Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) is a genre-bending work of 240 numbered propositions that explores the fundamental impossibility of pinning down language, philosophy, human perception, and desire. Nelson uses the slippery, unpronounceable title itself as a metaphor for how experiences like color and love resist precise definition. The book mixes philosophical inquiry with deeply personal narrative, featuring a narrator whose voice shifts between first-person, second-person, and direct address to the reader. Nelson foregrounds Enlightenment thinkers like Newton, Goethe, and Plato not to prove philosophical truths but to demonstrate their shared inability to fully articulate the phenomena they studied. The text privileges embodied female experience over cerebral male philosophical inquiry, particularly through its exploration of the female gaze and sexual desire. Nelson's approach suggests that the very limitations of language—its inability to perfectly capture experience—create both frustration and opportunity, allowing for richer individual experiences while acknowledging the universal human struggle to articulate desire, grief, and longing.
BLUETS by Maggie NelsonAñadido:
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive deep into the very best books. You'll come away with a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while learning to read everything a little better. I'm Kimberly Ford, one-time adjunct professor at Berkeley, bestselling author, and PhD in literature. Today, we are diving into Maggie Nelson's Blue or Bluetses. I feel like I can pronounce it both ways because at one point in the text Maggie Nelson says she herself had been mispronouncing it for years. My sense is like bluetses is probably how you would describe it in English and blue is how you would say it in French or at least a more like Frenchified English. And on some level it's so perfect that this is a title like literally the title of the text is something that is a little bit slippery. I mean honestly I can just kind of lay this out for you right at the start. My sense about Blu-ray or Bluetses is that it is really a study of the many ways that language and philosophy and human perception and human desire, all of those things are sort of impossible to pin down. And on the one hand, not being able to pin down the experience of color or the experience of desire or the way that language functions, not being able to pin those things down on the one level is kind of a tragedy. On the other, it's this enormous amount of possibility.
anytime we're not able to like really pin something down perfectly. Yes, there can be some sort of um you know frustration or some sort of you know like lack at the idea of not being able to describe this to someone else or not being able to share in the experience.
But it also really allows for everyone to have their own experience of the thing and for the experience of the thing to be much richer because it is not quite as pinned down as we all might think. I'm getting way ahead of myself.
I like to begin these talks sometimes with this question of why read this book. I went back to Blue by Maggie Nelson because of Penelopey Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. We looked at this recently. I mean, I can't get enough of the Penelopey Fitzgerald situation apparently because we did Offshore a couple of months ago and then we returned to The Blue Flower and then The Blue Flower now has me looking at Maggie Nelson. The Blue Flower is an incredible novel historical fiction. It's relatively short about a guy at the end of the 18th century, the poet Novalis, and he was obsessed with this idea of the blue flower. And I remembered that at some point in blue, Maggie Nelson makes some kind of reference to Novalis.
And sure enough, when I went back and reread it, there is a whole proposition.
Maggie Nelson's uh book very famously is made up of 240 propositions, which we are going to get to. proposition is a it's like a philosophical term for something that either proves something true or proves it false, which is like that kind of binary, the idea of things being true or false. It's like such a weird kind of false thing that philosophy purports to, you know, prove one way or the other. And I love the way that Maggie Nelson is playing with that.
These propositions, you know, which which come from the discipline of philosophy are doing something entirely different than just proving something true or false. So, one of these propositions is talking about Nales and talking about his obsession with the blue flower. And it was so gratifying to take a look at that, which we will explore. And I like to think Maggie Nelson has read The Blue Flower by Penelopey Fitzgerald. Maggie Nelson is not a a fiction writer. She's doing something entirely different. But I like to think that she would really have loved Penelopey Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. So, for those of you who like an agenda, um, today I can tell already, is going to be a little bit loose. It's going to be a little freestyle, but there is going to be some shape to it.
um at the beginning we're going to just dive in. We're going to talk about the title of the book. We're going to take a look at the first um you know couple of propositions and we're going to talk about the all of these different philosophers that she's touching on. I read or I reread the book entirely on a plane flight recently all in one go. And this time in my readrough, I've read this book many times. I was really struck by by just like the saturation of this book with philosophers. So there were all these like very famous men. I actually went through and made a list because I was very interested in the number of men who were represented versus the number of women. And as I was reading through, I was kind of like wearing all of these like ultra male, like ultra kind of confident philosophers. And I was like, why is Maggie Nelson here just like really leaning into this kind of like patriarchal kind of male voice? And I was discussing this with my daughter and she's like, maybe what Maggie Nelson is doing is is taking all of that philosophy and really like putting it to a different use. And I was like, duh. As soon as she said that, I realized that many of the ways that Maggie Nelson is using these philosophers is to sort of upend what it was they were trying to do. I also went back and looked at them, and a lot of what she is voicing from these philosophers is their doubt. She's voicing their urgency in terms of like wanting to understand color, but also all of them are just being in doubt.
Like no one really knows what to do with color. So, not only was Maggie Nelson pointing out the ways in which these philosophers were kind of like unable to come to some sort of conclusion, but she was also mixing all of this philosophy, this is the whole thing with Maggie Nelson. She's mixing the philosophy in with all of this very, very personal stuff. and the personal stuff is a little opaque and it's a little sketched and it's kind of not we don't have tons of detail. We're really made to kind of work to understand what the personal elements are. But she's taking all of this philosophy and mixing it with the personal in a way that both leavenvens the philosophy. It's like allowing people to understand those philosophical ideas and sort of play with them and think about them but also understand the limitations of philosophy. certainly when they bump up against things like desire and love and unity and chaos and grief. But back to our agenda. So, um we're going to dive in. We're then going to look at this voice of this narrator.
The narrator um there's some very interesting kind of slippage things happening there. A lot of it is first person, a lot of it is second person, which is interesting. And the second person is doing this really interesting thing where sometimes the U, the second person is Maggie Nelson seeming to kind of like talk to herself. Sometimes the U is the lover, the prince of blue who Maggie is addressing. And some Maggie, I'm just going to be on like firstname basis with her. And some of it is direct address to the reader. And I'm really tipping my hand here, but that is a very interesting way to conflate all three of those things. Our narrator, our Maggie Nelson, again, this is not a work of fiction. This is um which we're going to get into the genre bending of it all uh pretty soon, but this is not fiction. We we are invited to believe that this is Maggie Nelson. But the way the narrator works is fascinating and we're going to take a look at that. We're going to look at this idea of what she is doing with these philosophers and what she's doing with enlightenment thinking. And we're going to take a look at the urgency and the doubt that she is really underlining there. And then the ways that she's weaving it into the personal. We're going to talk about the structure, the way that these discrete numbered 240 propositions really um you know talk about juxtaposition. they really can kind of play off of each other in these fascinating ways. We're going to look at two short passages where the way that these things are arranged is just astonishing. I think um you know you you kind of flow through this work and you don't maybe like really stop and think carefully enough about what is happening with the the sort of resonance and the dissonance and all of the different ways that these different propositions are are really like working together or working against one another. We're going to talk about sex in this and the female gaze. Um, and then my next point is that in the agenda is that we're going to talk about the whole point of the project, which I don't even really know what I'm saying there. I mean, I think I'm trying to take a step back at that point and be like, what is it that she is actually doing here? Then we're going to talk briefly about the blue flower and then we're going to talk about humor. This is the book um in there are like a bunch of what I found this time like very funny elements. I mean, obviously, this is not like a hilarious book, and it's certainly not comic, but there are some really funny elements.
And I think that the humor in this book gets short shrift, so I wanted to take a look at those. It's toward the end of the lecture, and last night when I was pulling this together, I was like, probably won't have time to get to the humor, but now I'm determined. I'm determined to get to the humor because I think it's one of the real strengths.
And again, it's something I think is not um given quite enough attention. So, we're going to dive in here um by by taking a look at the title. I already um sort of tipped my hand that this is that like the kind of unpronouncability of the title is really important and it is is like indicating something to us. This kind of slipperiness, the inability to sort of pin things down. There's some very tangible things that she says about the title and I want to look at them. I love the fact that these come later in the book. The entire book is 95 pages.
They're the 240 propositions and she starts talking about the title in more concrete terms only on page 57. So we're kind of like well into the text by the time she's beginning to talk about this.
So the first time, well not the first time, but one of the most important times where she's talking about the title is when she is talking about the Joan Mitchell painting. So again, my daughter um she's an art history. She just she has a master's degree in art history and and she's really thoughtful about art and philosophy and like the politics of art and the politics of beauty. So of course um I had never bothered to look up the Joan Mitchell painting Leuer which is clearly foundational. And so she just like looked it right up on her computer and and showed it to me. But we were both kind of marveling at this idea that when you pull up Joan Mitchell's painting, which is called Leuer, like when you pull it up and you have like a Google kind of like smattering of all of the images, all the color renderings are different. Like depending on who is making the image and like what website you're looking at it. And that is fascinating. Like there's clearly like one painting that she actually made. I don't know where that painting is kept, but then we have all of these images of it and all of them are slightly different. like they're all the same kind of shapes, but but but like the blues are different in a way that feels so significant and so strange. I was also startled to see this painting.
I think in my mind it was a painting of flowers which is so stupid because like I just assumed because at that point we have a sense that blue is a flower. So the painting itself, if you're on the YouTube I will put up an image of it.
It's kind of like a bunch of different um like swatches of blue. So Joan Mitchell is doing the same thing that Maggie Nelson is doing in the sense that she's collecting these different kind of chunks of blue. It looks very much like a painters palette and it's very interesting in that regard. There's also like right from the start here we have more of the slippage. So we talk about Joan Mitchell here only after having talked about Joanie Mitchell. So the obviously the slippage between Joanie Mitchell and Blue her you know this very famous album. It's very odd when you have Joanie Mitchell and then you slip to Joan Mitchell. It's it's like a it's this very small difference, but obviously it's this hugely different thing and yet both of them are very preoccupied with this blue. It gives us both the sense of like the the universality of fascination with color, but also the very specificity of it. The way that Joanie Mitchell is thinking about blue and the art like like the form in which she is putting it, her her medium and her genre here, the idea of music is so different than the idea of visual art which we have with Joan Mitchell. Then obviously with this kind of linguistic art, this this vision that we have here that that Maggie Nelson is putting together for us. So on page 56 of Bluetses, we have this.
In England, the blue hour is happy hour at the pub. Joan Mitchell, abstract painting of the First Order, American expatriate living on Monaet's property in France, dedicated chromophile and drunk, possessor of a famously nasty tongue, and creator of arguably my favorite painting of all time, Leu, which she painted in 1973, the year of my birth, found the green spring incredibly irritating. So, I love this.
Of course, there is another proposition where Maggie Nelson herself is, you know, she's spending a month, I think it's May. I don't know why I think of that, but she's spending a month somewhere where everything is green and it's it's spring and it's rainy and it's very verdant and all she wants to do is see blue. So, we also have like a really an interesting and kind of amazing slippage here between the experience of of being bothered by all of the green when all you want is blue. I have to say right at the top too, I don't I don't have this kind of like visual I I don't understand like when Maggie Nelson's talking about the desire that that is like that she feels so viscerally and so sensually and so physically when she sees like a pile of of lapis lazuli like you know any one of these blue objects she's talking about I don't really get it. I am someone if I am in a museum immediately my eye is drawn to the little museum note on the like little placard thing. Like I am so drawn to language that I'll I like glance at the work of art in front of me and go straight to the like verbal thing about it. But that is one of the reasons why I love this book so much. It's stretching this idea of what color can do. I mean blue is my favorite color. I felt so vindicated. I really don't like the color yellow. And so I loved that part where she was talking about how like I don't know 80% of people now I'm totally misquing I'm sure but 80% of people don't like yellow and like half the people in the world say that blue is their favorite color. And I like that idea again this universality of what she is trying to talk about. If half the people love blue obviously not as much as Maggie Nelson does but it is something that we can all relate to and yet it is obviously so different. And back to this idea of Joan Mitchell she has a like a piece of art a painting that is called Leu. So it's it's plural.
It's the bluetss. And then we have Maggie Nelson writing Blu-ray. She does not have the definite article. It's not the blitz. It's not the blue. It's it's like blue as like a much larger category. But again, I love that slippage. We're moving from the bluets like this idea of the corn flowers, which in the Joan Mitchell painting are not just flowers. I mean, it's all these different swatches of blue, but then we move on from that idea of the the blue flowers, which is also the Penelopey Fitzgerald title. I mean, I'm just like I I just can't like get enough of this kind of proliferation here. Then we have Blu-ray, which is Maggie Nelson here.
You know, it's in French. It's a completely different thing and it's rarified and it's made strange for anyone who is an English reader. And yet, we have this this this kind of link and this idea of both of them as as trying to kind of put blue into a different context so that it can be more deeply appreciated. And then we have a second um like discussion of the title.
This is on page 68. And this really struck me. It's something that I thought about a lot afterward because it basically tells us how to pronounce the title of the book. And again, I think it's amazing that we're like 20 pages from the end of the book and she's finally telling us how to pronounce it, but she's also telling us that it is absolutely great to be mispronouncing.
So on 68, she says this, it's proposition 170. She's talking about a filmmaker. The last name is Cornell.
Cornell even coined a word to describe the sensation he hoped to produce by blue tinting his work. Blue and importantly that is spelled B L U E A I L L E. The suffix there is French. It it sounds like it looks like Versailles. A I L L E. I have no idea how to pronounce it which is fine by me. This way it can be blue like the flower, blue ale like an affliction or blue eye like verai or blue eye. So I mean here it's hard to read these out loud because she's actually like the way that she's spelling these things is all very important in terms which is different than the pronunciation. So with the a I l e she's saying blue ale as if some sort of ailment and then blue eye which is more how you would pronounce it in the French but then of course the slippage to the blue eye. She has that amazing thing about whether or not blue looks different if you have blue eyes and then I think it's in parenthesis she says self agrandisement. There's so much that is so personal and so memorable about this book and yet all of it feels distanced and flipper flippery distanced and slippery enough that it does feel universal. It feels deeply personal because so many of the sort of details are are not exactly hers. I mean they are and they're not. She talks at one point too about about not giving very many you know like concrete details certainly about the sex that she is having with the prince of blue. One thing that we know about the prince of blue is that his eyes leaked blue. And I was like, I don't know what that means.
Which is amazing because like the one thing we know, you know, concretely about him is actually something that that kind of defies logic. Like what do his eyes leaking? Is he crying? You know, does he actually have some kind of anomaly of his iris where his, you know, I mean, I can't even imagine that. But but this kind of like the mystery and what she's presenting to us is part of what's beautiful because she's making us work harder, but she's also inviting us to see beyond, you know, sort of like how things are at first blush. Then on page 90, we have one more um little chunk about the title. So this is proposition 224.
Recently I found out that lelue can translate as corn flowers. You might think I would have known this all along, as I have been calling this book Bluitz, mispronounced for years, but somehow I'd only ever heard a small blue flower with a yellow center that grows abundantly in the countryside of France. I thought I'd never see it. So, this is so beautiful and also of course reminds me of Penelpy Fitzgerald and the idea of the blue flower. There's the most amazing scene in that book where he's like the blue flower. Like the whole point is Nales is like looking for this elusive thing which is like this blue flower that does not exist and it's this concept of like a union of souls among many other things. Immortality there all these different things that the blue flower stands for. But he's talking about it at one point in front of his beloved Sophie and Sophie's sister-in-law who are these very downto-earth people. And he's like, "We will never see the blue flower." and they're like, "Oh, do you mean lavender?
Do you mean cornflour? Do you mean flax?" That is a book, The Blue Flower by Penelopey Fitzgerald that is like such a skewering of like male kind of um self agrandisement and like all of the problems in philosophy, all this kind of heady inquiry and all this stuff about the sublime and the stuff about union of souls when the women in that book are feeling things so deeply and they're articulating them, well, Fitzgerald is articulating them for us in ways that are so real and so gut-wrenching and so immediate and the men are kind of like up in their heads just like doing I don't even know what it is such a beautiful rendering of of love and heartbreak and I loved the way that Fitzgerald is really privileging like the sense of these women the kind of like downto- earthth embodied reaction of the women really in many ways seems so superior to me than Nales and his like philosophical poetical kind of um you know like musings and what's interesting about that is I feel like Maggie Nelson is doing very much the same here with this idea that we have all of this philosophy. I mean, I'm about to read a list. It's a very long list. I'll read it quickly. It's a very long list of all these incredible thinkers, most of them, like the vast majority being male. And yet, all of this kind of very heady philosophical stuff. All of that is brought down to earth and is is like like kind of like grounded and found like there's ballast that is found in this idea of the physical desire that Maggie Nelson/our firstp person narrator is talking about when she's talking about the desire the physical desire and like lust for someone else and sex. Again, I feel like it's a privileging of this like embodied female experience over this much more kind of cerebral male body of like philosophical inquiry. So, speaking of philosophical inquiry, I'm just going to zip through this list very quickly. It is like both totally impressive and also so shocking. I I was like, I'm going to just go through here and see if I am correct that most of these thinkers are men. It's interesting when you think about philosophy like I feel like philosophers when we think of them they're all kind of men and then we have people like a modern day or a more modern um you know philosopher you might have like Hannah Erant I don't know how you say her name but um you know she in many ways is like a a female philosopher a lot like Christa and Siku all of these people are are are um philosophers to a large degree but they're also kind of known as theorists I think when we think of philosophers we think of like an older thing that was kind of like pre enlightenment and since the you know 18th century since the 1700s and all of that enlightenment thinking now and and and certainly you know after a lot of post structuralist French things you know like derided and so syrup and all of these ideas about language and then then we move more into theory but the fact remains that the people she's including here are these like total giants of any kind of philosophical or enlightenment thinking so I'm going to zip through this list here we have Pascal oh also they're artists and poets and whatnot But most of them are philosophical kind of people. Pascal Malar Gerta, he's like in there constantly. He and Vickinstein are like the big ones. We have Joanie Mitchell who is mentioned um at least three or four times. We have Derek Gar Vickinstein. I'm doing this chronologically. Uh Newton is brought up at least four times. William Carlos Williams, Pythagoras, Uklid, Hipparus, I don't know if it's Hippus or Hipparus.
Um Aristotle, Epicurus, Plato. Then we have St. Lucy. So she's the woman. She and Joanie Mitchell so far. Uh then we have Leonardo da Vinci, Dialesian, St. Madonna and St. Tidana. And we do have the mention of those two women. Then we go back to Milton, William Gas, Maurice Melo, Ponti, Thorough, Emerson, Eve Klene, Robert Leel, Van Gogh, WG Seabold, George Bush II, so then we have Gertude Stein, a woman, Leonard Cohen, Lucinda Williams, John Berger, Nollas, there's our noales. Thank you very much.
Can't get enough. Penelopey Fitzgerald.
Then we have Joseph Juber. We have Seaagon, who is an kind of ancient Japanese writer. She is a woman. We have Billy Holidayiday who's a woman but then many more men. Adam Phillips, Monet, Frank O'Hara, Joan Mitchell, very important painter obviously. We have Margarite Jira who's a very important French writer. Then we're back to Bertran Russell, Dionis, Mike Kelly, Arto Seaison, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Dered Da, Socrates, Fedrris, John Ashbury, Heraclitus, Henry James, and Schopenhau. So when I read all of those, first of all, I'm just so impressed. I mean, this is someone like in a very light way who is just like amassing this incredible like philosophical um like like this is literally what a 100 pages and we have and she's not just nameing these people.
I mean we are really diving into some of like like the essence of what they are up to each of these people. It is so incredibly impressive. But I also again like as I'm reading through I'm like what's with all these old dudes? Like why are we doing all these old dudes?
And then it was very fascinating to realize that all of them were being put into positions where what she's foregrounding is their doubt or the limits of what they're doing or at least the urgency and and kind of their desire to be able to describe the phenomenon of color which is very difficult um for any of them to do. Okay, we're going to move on now to talk about um the narrator.
And it's a very good segue actually to be talking about these like giants of philosophy and enlightenment thinking and then to to talk about this first-person narrator. Um we're also going to touch very briefly here on the genre situation. It's very famously known as kind of genre bending. I read the most interesting thing by Ben Lerner. He wrote something in Lithub that had to do with with language poetry which I didn't know what that was. This is a movement at the late 19th the late 20th century um about like very difficult challenging pros and like that this was this kind of political thing to be like making the reader understand that language is unstable and that you know like politically speaking like you know all of these different sort of ways that we make promises politically. All of those things are are unstable because language is unstable. Learner pushes back against this idea of like do we actually think you know poetry is like a a really strong political act but he also talks about the fact that that the work of Maggie Nelson is is radically um kind of like it's like offered to us in this radical way that is very approachable. It is not meant to be super challenging and that is true. She will talk about the most like difficult, you know, like Newtonian ideas of like, you know, the color spectrum in ways that make it all feel incredibly accessible. So, this first person narrator is really very much a key to making this very accessible. It is a completely different form. She's often thought of as like a pros poet. This was important, and I did not know this, but Ben Learner also talked about how Wave, who is the the the like publishing house of this, is a poetry house. like he it's they published poetry. So for him it was like just the imprint just like the publishing house itself indicated to him that this is a kind of lyric. It is a kind of poetry and I love the concept of like a pros poem. Like it's clearly there are elements of this that are like heavily heavily poetic in their feeling very lyric but it also is pros. I mean it is written as pros. So we have this first person narrator that really allows us a way into the work. I'm going to read just the very first sentence here.
This is proposition number one. And this idea too of calling them propositions.
Um much later in the book, she she talks about the bower bird and like all these blue things that it will gather in its nest. And how she is also doing the same that these 240 chunks of pros are these things that she is like sort of lining her nest with. She's like making this kind of encyclopedia or this like scrapbook. I think that's my word, not hers. This scrapbook of blue. She's wanting to to like have this kind of encyclopedic like amalgamation of all of these blues, but she talks about um these things as as a proposition much later in the book, which is really important because a proposition is kind of like a hardcore philosophy idea. It's Victinstein at some point here is talking about or she's talking about one of his propositions and it's it's like a logic thing. It's like a way that a philosopher will talk about an argument.
So it's very important here that she's co-opting the language of like hardcore philosophy when what we're talking about are these like pros poem uh chunks. So in the very beginning um we have this suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession. Suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. So there is so much going on here and we're not going to dig too deeply, but we have this idea of like right away the instability of this.
She's saying suppose that I were to start out this way because it's in the subjunctive like like I were like the subjunctive tense like automatically puts things in an unstable thing. It's like if you say suppose I were starting this way, you're saying I'm not starting this way and yet she is starting this way. So, right from the start, we have this like incredible instability of language. And we have right at the top this like beautiful kind of pronouncement about how this is going to be a book that is about her love of color. But then right away we have this idea that this is also going to be confessional. And then we have a semicolon. So she says suppose she says I suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession semicolon. Suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. So then immediately we are put into scene and there's a there's a first person plural there. There's a wei and right away the reader's got to be like wait who's this we? Like obviously it's not the reader and the narrator. Often when we have we it's like you know the reader is being invited to to be like a unit with the the author but because there is a shredded napkin happening here there's a specificity that tells us there's another kind of we. And then fascinatingly we move into an italics part. And when we when we have the italics throughout, it's a little bit of a shift toward a different language.
It's I mean a different speaker. So we have kind of a different voice here. So um she says, "Suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke." And then in italics it began slowly an appreciation, an affinity. Then one day it became more serious. Then and then she has a um a parenthetical phrase I'm going to skip.
It became somehow personal. So we have all of these different voices here and all of these different we have the idea of of of like a more abstract thing and then it becomes very concrete and then with the italics we have the idea of these multiple voices. All of this is really emphasizing the way that language is is highly volatile and unstable in in like these beautiful ways but it's also very concrete. We have her talking to someone shredding a napkin which shredding the napkin is so beautiful. It speaks to like anxiety and unsettled thing. Like you it's just it's such a powerful powerful image. But then I want to move on. That was page one. I want to move on to page three. This is proposition seven at the bottom of page three. But what kind of love is it really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? liberate it, purchase it, ingest it. And she goes on a little bit, um, you might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example. First staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it.
You might want to rouge your nipples with it. You might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still, you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it.
Not exactly. So in this case, we have this totally fascinating thing where in some ways this is kind of a direct address thing. I feel like she's saying to the reader like you might stand in a museum and you might see this this, you know, cup of pigment and you might have all of these desires, but I also would argue that she's kind of talking to herself there. So, it's it's a first-person narrator who's saying like, "Oh, you might be standing in a museum looking at this thing, and you might want to ru your nipples, and you might it's very specific. All the things that she's thinking that she might that that this this you might want to be doing."
Again, we have this tenuous nature of language. These are not things that someone's doing. It's things they might want to do. But but in that sense because they are so specific I feel on some level like you can read it as Maggie Nelson describing or our narrator first person narrator describing what that person might want to be doing that you especially when we get to the end here but you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it not exactly. So when it gets more concrete like that I think that's even more of an argument that like she's talking about her own self her own experience because she's not able she can't access the blue. There's also that beautiful thing there about painting a virgin's robe with it. And I will say um I had the privilege recently to be in Madrid and I did the most amazing um like uh tour of the Praau with a with a tour guide who was so amazing. If you ever go to Madrid, you should get Alex um through Airbnb experiences. He was so he was just amazing. But he was talking about this idea, and I don't know if this is apocryphal, but that one of the reasons why we say, you know, I'm feeling blue has to do with the idea of the fact that Mary is always painted in in this blue robe and that she's obviously like the saddest person, you know, in all of history in many different ways. He made this very beautiful like statement about how like Jesus died in in like historically and you know however you want to think about that but that like hypothetically he died in a way that was very hopeful because he was going to save mankind but for her it's just a tragedy and the way that Maggie Nelson just tucks that kind of like really radical and important like art history kind of um you know trope into this whole thing is fascinating. So we have this idea of beginning with the first person. Then we have the second person that is both in some ways the reader and both like the narrator talking to herself. So you have some slippage there. And then it slips even further in the next proposition number eight down at the bottom. It says above all I want to stop missing you. So that first that second person there that you when she says I want to stop missing you that is a very specific thing that is the introduction of this lover who she is you know not in contact with anymore and what's fascinating about that is we have yet more slippage so in the beginning we have the first person then we move to the second person who is both Maggie Nelson/ the narrator and the reader and then it slips again to the lover the lost lover so there's this idea of a conflation here with the use of you, that second person singular pronoun there, that that U is the reader and Maggie Nelson and the lover, which is showing us the incredible like uh possibility in language, the potential that language has to be all of those things. And to talk about like the universal experience of heartache in a way that's like this incredible articulation of all of this possibility that really can, you know, get to kind of like the bone of how it feels to be so heartbroken. Okay, so we're going to move on from this narrative stance now to taking a look at the the philosophical kind of underpinnings of this whole thing. So one of the things that I would argue is that Maggie Nelson is providing all of these important thinkers and they are all not all but there's a lot of rumination not rumination I don't like a lot of phys like philos wow philosophical um you know very deep philosophical thought on the phenomenon of color and one of the best is that she makes it very clear that these are very high stakes the idea of looking at color becomes very important to people so um on page 10 we have this about g this is on um it's proposition number 23.
Ga wrote theory of colors in a period of his life described by one critic as a long interval marked by nothing of distinguished note. Ga himself describes the period as one in which a quiet collected state of mind was out of the question. Ga is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment.
And she talks about Derek Gar who talks about who who wrote a book called Chroma while he was dying of AIDS. She then talks about Vickenstein who wrote remarks on color while he was dying of stomach cancer. She has a part where she's talking about Newton. This is on page 19. Um it's uh proposition number 50. The confusion about what color is, where it is, or whether it is persists despite thousands of years of proddding at the phenomenon and literally proddding. In his zeal in the dark chamber of his room at Trinity College, Newton at times took to sticking iron rods or sticks in his eyes to produce then analyze his perceptions of color.
And again and again we have these examples of people where like the idea of wanting to understand color is incredibly urgent. And then back on page 10 um we're going back a little bit. Um in proposition number 24 we have like this crazy mashup of Ga and Vickinstein and Newton. So, um, it begins with a quotation.
In view of the fact that Guts's explanation of color makes no physical sense at all, one critic recently noted, "One might wonder why it is considered appropriate to reissue this English translation."
Vickinstein put it this way. This much I understand that a physical theory such as Newton's cannot solve the problem that motivated Ga himself either. So then she goes on and talks about the ways that he was sort of obsessed by color like that that the perception of color was something that was like deeply um interesting to Ga. So she's convincing us of like the urgency that these people feel like this really strong desire to understand color but also their inability to do so. And one of the ways that she makes it so manifest, the the way that we cannot actually very satisfactorily talk about color, she uses a lot of sort of like the the enlightenment thinkers, people like Newton and science and the way that science really kind of fails to to describe what is happening with color.
At one point, um this is on page 17.
It's uh proposition number 43. She's talking to someone who's like an expert in guppies and there's this idea of them being orange and that is important. So in um we have that italicized voice again which is kind of like um a voice that's in dialogue with the Roman type um the sort of like normal type of our uh narrator. So in um italics it says but can it really be said that the guppy cares about being orange? I ask. No, he admits the male guppy simply is orange.
Why orange? I ask. He shrugs in the face of some questions. He says biologists can only vacate the field. So there's this idea of like enlightenment thinking and science as failing. And what's important in all of these elements is to like I mean we've talked about this so much on the Fox page like you when when you recognize something that's happening it's important to ask yourself like so what what is the larger thing that's happening here? If science is failing to describe like this this phenomenon of color and what it is to to like experience color, it's the the the kind of other thing that's happening here is it's impossible to describe heartache.
It's impossible to like exercise yourself of heartache by being able to articulate it and and sort of like um you know encapsulate it effectively. So we have that idea about the guppy and very importantly when she's talking about the guppy with the biologist, she's talking about mating rituals. So there's this idea of desire and sex even among guppies that that's the whole like color is couched in the idea of physical sex. And then the very next proposition is this number 44. This particular conversation with the expert on guppy menopause takes place on a day when later that afternoon a therapist will say to me if he hadn't lied to you he would have been a different person than he is. She's trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he was or is. Then we have another proposition.
This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why. I can't answer. Instead, I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable. that if what I was feeling wasn't love, then I'm forced to admit that I don't know what love is, or more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an angry, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter. This is like so incredible to me. So, we have again this kind of slippage. We're talking about guppies and orange and their mating rituals. Then we're talking about like the failure of science. Then we're talking like about clinical psychology and like this science of like the essence of a person. It's incredible how all of this is all woven together. And then we have this incredibly beautiful finish here where she's talking about the impossibility all of all of it. You can't be scientific about these things.
It just sort of renders everything pale.
And we move from the idea of the orange guppy to the idea of this colorless fish on a on a cutting board. It's just incredible. But what's important and this is moving throughout the entire thing is that none of these branches of science or philosophy is is giving her what she actually needs, which is this kind of explanation for desire and for heartache and for chaos and violence where her friend is concerned and for grief and and for longing. It's it's just it's such an incredible like soup of all of these things and both the shortcomings of all of these things, the inability of her therapist to really help her super effectively, but also the potential in all of these different explorations before we move away from or a little bit away from the philosophy um sort of elements. I mean, we're never fully moving away from that, but we're going to look at some different things.
On page 73, which again is fairly late in the book, we have this really important, it's another kind of like crazy mashup. Here we have Plato and Derry Dah. I guess it's just the two of them, but that seems like a pretty um crazy like mashup to me. But what we're talking about here is this same idea, the idea of desire and the idea of of philosophy and science. All of these things to to to like fail in many ways to articulate something important. And one of the things I love best here is just her tone is so great because she's grounding this idea of the failure of of of of philosophy in this very embodied way like this very like um physical and and sexual kind of way. So um this is uh this is proposition 181. Pharmarmacon means drug but as Jacqu Dereda and others have pointed out the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues, Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. I mean, talk about slippage there. Like, we're moving all the way from like a drug and semantically like this is just how full this word is all the way to the idea of color. Like, this is this is what she's doing again and again and again in this very kind of fractal way. Like every one of these propositions inside of its tiny self, it's not tiny. Each one of them seems enormous, is it's a reflection of what the book as a whole is doing. So we have this slippage here verbally from the idea of of like a drug or an answer or a cure all the way to the idea of color. And then it goes on in that same proposition. Plato does not call [ __ ] pharmarmacon. But then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about [ __ ] I love that. I also was like, "Yeah, well that's the platonic thing." But this idea of separating, you know, like sexual desire and love is a really important underscoring in some ways of the limitations of philosophy, but also the limitations of language, the limitations of any one of these elements that she is presenting to us because the way that they're all working together is so superior. Okay, we're going to move on to talk about the structure of this text. So, we've talked about the idea that these are 240 propositions. I'm really interested in the number 240.
Nelson herself talked a lot about like moving all of these things around and you can imagine as if like they were all on like a 3x5 card and she's kind of shuffling them which would be such an incredible like experience. And this is a book I should have maybe said this earlier. This is a book that is incredibly important to a lot of people.
Maggie Nelson wrote The Argonauts, which was a it's a memoir that also is kind of a a genre bender, and it found a huge audience, and a lot of that audience from the Argonauts made their way back to Bluitz. And she said that she has heard that this is a book that a lot of people give each other at the beginning or the end of a relationship. And I was like, "Wow, this is a heavy book to give someone at the beginning of a relationship." Like to me, that seems pretty insane, actually. More appropriate perhaps at the end of a relationship. But Nelson is someone who is playing a lot with form and what she's writing is non-fiction. This is not a novel. I listened to a podcast and someone kept saying novelist in the novels and I was like what is happening?
This is not a novel. It is not fiction.
It is categorized sometimes as literary essay. Sometimes it is like poetry.
Again it's published by a a poetry publishing house. And my sense of what we have here are pros poems. But she's complicating the idea of genre by like numerically ordering these like chunks of text. And there is some kind of like taxonomy and some kind of like rigor that she's trying to include when she's having like this quantifiable like this numerical thing. There are plenty of books that are like have chunks of text that because they're not like in any kind of numerical order, you feel like you could just like open the book and and start the book anywhere and you can read them all out of order. And there are people who say that they read this book like that. And you certainly can because any one of these chunks of texts is like very important philosophical like inquiry into something. But the fact that she has them chronologically ordered is very important. And it says to us that the order in which they are occurring is important. And I want to take a look just at one section. And we could do this with any section in the whole entire thing because when we have these chunks of text, some are very short, some are very long, some like obviously the form of them changes all the time. meaning some of it is the italicized voice, some of it is quotations from other critics, some of it is a scene like chunk where we have the narrator like actually like showing something or like describing something that happened as if it were a scene in her life. And what's important about that is that the order of these things there's a certain like juxtaposition that can happen or a certain kind of dissonance or resonance like I said before. So I want to take a look at that. So this is on page 18 and importantly this follows the the the biologist who's talking about the orange guppy and then we have the therapist who is asking these questions about whether or not he had lied and I want to look at that a little more closely because there is a certain way where it feels like some sort of like like philosophical fallacy here. So she says the therapist and this is in italicized writing. So here we have the voice of someone else which is further problematizing like the italicized voice elsewhere that feels like Maggie Nelson's voice. Now we have a voice that's the italics is like the voice of the therapist. So the therapist says if he hadn't lied to you he would have been a different person than he is.
And then um our narrator goes on to say something about how uh clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the psychological or the delusional or the biologically explicable. Then we have proposition 46 disavowel says the silence. So in that case disavowel is italicized. So we are invited to think that this is the voice of the therapist. So I looked up disavow like to disavow something is to just like reject it and to be like I have nothing to do with that. But in psychology it's a defense mechanism where you simply cannot see the the thing that caused you trauma. You cannot accept it as true. So we have this idea again of like this philosophical kind of idea. In this case it's like you know social science. We're talking about psychology. We're talking about a defense mechanism. It's probably very Freudian. Maggie uh Nelson is very interested in psychoanalysis and very interested in in in this kind of like psychoanalytic tropes. But what we have here is this incredibly succinct thing disavowel says the silence. She's giving like voice to the to the therapist who is not saying anything. But Maggie Maggie Nelson or or whoever we're invited to see as the the narrator is filling the silence with this idea of this one word disavowel. Of course, because it is set off by itself and it's just the one word and if you weren't going to look it up and see that it was a defense mechanism in psychology, you you have this sense more of like disavowel in general. The idea of rejecting things like the idea of a word whose concept it is to like reject everything which speaks to to pain and it speaks to isolation and it speaks to loneliness and this is a book that is very concerned with loneliness. So we have um we have this proposition 46 disavowel says the silence and then 47 also in italics it says is there a good kind of hustler I wonder as I steer my car through the forest of gargantuan billboards ghostly palm trees and light flattened boulevards that have become my life. So here we have like it's this incredibly efficient way to move us from the therapist office and then to like bring in this bigger question of like defense mechanisms and disavowel and rejecting things to and then putting us into the scene of the car. Of course, this is like the ghostly palm trees are being like sapped of their green. We see we hear we hear about the billboards but we don't hear their colors. So there's this idea of everything being a little bleached out there and everything being a little flat. And then in 48 which is right the next one. Imagine, for example, someone who [ __ ] like a [ __ ] Someone who seems good at it, professional. Someone you can still see [ __ ] you in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy [ __ ] about 3 ft away in an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight. This person is always [ __ ] you from behind in the blue light. And you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God's green earth your bodies know how to do except [ __ ] and be [ __ ] like this. In this dim blue light, in this mirror, what do you call someone who [ __ ] this way? And that ends with a question mark.
And then we have 49. There is a color inside the [ __ ] but it is not blue.
So, we have this incredibly intense thing where we have the repetition of the word [ __ ] We have this idea of of a mirror. I mean, this is like we could literally talk for 90 minutes about this passage and about the absence of people in this passage. The idea of seeing yourself in a mirror, the idea of being like separated from your body, the idea of of being separate from the act because it is an act in the past. It's very interesting because she should have used not should have, but like grammatically speaking, you would say as if there were no other activity on God's given earth, but instead of the subjunctive, it says as if there is no other activity. It's in the present tense. It's not in the subjective. So, it's taking out the idea of questioning.
It's like right when you should be questioning something, it's actually like happening. And then it ends with this question. So it's this whole passage that is that is just opening things up. And then right after this idea of like the color of [ __ ] is not blue, we drop into the next proposition which is bringing us like the lens is pulling way back because now we're talking about Newton and we're talking about like the physics of color. I read this before but it's um number 50. It's the the the little chunk that starts the confusion about what color is, where it is, or whether it is persists despite thousands of years of proddding at the phenomenon. So, what we're having here is, I mean, first of all, with with the idea of of of sexual intercourse and the idea of it having a color, we're conflating the idea of color and desire and physical union, which is really important. A lot of this book depends on the idea that that like desire and color are kind of the same thing. the desire for a color like for the beauty of a color which is kind of impossible to to to like comprehend like it's impossible to take into you. It's the impossibility of like having the thing that is so desired. But the insanity here is the way that all of these different pieces juxtapose. We have the idea of the therapist. We have that disavowel. We have her driving in her car. Then we have that incredibly intense paragraph that's describing all of the [ __ ] then we have the color of the [ __ ] and then we have Newton. So in this very efficient way, each of these is thrown into a different light, no pun intended, be because of what is coming before and after it. And it is an incredible reading experience to kind of like just be getting your footing in something and then be like radically shifted into another way which tells you everything.
Not everything, but it's inviting you to really think deeply about what each of these sections means. And it's just like it's incredibly um like efficient in some ways and also unoring, which is the whole point of it. and genre bending like all all of those different things really do derive from this incredible structure that she has chosen. So I want to go on now to talk about sex in the book. She mentions at some point that there isn't a lot of detail about the sex and this idea of like wanting um like that if you write something down if you like that you're able to kind of keep these things that like if in this like urge to catalog things and the urge to have this like this collection of all of these blues is this idea of like keeping things and being able to like retain them and own them. And of course like physical desire you can't do that with language. you can't and and there's also the risk of course that if you if you use language to describe certain things that you're going to limit it because language is inherently limited.
So I want to look at these three different um propositions. So on on 75 we have 187 which says this. It's so difficult to like know where to start because they all build on each other obviously but up above she's talking about a grandisement. So in 187 she says this. Is it a related form of arandisement to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common than that, more precise. One could leave it too as it is. And then we have a little m dash which usually signals a voice like dialogue. And we have an italicized part that says this. Yet how can I explain that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it. Here we have that same thing where we have two separate eyes that are like in like dialogue with each other.
And of course we also have the metaphor of this balloon that she is pricking that is not in fact deflating. It is in fact blowing back up. So that's 187. And then 188 is this. How often I've imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like. I can hardly see your face. Then 189. How often in my private mind have I choreographed ribbons of black and red in water, two serious ropes of heart and mind, the ink and the blood in the turquoise water. These are the colors inside the [ __ ] I love this so much.
So this here on page 76 is this answer or it's not exactly an answer because the the thing on page 19 is not when when it's talking when when our narrator is telling us about the color inside the [ __ ] it's it's saying that there is a color but it's not blue but it's not a question. But then you know what 55 pages later we have this kind of response to that which is that the colors inside the [ __ ] are red and black and it has to do with heart and mind and it has to do with ink and blood. So you have this kind of again a proliferation. You have these metaphors where the heart and the mind are the ink and the blood and they're in this turquoise water. So in a book that is totally consumed with this question of color and like how do we experience color? She's trying to articulate like the color inside the [ __ ] but it's like not even it's not she's moving away from that question or or like kind of multiplying the question by bringing in these other metaphors. It's such a fascinating way to deal or or to like like problematize and to interrogate and to and to like um elevate this question of what physical intercourse is all about and the difficulty of being able to capture any of that kind of union.
So, in this conversation of the idea of of sex in the book, I want to talk briefly about the female gaze, I want to take a look at a couple of the propositions that that are really digging into that concept. So, on page 12, this is proposition 28, we have this description. It was around this time that I first had the thought, "We [ __ ] well because he is a passive top and I am an active bottom." I never said this out loud, but I thought it often. I had no idea how true it would prove or how painful outside of the [ __ ] So, this is so fascinating to me because the idea I mean, if this is a male and a female, we are talking about like a top and a bottom. we're talking about some sort of like missionary kind of style sex which I mean I'm I'm making some assumptions here but the idea that he would be that the the male counterpart would be like above who would be the top and who would be penetrating the bottom we have the idea of that person being passive and the and the person who is accepting the person who is being penetrated as being active. So you have this question about these roles. You have a question about the way that the the sexual intercourse between these two people is maybe different than sexual intercourse between other people. I mean obviously sexual intercourse between everyone is totally different. But in some ways this does kind of it's it's making us question sort of this this idea of the female gaze. And there's something that that feels very um like female to me very like proliferative. And so the idea of building this whole entire book around color and around like philosophy and around grief and around chaos, all of those different things are speaking to to kind of like the plurality of the female gays. I'm really getting out there with this like kind of theorizing that I'm doing here. I also just was going to look something up and I don't really have the time or the energy to do that right now, but I had this idea that when they're in the Chelsea Hotel, she says that was the only time I came. And what that what I I'm assuming that means is that it was the only time when there was sex between the two of them where she had an orgasm. I think that is what we invited to conclude. I was going to not make this comment, but I want to make the comment because it sounds like during the intercourse, the sex that they had, there was that one time she had an orgasm versus the time at like much later when she's in the midst of all of that green and she's looking for blue and she's touching herself every night. She's masturbating and she's thinking about this prince of blue. And in that case, she's having plenty of orgasms. So, you have this idea of like of of a woman being able to pleasure herself in a way that's much more um like productive. And in some ways, that to me also feels like part of the female gaze. like the importance here. If we're putting importance on female pleasure, it's something that she's achieving much more frequently and much more easily when she's not actually with this person, which is a pretty important like metaphor for the the pleasure and the generosity of this prince of blue. We have direct um like mention of the female gaze on page 23.
And this is one of those times where I want to read the little proposition above because the juxiposition is so jarring. So on 23 um proposition number see I'm like looking at the one above because I have some note in my marginelia that says this is the power of desire but in but number 58 the prop proposition 58 says this it's a quotation love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing. That's Leonardo da Vinci which is I mean obviously one of our gigantic thinkers and it's such a like crazy thing to say.
So in number 59, so she's saying that if lovers saw, they would be like so repulsed and the human race would come to a halt. I mean, crazy. But then in 59, we have a rebuttal on the part of our narrator. She says this, "There are those, however, who like to look, and we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze, about the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head." I love to gaze at a promising looking [ __ ] writes Katherine Malay in her beautiful sex memoir, before going on to describe how she also loves to look at the brownish crater of her [ __ ] and the crimson valley of her [ __ ] each opening wide, its color laid bare for the [ __ ] I love this so much. Oh my gosh, my eye was just totally caught by um the the proposition at the very bottom here, which says, "This is puritanism, not aeros." I mean, don't get me started on Puritanism. You guys all know how I feel. This is a book um that I think is doing a very very good job of pushing against all of our weird puritanical like American foundational crazy tenets. And the last thing um I want to the last like female gays thing I want to look at is right on page 25. So kind of like right across the way here. It's proposition number 24. It's also so excellent to just be like reading these and hearing my voice say them out loud. Um so 64 says this.
It was around this time that I was planning to travel to many famously blue places. Ancient indigo and W production sites, the Chartra Cathedral, the aisle of sky, the lapis mines of Afghanistan, the Scroven Chapel, Morocco, CIT. I made a map. I used color pins, etc. But I had no money. So I applied for grant after grant describing how exciting, how original, how necessary my exploration of blue would be. In one application written and sent late at night to a conservative Ivy League university, I described myself and my project as heathen, hedonistic, and horny. I never got any funding. My blues stayed local.
I love this so much. And this isn't quite the female gaze, but what this is doing is it's like putting this idea of like raw physical desire and like the potency and the power of that desire, the real intensity of that desire and and pushing it up against like the conservative Ivy League institution, which is amazing. I literally in my mind was like thinking Ivory Tower and I was thinking Fallus. Like I just literally had such a like sexual kind of thing in my head here. This idea of her pushing up against this ivory tower. But it's so excellent because what we are holding in our hands is a study that really is very much outside of academia. But it also is like using all of the like philosophical underpinnings that you would have in any like really hardcore philosophy department of any one of these Ivy League universities. So she's taking all of this stuff that's very academic in its nature and in its like foundational essence and she's using it in her own ways. And a lot of it has to do with sex and it has to do with a sexual desire that's very potent. She's a very active bottom. You know, this is like a very um it's a very like empowering and embodied kind of look at what it is to to feel passion as a woman. It's just like it's it's incredible. Okay, we've gotten to that point in the lecture where at that kind of cryptic point where I was like, this is the the agenda thing where I was going to tell you the whole point of this book, which um sounds like a very losing proposition, but I do have these three things I want to read about kind of like the point of this project. And I think we've addressed this um you know, in many different ways, but I want to like point out these three things where I was like, oh, this is this is really getting to to to the germ of what it is that this project is hoping um to achieve. So the first is on page 35 and I found this so deeply moving. This is one of those things that I think I will return to again and again. I mean there are lots of things like that about Maggie Nelson, but this one just really struck me. So on page 35, this is proposition number 92.
Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping, its intensity, its frequency. She says kindly that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. So when I read that this idea of wanting to feel witnessed in our despair, I was like, "Oh, this is what this entire book is doing. It's it's it's like a it's like a mirror of her despair and it's something that she is showing to the world. She is like putting this thing out into the world not only so that other people can see themselves in it. You know, there there is a lot of like being able to identify with the with the very like dire state of being heartbroken, but this idea of being able to kind of exercise yourself of so much despair, the idea of trying to articulate it in order to like be rid of it. So, we have this idea of of the of the uncontrollable weeping in the mirror as being kind of like a metaphor for for what these pages what these words are actually doing. And then uh on page 78, we have kind of a different like aspect of of this project. And I'm so happy to see this because this is what I was saying about earlier about not wanting to have so many details, but it's not just about not including details. It's also about what what she is putting into the text. Proposition 196.
I suppose I'm avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons. The most I will say is the [ __ ] why else suppress the details? Clearly I am not a private person and quite possibly I am a fool.
Then quotation marks. Oh how often I have cursed these foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property. Ga wrote down after the publication of the sorrows of young Worther. Seaagon felt similarly.
Whatever people may think of my book she wrote after her pillow book gained fame and notoriety. I still regret that it ever came to light. So we have this question here of like not only words as as limiting something like if you articulate something it becomes limited to just the the concepts that you articulate but this is getting to the larger question of like why why why sort of exercise these things and the possibility of regret. So when she's talking about the possibility of regret here it's important to understand that she's also underscoring the power of this. Then she's like namechecking ga and shagon which I don't I'm not actually familiar with the Japanese text but but these are like you know enduring these pillow books were written like a millennia ago. So what she's what she's like she's joining in this group of people who are like can do nothing else but like articulate their despair and try to get it out and that there is like the possibility of real um regret at having done that. And yet, and yet the power to do it is creating this incredible text. And then on page 87, um we have proposition number 212. It says this. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth. Now, this is so interesting because in my margin here, I have the reader is suspicious. Um, so this is like before we have the [ __ ] like that's the way I describe you. Like when I'm talking about our union, it's just like the [ __ ] So then when she says um making love to you and it being the sweetest sensation, I I as a reader was like, wait, what? Like are we being sarcastic here? And this kind of like distrust that crops up is very interesting because it makes you realize how attuned you have become like like to to to the semantics that she's using but also to the tone, the feeling of the whole thing. And sure enough, the next the very next proposition says this. But are you certain? One would like to ask that it was sweet. Here again we have the use of the second person that you are you certain. So we have the idea of of like another voice one the impersonal second person talking to the narrator and saying are you sure it was sweet?
And then the next proposition 214.
No, not really or not always. if I am to enforce a rule of brutal honesty, perhaps not even often. So, I love this.
This is like this little interrogation of like what this book is doing. It's trying to find words and the sweet sensation of making love is not that it's not satisfactory. It's not sweet.
And even the word sweet, I mean, it's kind of cloying. It's cliche. It It's like literally it is kind of embodied because it has to do with a sense, but it has to do with a sense I guess it's smell too, but like of taste. It's very limited in what it is trying to describe. And what she's doing here is like pushing that idea and saying it isn't correct to say that it's sweet.
And this idea of brutal honesty, that is what she is trying to employ here. And you know, we're on page 87. We're getting very close to the end of the the text. And she's still playing with this idea of what it is the book is trying to do. Now, I want to just touch very briefly on the Echo of the Blue Flower by Penelopey Fitzgerald in Bluetses. Um, so we have on page 45. I'm not going to like do a lot of analysis here. I'm simply going to read this to you. If you have not read The Blue Flower and you are a fan of Maggie Nelson and and oh my god, I mean, if you haven't read Penelopey Fitzgerald, like get the straight to a bookstore. this is the perfect time for you to read it because if you are someone who's thinking about blue and you're thinking about the idea of color and the idea of the elusive nature of language, Penelopey Fitzgerald is so good and that book in particular, the blue flower, incredible. So when I found the echo of it, I was so happy.
It's an entire proposition and it's like this very beautiful um distillation of what it is that that Novalis is trying to do and it has everything to do of course with Penelopey Fitzgerald's historical um you know novel about this.
Wouldn't it be incredible if Maggie Nelson has never read it? Maybe she hasn't. I don't know. So on page 45 we have proposition number 113.
In his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Offendinger, Nalis tells the story of a medieval trouidor who sees a little blue flower, perhaps a bluette, in a dream.
Afterward, he longs to see the blue flower in real life. I can't get rid of the idea, he says. It haunts me and then in parenthesis and then close parenthesis. Hinrich knows his obsession is a little singular, for who would be so concerned about a flower in this world, and I've never heard of anyone being in love with a flower. Nonetheless, he devotes his life to searching for it. Thus begins the adventure, the higher romance, the romance of seeking. I love this so much.
Oh my gosh, I just was totally distracted because the very next one, the very next proposition 114, she's talking about the Dutch expression where the idea of saying um something is nothing but blue flowers means it's a pack of bald-faced lies. So, here we're talking again about the slipperiness of not slippage here. Well, kind of slippage, but the slipperiness of language and what all of these different things stand for for different people.
But I love the idea. Um, thus begins the adventure, the high romance, the romance of seeking. And before we move away from Blue Flower, I do have to let's just like plop in some kind of analysis here because I just can't help myself. But there's a part where Sophie, who is this young Nollas, um Heinrich falls in love with her. But at one point, Nollis is describing to Sophie how this trouidor has this obsession with the blue flower.
And Sophie's like, why? He's not a gardener and he's not a woman. I think that's what she says. And on the one hand, you could be like, well, that's very like she's not thinking about this in abstract terms. She's like thinking about it too literally. But also what we're getting out there, what we're getting out there is there are a number of different women in the novel who understand what love is. They understand heartbreak because they have a much more concrete sense like in their bodies of what desire is all about versus Hinrich who's like kind of like has this like heady experience of the whole thing.
Unbelievable. Okay, we finally come to the part where I'm going to talk a little bit about the humor of this book.
Again, I think it's underrated. And what I will say before we um you know really dig in is the idea that in a lot of this um a lot of the humor, a lot of the places where I found something that was like somewhat funny, there were also places where I think there was some hope. I think that a lot of the humor is is providing us kind of glimmers of hope in a novel that is otherwise just full of of despair. So I mean it's not full well it is. Yes, it's full of despair in many ways, but there is an optimism and and a hope that is threaded throughout the whole thing. And one of the ways we see that is is in these glimmers of hope. I mean in these glimmers of humor.
So on 28, it's uh proposition number 72.
Actually, I'm going to read 71 and 72.
No, I'm only reading 72. Oh god. See, it's too tempting. Um number 72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way. It has no arms.
I thought that was so funny. But the idea of blue not having arms is actually very significant because it's a standin for the lover. She has desire for the color blue in a way that she had desire.
It's like a transfer of her desire for this this prince of blue to just the color itself. And and it's really speaking to like the the importance of physical union and the way that the color simply does not have arms. Then on page 32, um this is proposition number 82. She's talking about um living in New York in a particularly despondent winter. And it says right here, "Later, I learned that nearly all cultures have considered yellow in isolation one of, if not the least attractive of all colors. I painted everything with it." I thought that was so funny. I mean, it's it's such a like short and curt and like light way to just really talk about her despair. It's so good. On page 33, right across the way there, she has some sort of mysterious ailment and she is going to um she's going to an emergency room.
This again has to do with like the idea of male versus female. A young doctor inside asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I was flumxed. I felt as though I shouldn't be there at all. I said six. He said to the nurse, "Write down eight since women always underestimate their pain. Men always say 11," he said. I didn't believe him, but I supposed he might know. I like that just because these like men always say 11. That to me is a real truism. Um, you know, there has been a lot of ink spilled on this topic, but I do think that women literally just because of menstrual periods. Like we there's a certain level of pain that women are are in touch with at any given moment. And um and I think that that really uh you know toughens us up in a way that I think lots of men are not toughened up.
Uh on page 34, this part was killing me. This is what there's a whole section about um like self-help books that all have to do with the color blue. So, this is on page 52.
It's proposition 136. Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire. I read in another self-help book at the bookstore. What depression ever felt like a fire? I think shoving the book back on the shelf. I loved that so much. I mean, again, all of these like obviously things that are funny in this book are also going to be really tinged with despair, but I loved that.
It was unexpected. And it's a part when she's talking about alcohol and she's talking about how to quell pain, like what kind of salves we can look for. But then this idea of of like the unexpectedness of being like what what depression feels like a fire. It's so it's also speaking again though to this idea of metaphors as being lacking and the inability to truly describe so many different states. Then on pages 89 and 90, this is the last little uh humorous thing we're going to take a look at. on page 89. This is um proposition 222.
Flipping through a copy of Nature magazine, I read that the color of the universe, whatever this might mean. Here I gather that it means the result of a survey of the spectrum of light emitted by around 200,000 galaxies, has finally been deduced. The color of the universe, the article says, is pale turquoise. Of course, I think, looking out wistfully over the glittering gulf, I knew it all along. The heart of the world is blue.
But then right here we have 230 223. A few months later back at home I read somewhere else that this result was an error due to a computer glitch. The real color of the universe this new article says is light beige.
I thought that was so funny. It's so good. Just the the like kind of lack of color and just like the the beigeness of it all. I mean, these are these are quiet and and like like very subtle pieces of humor that we're finding throughout, but I really loved the presence of them this time. And I think it's yet another one of these ways that that um Nelson is like allowing us to enter into the text because humor is such a good way to to to sort of act as a counterbalance for all of all the pain and despair. Okay, to close, I'm going to read the last four of the propositions. This is on page 95. Um and then I'm just going to leave it there.
I'm not going to even do if I can control myself. I'm not going to even do any analysis. Um, so we have we have 237 proposition 237.
In any case, I am no longer counting the days. 238. I want you to know if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words. I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.
239 But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Vile warned otherwise. Love is not a consolation.
She wrote it is light.
240.
All right, then let me try to rephrase.
When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.
Okay, I can't not do a little bit of analysis at the end here. It's so striking this idea of when I was alive.
I mean, she's really saying at the end here that in some way like some part of her is still deadened. And there is a real um throughout the book there's this real construction of the idea of yearning like like desire versus love.
And at the end here, I love this because longing and desire are like end up being kind of the same sort of thing. Whereas light and love, like there's there's a different quality to to light and to love than than like that kind of ardent feeling of of of yearning or of of longing or of desire. So, I love this and I'm going to read the last sentence one more time. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. It's so beautiful. Um, I'm just going to end it there and I really need to thank all of you because this is it was such a privilege like knowing that there were people out there who were going to be interested. It's not a new book. It came out in 2009, but it is a book that we should go back to again and again and again because it is unbelievable. It is so rich and so dense and so beautiful and honestly it really made me want to go back to the Argonauts. So stay tuned. That might be coming soon. Thank you for like sticking it through all the way to the end here.
You're like a real ardent listener whoever's whoever's still with me at this point. So thanks for tuning in.
Happy reading.
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