing is mentioned for the sake of study, the sex in Oh, Calcutta! is simply sworn.

The blue list with which I began was celebrational. I did not use the phrase ‘blue devil’ but I was delighted to mention it: blue line, blue note, blue plate. If I were uttering these words (as I am presently trying to formulate the distinction), I would not particularly care what they meant, I would only care what people thought of their appearance in my speech: would they think them friendly, or not; appropriate, or not; predictable, or not? And consequently I would only care what people thought of me for using them: blue nevus, blue vinny, bluetongue, blue tangle, blue star, blue bells. Noises or notes: what do I care? What is their public pay-off for me?

Unfortunately these three — utterance, mention, and use — as well as the other distinctions I’ve dragged across the page, are overly crude, and have names which mislead beside. Their cuts are like cracks between buttocks, and philosophy should be ashamed to contain them in such an untrained, yappy, and pissy condition. There is, first of all, a more fundamental bifurcation, overriding every other, namely between those blues whose continued existence is as obnoxious as a pile of sanitary napkins, the blues we expect to dispose of after use (or utterance or mention), those we’ve set fire to, or eaten, or blown our noses in, those blues, in short, which appear to disappear, and are otherwise linguistic waste:

gee, look at the little blue butterfly,

or

give us a B, give us an L, give us a BLU,

or

how am I? glad you asked, yes, well, yesterday I was kinda gray, but today I’m downright blue,

or

buster, baby, you bastard, you blew it.

No one wants that sullied air and spoiled paper about. There are acts which we are glad are gone and gone without a trace, too: gaucheries, spit-ups and spraying sneezes, broken promises, prematurities of all kinds, arguments and chores, the one-night stands with fortunately not a single fuzzy Polaroid to bluemail them or piece of tape to tangle. There are thoughts, postures, attitudes of the same sort, consciousness itself, some say, who regard it as no more than the belching of the body… and who wants a collection of throat-farts fastened though floating around their source like a tree full of soft blue Italian plums?

Then there are the blues we’d love to have loom large and linger long around us like deep sofas, accommodating women, and rich friends: the blues in dictionaries, grammars, spelling books; the blues in all the manuals that lay out figures, facts, and their relations, so definitively we continue to consult them…

the Eastern Tailed Blue,

Dwarf Blue,

Pigmy Blue,

Common Blue,

or Spring Azure, whose larvae secrete what the ants call ‘honeydew,’ the Western Tailed Blue,

Square-spotted Blue,

Acmon Blue,

Orange-bordered or Melissa Blue, which has two broods,

Reakirt’s Blue, which feeds on mesquite, the Silvery Blue,

Sonora Blue,

Saepiolus Blue,

Marine Blue,

whose worms chew upon locoweed and the blossoms of the wisteria, or the blues of the great poems…

ix

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.

Books whose blueness penetrates the pages between their covers are books which, without depriving us of the comfort of our own commode or the sight of our liberal selves, place us inside a manufactured privacy. This privacy is really not that of someone else. It must be artificial because the real world plainly bores us. Impatient, we can’t wait for nature to take its course. When we take our textual tour through the slums, we want crime, violence, starvation, disease, not hours of just sitting around. We want the world to be the world we read about in the papers: all news. What good is my ring if the couple I am using it to spy on make love in darkness once a month, and then are quick, inept, and silent? Better rob banks. The money is always there. What good is my peek at her pubic hair if I must also see the red lines made by her panties, the pimples on her rump, broken veins like the print of a lavender thumb, the stepped-on look of a day’s-end muff? I’ve that at home. No. Vishnu is blue in all his depictions. Lord Krishna too. Yes. The blue we bathe in is the blue we breathe. The blue we breathe, I fear, is what we want from life and only find in fiction. For the voyeur, fiction is what’s called going all the way.

The privacy which a book makes public is nevertheless made public very privately — not like the billboard which shouts at the street, or the movie whose image is so open we need darkness to cover the clad-ass and naked face that’s settled in our seat. A fictional text enters consciousness so discreetly it is never seen outdoors… from house to house it travels like a whore… so even on a common carrier I can quite safely fill my thoughts with obscene adjectives and dirty verbs although the place I occupy is thigh-sided by a parson.

We like that.

Thus between the aesthetically irrelevant demands of the reader and the aesthetically crippling personal worries of the writer, sexuality reaches literature as an idée fixe, an artifically sweetened distortion or an outright lie, while the literature itself leaks quality like a ruptured pipe.

This is not the same shade of blue Henry James had in mind when he invented Ralph Limbert, an author like himself who, as each book disappeared in a neglect as complete as the last tick of the clock, resiliently hoped for a popular success ‘The Next Time.’ Limbert is given the incorruptible artistry and felicitous bad luck always to aim for the mob and hit the few, choosing cheap subjects and enriching them as clay is, modeled into bronze, until in the twilight of his career, when there was to be no ‘next time,’ he accepted the plain inglorious and unromantic loneliness of the creative self. Then it seemed ‘… he had quite forgotten whether he generally sold or not. He had merely waked up one morning again in the country of the blue and had stayed there with good conscience and a great idea.’

Blue as you enter it disappears. Red never does that. Every article of air might look like cobalt if we got outside ourselves to see it. The country of the blue is clear.

• • •

It is not simple, not a matter for amateurs, making sentences sexual; it is not easy to structure the consciousness of the reader with the real thing, to use one wonder to speak of another, until in the place of the voyeur who reads we have fashioned the reader who sings; but the secret lies in seeing sentences as containers of consciousness, as constructions whose purpose it is to create conceptual perceptions — blue in every area and range: emotion moving through the space of the imagination, the mind at gleeful hop and scotch, qualities, through the arrangement of relations, which seem alive within the limits they pale and redden like spanked cheeks, and thus the bodies, objects, happenings, they essentially define.

The condition I describe is not, as one might initially suppose, like that ascribed to Eva Flegen of Mörs, the Maid of Germany, who lived without meat on the smell of a rose, but, paradoxically, every loving act of definition reverses the retreat of attention to the word and returns it to the world. The landscape which emerges from the language which has made it is quite as lovely, vast and curious, as rich and prepossessing, as that of the deity who broke the silence of the void with speech so perfect the word ‘tree’ grew leaves and the syllables of ‘sealion’ swallowed fish.

The misleading miracle of the movies can nevertheless instruct us about prose. The silent film was full of magnificent action and exaggerated gestures as the actors strove to overcome the muteness of their medium. A Chaplin might occasionally manage, but most emotions cannot survive breast-beating. The talkie, on the other hand, while showing us how complicated thoughts and subtle feelings had been nearly snuffed out by the airless absence of speech, also demonstrated how cheap, thin, and stupid both became when the script was weak. Of course the camera fidgets in front of the speaking face. The telephone, a tire screech, the smash of glass, a ringing exchange of shots: these sounds issue from their images; but any conversation which rises above cliché like the first bird requires every photo in its neighborhood to be obedient and serve it. Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal. The camera understands its enemy, and shuts its eye.

When Leo Feldman, Stanley Elkin’s awesome merchant, enters his department store and is at once assailed by ‘perfumes and facepowders, the mascaras, and polishes bright as sodas,’ will we enter? only if his language enters us the way God’s did Adam at whose bare word, as Sir Thomas Browne reminds us, ‘were the rest of the creatures made.’ Then the language fills the mouth as it was meant to. We feel the need to speak it. Accepting the words as our own, speaking the words as our own, we believe at last in their denotations. ‘Art, art, thought Feldman, impresario of deep disks of rich rouge, pastel as flesh, of fine-grained dusting powders like soft, fantastic sand, of big plush puffs and cunning brushes.’ This silent head-hummed sound we make is not a useless and annoying wail which has been wrenched by lack of oil from the machinery. When we hear ‘big plush puffs’ we do not have to see them, and ‘deep disks of rich rouge’ replace the feel of the tinted grease. Through the physical qualities of the language, Elkin moves his ‘things’ as if to music.

He was obsessed by it, the merchandise laid out like a city, patterned, zoned as neighborhood, and missed nothing on the fluorescently tubed yellow wood and glass horseshoe counters. He knew without touching them the feel of the glass, greasy as plastic from the precious contact of shoppers, their leaned, open-palmed surrenders on the countertops, smudged from their groped investigations, their excited jabs at the glass: ‘There, there—next to the white one.’ (The counters, washed each night, bore a now intrinsic blur, ineffaceable as the cloud on an old watch crystal.) And could almost have told which belts had been sold from the tiers mounted like coiled snakes in their clear oblong boxes. And even which ties, perhaps, hanging thick as a curtain before some gay vaudeville. (Elkin: A Bad Man.)

Feldman’s passion for his goods is instantly convincing because Elkin’s passion for the language which relates it is convincing. What the eye dwells on — loves — the ear hears. How often do we approach one another with the unashamed sensuality of Feldman approaching Men’s Ready to Wear?

Trailing his hand comfortlessly through the heaped, dark piles of socks, he looked out over the open rectangles of distant counters and cases and racks, and went toward Men’s Ready to Wear to stand among the mountains of slacks, aware as always of the faint, sweet, oily smell of the massed cloth. He pulled at a rack of suits built into a wall, dollying it effortlessly forward on its big tracks, turning it soundlessly on its thick, greased shaft. He drew in one last deep lungful of the pleasant odor and moved on, the tweeds and herring-bones giving him, as he glanced at them in passing, a faint illusion of speed.

The sincere think it is enough to have stood by a stack of pants in a store one day and smelled something. We merely need remember Rupert Brooke’s weak list of loved things, of which the rough male kiss of blankets is alone worthy of remark, to measure the distance here from cuff to crotch. Unfortunately we cannot follow Feldman the whole way down his legendary aisles, yet nothing but genre blindness could prevent us from seeing that there is no warmer, wealthier poetry being written in our time.

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings its own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them: blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear… chant and pray, since the day may begin badly, in a soggy light that moistens the soul before consciousness has cracked so every thought is damp as an anxious forehead, desire won’t spark, and the morning prick is limp… consequently speak and praise, for the fall of the spirit, descending like a diver toward the floor of the ocean, is marked by increasing darkness, green giving way to navy, then a hair-wide range of hues which come to rest, among snowing fish and plants pale as paper, in a sightless night; and our lines are long when under water, loose and weedy, turning back upon themselves like the legs of a dying spider; we grow slack of feature in our melancholy, and the blue which marks the change is heavy, thick as ooze… so shout and celebrate before the shade conceals the window: blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese… while there is time and you are able, because when blue has left the edges of its objects as if the world were bleached of it, when the wide blue eye has shut down for the season, when there’s nothing left but language… watered twilight, sour sea… don’t find yourself clergy’d out of choir and chorus… sing and say… despite the belly ache and loneliness, new bumpled fat and flaking skin and drunkenness and helpless rage, despite dumps, mopes, Mondays, sheets like dirty plates, tomorrow falling toward you like a tower, lie in wait for that miraculous moment when in your mouth teeth turn into dragons and you do against the odds what Demosthenes did by the Aegean: shape pebbles into syllables and make stones sound; thus cautioned and encouraged, commanded, warned, persist… even though the mattress where you mourn’s been tipped and those corners where the nickels roll slide open like a slot to swallow them, clocks slow, and there’s been perhaps a pouring rain, or factory smoke, an aging wind and winter air, and everything is gray.