ON BEING BLUE A Philosophical Inquiry WILLIAM H. GASS Introduction by MICHAEL GORRAINTRODUCTION G 2225 Ge shed sand fre se mio ok at your mouth. and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and chen that final exhalation of vowels? Blu. The word looks like what iis, asyl- lable blown out into the air, and with thesound and the sight of sayingit as one. You blew blue, though let's pause a while before setting on to shat, and try it out in the other languages you might claim ro know. Blew, Buc its just noe the same, you lips dont purse as much, che eu cus he syllable short where the ue prolongs, sustaining like pian's pedal. Blau —thae doesn't work ether, and the ow makes the mouth open too fat Ie not ‘uite a how ita touch roo soft for that, and yet it's a blowsy sound, and untidy. As for azzur or azul, well those suggest something ese entirely. They mighe do for the pale milky sky cutside my window on this almost cloudy October aferno ‘hey won't capture the color of morning glories o the flag In none of those other tongues does the word carry the pun ‘orthe homonym of the English. None has that mingled note of (wu)synesthesia and onomatopociasin German *to blow” isthe hiss ing blasen. For blues not blue not always, and not ven flight aca certain wavelength will show the same thing from Belacus to Brisbane, The French cultura historian Michel Pastoureau thas written that while the classical world produced many trea- tises on the rainbow, nether the Greeks nor the Romans saw blue in ts band of eesti shimmer. That bt of ight was there allright, bu chy juse didn sei, nor cher. Lucretius gave us a rainbow with only three colors—red, yellow, and violee— and Epicurus added green; Seneca took it upto five, br then Homer's sea is wine-dark rather than deep bite and so maybe they had a reason, ‘Oh, of course they knew che color—and they did’ like what they knew. The ancient Celts would dye their bodies blue for battle, and Pastoureau ads that to the Romans blue eyes in woman “indicated loose morals’—like red hair in a Victorian novel. Even after Rome was Christianized it stil took a few hhundted years for cterules to seem appropriate for the clothes sworn by both God and his mother alike. The Virgin made ic fashionable, though by the time she put on her mansle it had already found a kind of legitimacy in the sports pags; in the third century C.E. it became a team insignia and the Blues ran their chariots alongside the rival Reds and Whites. Pastourcau's ‘vn Bleu (2000) offers compendium of the color'serershifting culrural meanings that takes in everything from ancient Egype to Yves Klein, and among other thingshenotes thatthe Amer can word fora particular kind of music has swam unchanged Jnco other language: le bus. Bu that’s not the kind of feeling [vu tha the French have whenever Les Bleus lose on the soccer fle the phrase for that is Breyer du noir, and you have the blues in black in both German and Italian as well. Some shades of meaning use won't eanslate ‘That's noc a point William Gass makes. He doesn't need to, Butit'ssomething you can learn from reading him, fom lrting yourself drown in On Being Bluc. For Gass has an car like 2 Pantone chart, exquisitely alee to the semitones of sound and sens, fifty red words here and a hundred greenies over there. His blues themselves are enough to sallow you down, and if you werent going to read iin justa few minutes I would quote the entirety ofthis book's pagelong ist sentence, with it at- leap inventory of some few ofthe things that particular color canbe, the “Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, aws, blue legs and stockings... beards, coats collars, chips and cheese...wa- tered twilight, sour sea” Russian cats are blue, and oysters, che Social Register too, and itis also, he says, the color of “every- thing chars empey. which makes me emember the high win- dows chat Philip Larkin opens onto “the deep blue ait, chat shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless” ‘With its three separate sets of parentheses and is grab bagof semicolons and ellipses, Gass’ extraordinary sentence is at once "ungainly and balanced, a pater songof rickety improvised per- fection, and free. Even so...why blue? He never says, not in these pages, though in interviews he has offered some glimmer ‘of motivation. Gass told The Pars Review, in 1976 (the same year that chs book was frst published), chat he wanted to ex plore “the way in which meanings are historically attached to todwords: itis so accidental, so remote 0 twisted. A word is ikea schoolgits room—a complete mess—so the great thing isto make outa way of secing tall as ordered.” In another interview he said chat “the ttle and the word were what interested me, not the subject” Inthe beginning was the word nor the coor, notche shade that che spectrum places alongside green, but rather the sound and all that clumps around it, the fuzz balls of meaning that ies picked up asic has rolled on through time. For Gass sands a fellow traveler in the linguistic turn ofthat period's academic criticism. The real subject of On Being Blue is lan- guage itself which he ses as glorious to the exact degre that itis abo inadequate, unable to sustain an immediace relation bbeeween aword on the one hand and is arbitrary and yet indis- soluble referent on the other. All words are figurative: no blues cverjust blu. But that's trivial point, orat lease swhen I put iso blundy. The wonder lies in the way Gass works call out, and anyone reading both this book and his interviews is likely ‘ocall him alias. Because blue does matter to him. Ie matters fat smore than red or green or yellow, and precisely because it comes inso many differene favors and tonalities, because more shades of emotion and meaning have stuck themselves upon ie. So “Praise is due blue, the preference ofthe bec.” ‘True enough, and you know that Gass must have had fan with that lin’ alleration and internal shyme. Sell, i's a bie sententious, as befits maxim dropped in between allusions to Goethe and Aristotle, and this book i usually up co something :more mischievous. For there's a phase that he perhaps deiber arely does not us, a blue activi thae he doesn’ mention as fel such, even though he both writes aboue ie and provides his own bescexample. Working blue—the stand-up comedian’ term for the kind of routine one could do in a nightclub but not on tele- vision, notin the days when there were sill seven words you couldnt say: Raunch and filth and sex and sweat, che smoke- filled room as smuilled room. And at moments Gass himself works as blue as Richard Pryor, with something salacious in every moist slippery thought that comes out of his “Quink- stained mouth" Many poets, he writes, are given to measure- ment even though they “would never meter thee stick” and John Cleland, che author of Fanny Fil had such “a deep sense for the blush in blue language” that he managed to produce “a dicty book withoue a dery word” excepe perhaps insite. As for Gass own cil, icis "appropriate that blow and blue should bbe—at our ealiest convenience—ueterly confused.” Yet working blue isnt an end in itself, not in this oom, Gass language in this “philosophical inquiry" is notably freer than charin che tion he had published in the sixties, the novel Omensetter’s Luck (i966) and the stories collected in In the Heart ofthe Heart of the Country (i968). Witten English in those few intervening years had grown ever closer tothe spoken tongue: certain “srupulosties’ no longer needed to be ob- served, and Gass was quick to allow himself a few liberties Here, forexampleisthe frst sentence ofthis book's thied chap- ter: "When, with an expression so il-bred as tobe faherless, 1 enjoin a small offensive fellow to fuck «duck: I don't mean he should.” Ies eu that having once sid it Gass caneresise image ining wha i would be like ihe did mean i and yee most sich failcaplecives are neither literally nor consciously intended. The swords may have been used bue the speaker has inevitably “ig- sored thei conten.” and in that sense they havent realy been sed at all. Tey have merely “appeared,” and in consequence cu freedom rouse chem in princhas produced no “improvement in our life, hough of writing... because [thae] appearance is ss unmeant and hypocritical a thet] Former absence” Nori ic much better when the blue is consciously chosen and inven- tively worked. Nipples may be said ro resemble the ripest of| raspberries or pethaps even a thimble, ut “why take th trouble when the trouble taken isso evident” hough Gass himself i willing o do ie and make it look effortless. Maybe they really look like “the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers,” and for someone who spends his days at his desk thar image can prove surprisingly effective. ‘Working blue provides an especially vivid instance of the way words operate, wich eroriea’s clichéd calland/-cesponse serving to illustrate the formulae within which any linguistic system is mired. Yer where other theorists of his day take a mingy delighe in whae Fredric Jameson called “the prison house ‘of language,” Gass himself refuses vo accepe the ida even ashe recognizes its force. Criticism may often stand asa kind of erature, but the knowledge ic offers rarely has the power ofa (On Being Blue seems to me an exception, and in time Gass wil probably be remembered as much for i, or for the essays col leceed in such books as Habitation ofthe Word (1988) oF A Temple of Texts (2006), ashe will for his ction. Few American novelists have writeen so barbed and sensuous prose, and yet fa] his own rumpled brain has ahways seemed to me more consis- tently interesting than any narrative situation or character he has yet contrived. Nevertheless isthe factor rather the exis- tence of the fiction, of such grandly conceived books as The Tunnel 1998), that gives his criticism its lfe—i’s che novelist in him that makes him want to break out of jail. Gass’ essays rarely pursue a single Line of thought, and they offer not a p ‘gression of ideas so much as an experience, all feints and nu- ance, and with the argument itself vanishing within thesportive accretions of his prose. But then that play of minds iself the argument, and where the theorist believes ehat language can cripple, che novelist knows chat e may st you fee. Gass eroti atention finaly rests, therefore, on the bluest thing of al, “noe whae che tongue touches, bur whae i forms, not lips and nipples, bue nouns and verbs.” Words caress, they slide thei Fingers down the spine and breathe berween the soes, and “Ifany of us were as well eaken care of asthe sentences of “Henry James, we'd never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anceipated, our feelings understood?” That's a direy ‘one, cha sentence, though its beauty would vanish i eied co ‘ell you why Ie means what fesays and about eight other things ‘too, and that perhaps is the final point of being blue. Joseph Conead once complained that “no English word has clean edges” The language had too many synonyms, words that ap- proximated cach other and yet were never quite identical, and with cach finely shaded meaning carrying so many connota- tions as to make chose words isle more chan “instruments for (its)acting blutred emotions” Still, Conead must have liked chat imprecision, for he chose despite himself to work in English and not the cu crystal of French. Ye let me have a pan once ‘more. Our words are noc so much blurred as blued and bent, a bicless chan chey should be, and abit more because of it, vehi cles of the unintended, “Meaning i evr labile as Pastourea's account ofthe rain- bow suggests, but however much one may bled inco another cour words have each thei own unduplcatedspecifciry. Blue is ‘many things for Gas, and his account of will make him spec uae about che way children distinguish shape from size from color will cake him back to Democritus and forvard to Ed- win H, Land, and lead him on to comparisons of Rilke and Rodin, Pollock and Picaso. And a you read down his oser of “damson, madder, and cadet.” of slate and steel and gentian, you will realize thar this shapsode has made blue into some- thing like life esl Or no, For we should rather surrender “the bu things of this word in favor ofthe words which say them, the word and syllables and sounds that may sheler usin ime when “everythings gray” —Micwaet Gonna [xiv] ON BEING BLUELUE pencils, blue noses, ue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung bby longshoremen, that lea-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fea; 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 chat siamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes carn that gentlemen may wear; afctions of| the spitit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all thats dismal—low- down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hai rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia lke thar blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for rumps in whist (but who ‘remembers whist or what the death of unplayed gamesis 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 canstandly increasing abseniness of Heaven (is Blawe hinein, the Germans 37), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bores, bank accounts, and compliments, fr instance, of, when (31the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete dhuts and gasblue flames; socal registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese... the pedantic, indecent and censorious .. watered ‘light, sour sea through a scrambling of accident, blue has be- come their color, just as i's stood for fidelity, Blue laws took ther hue from the paper they were printed on, Ble noses were named for a potato. E. Haldeman Julius’ tele library, where I first read Ellen Key's Evolution of Love, vainly hoping fora cock stand, had such covers In the same series, which sold fora dime in those days, were the love lees ofthat Portuguese mun, Mar- jana Alcoforado, an overwrought and burdensome lady, cer tainly, whose existence I callously forgot until read of her again in Rilke, ‘The firs ofthese pocket pamphlets was, inevitably, the Rubi ut had the right sentiments. Iewas the right length. Iecamein [Pretty quatrains. And like a pair of polished shoes, chad just the right workd-wearinessand erotic sheen. No, 10, the nearest got to The Jug and Bough, was entitled, Nitgsche: Who He Wes and What He Stood For, by M. A. Mugge, Ph.D. All those capital ‘were formerly for God. There was another, I vemember, that reproduced the wartime speeches of Woodrow Wilson in type Which somedimes sagged toward che bottom of the page as though weakened by the weight ofthe words above, The ble of| these books is pale by now, the paper brittle as communion bread, while my association of Wilde and Darrow with the ‘olor, once so intense, has faded too. My cock did not stand for Nietsche either, nor did Mes, Annie Besant’ essay onthe furure Lal of marriage cause a stir. One had to goto Liveright fo that—to ‘other colors: Black and Gold—where you could be warmed by ‘Stendhal, Huneker, and Jules Romain, by Balzae and Remy de Gourmont, and where the decadence of Pierre Louys was gent- Ine and not a bic of blueness dripped on scarcely curdled cheese. John Middleton Murry edited The Bue Review for te three dis tinguished issues oft life, nd something called The Blue Calen- dar predicted che weather from 1895 to 1868 without ever being. right. Only a nickel, also blue, out of the same dry atic box, ‘The Bibelot, a Lilliputian periodical with » Gochically lerered cover which fairly cried out an, rose into my unhealthy hands, I eame down from Maine instead of in from Kansas, and re- printed pieces that had previously vanished in the pages of The ark Blue, a vague Pre-Raphaelite monthly with a tile as frus tratingly incomplete as a broken musical phrase. These chap- soles went into print and out of sight the way trout, I'm sure, still disappear among the iidescences of my childhood Ohio's cold, bottomless Blue Fole, suddenly to emerge again in the clear, swift streams and shallow ponds ic feds a fnothing mag- ‘eal had happened to them. Bach ofthe magazine's meager issues fearured a singe, slightly sacred, faintly wicked, and alwaye delicately perfurned work by William Morris or Francis Thomp- son, Andrew Lang or others. The set [saw concluded quietly ‘with Swinburme'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 descripion of two figures in a painting. .. the prose of a shade of blue I leave to you. ‘One gis, whicerobed and radiant a8 white waterowers, has half (1let fal eh rse that droops in her hand, dropping laf by leaf like tears both have the languoe and the frit ar of flowers ina suey place: ther leaning Kimbs and fervent fics are full ofthe goddess, thei ip and eyes allure and await che ivisble atendant Loves ‘The clear pearawhite checks and tender mouths have still aboot them the subtle purity of sleep; the whole drawing has upon ithe heavy incumbent light of summer but half avake, Nothing of more simple and bilan beauty hat been done of lat yeas, Lang, plainly fond of the color, edited The Blue Petry Book From her window Katherine Mansfield sees a garden fll of wall flowers and blue enamel saucepans, and sets the observation down in a letter to Frieda Lawrence she'll never mail. Stephen Crane wroce and posted The Blue Hotel, Malcolm Cowley Blue Juniata, and Conrad Aiken Bue Voyage. Like rainwater and white chickens, KM exclaims: Very beautiful, © God! isa blue tea por with cwo white cups at- tending a red apple among oranges aldeth ie to Dame—in che hie bosk cases the books ly up and down in scales of ealou, with Pink and lise noves securing, unell nothing remains but ther, sounding over and over. “Then there s the cold Canadian climate and the color of deep ice ‘The gill ofa fish, Lush grass. The whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin. a an ‘Among the derivations of the word, | espedally like Bavus, from medieval Latin, and the earlier, more clasical, flavus, for ‘the discolorations ofa bruise, so that it sometimes meant yellow, ‘with pethapsa hint of green beneath the skin ike naughty undes- clothes. Once, one blushed blue, though to blush ikea blue dog, as the cliché went then, was not to blush ac all. Covenanters, against royal red, flaunted it. They were true blue, they said. [6] And Boswell els us out of his blue if, that Benjamin Siling- fleet wore blue wool undress hore ro Elizabeth Montague it crarytenathomes. Perhaps ro Blizabeth Carters too. And even Hannah More's Few words ner more lrg int the composton i {nd logis boreringon ng thandos he word au EX Drea of he urmoxt contempt ofl shat men Bld deat {stand ore bes mani comnts never varying sae Of messing gree the piel every turn, Avery Prove it Asal tempo ace the wy snd whecoe of an of the term of expresion of whch fsa pars Pare rd ly lng ands Analg) So a random se of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lng oles, The mind does that. A single word, 2 single though, a singe thing, as Pato taught. We cover oat concep, like fsb, with clouds of ne, Cops and babbies wear blue. We ach them and connect Imagined origins reduce the sounds of cash and eontradicon, as when one crits out blue murder inthe tee. There's the ble for baby boy, the Bix of bu sky laws, befor jeans, Be for hogs. The coal sb asm fon, the gluchersing, kindof rout, ae sid ro have Be-backs and renamed soin Yorkshire Marland, Virgins, Main. From cars imesit’s been the badge oferviude: among the Gaul, to hurnilate harles in houses of correction, atthe color ofa tradesman'’s apron, for liveries and uniforms ofall kinds, the varles comme Bue: bright, wih certain alfnitis for ba re, pre), with certain fines for bald (ble), with certain fines for bold (Oi, Wella bald bracisablue goose. And thes slippery blue- areen sources ease, ike sleeves of gress, cach separate ne into U7single—we think—fuir 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 noges are the consequence of sexual freeze or they are noses buried far too long in bawdy books, oF rubbed too often harshly up and down on wool-blue ehighs. Not lone is love the desire and pursuit ofthe whole. Iris one of the passions of the mind, Furthermore, ifamong a perfect mélange ‘of meanings there is one which has a more immediate appeal, 2¢ among the contents ofa pocket one tem sa peppermint, i will assume @ center lke the sun and require all others take their docile urn to go around. “This thought is itself a center I shall not return co it. Blue postures attitudes, blue thoughts, blue gestures... iit the form or content that turns blue when these are? ... blue words and pictures: a young git] posed hefore che door of her family’s trailer, embarrassed breasts and frightened triangle, vacant stare... wonder what her father sold the snapshots for? [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 «ase, buta bumbershoot held up against the absence of all cloud? Seringy hair, head out of plumb, smile lke a scratch across her face... my friends brought her image with them from their camping tip, and I remember best the weed which grew be- tween 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: rook advancige of beng the seaside co lay ina store of sucking [8] stones. They were pebbles bu all hem stones... 1 dsrtibed| them equally berween my four packers, and sucked vem tum and tur about This ave a problet which fist solved in the fllow- ing way. Uhad say sxceen stones, four in each of my fo pockets these Being the two pockets of my trousers and the rw pockets of -my greatcoat. Taking stone from ee ight pocket of my geatcoat, and putting ein my mouth replaced i inthe right pocket of my [reatcoat by a sone from the right pocket of my trousers, which replaced bya stone fom the lee poske of my trousers, which e- placed by atone from the left pocket of my gresteat which I r= placed by the stone which wat in my month, a oon a Thad fe [shed sucking it. Thus cher were sil four ane in each of my four pockets, but noe quite the sme stones. But this elution did not sats me lly. Fr i id not escape me that, by an extraordinary hhzard the four stones iclating thus might always be the same four. In which cas, fr from sucking the sittzen stones turn and ur about, was really only sucking four, always the same, earn aed turn about Beckett is a very blue man, and this isa very blue passage Several brilliant pages are devoted tothe problem, The penult- ‘ate solution requires tha fifteen stones be kept in one pocket ata time, and moved togethes—all the stones, that i, which are not being sucked. There is, however, an unwelcome side effec thar of having the body weighted down, on one side, with stones, ele the weight of the stones dragging me now o one side, now to the other. So it was something more than a pritciple {aban ddoned, when Tabundoned the equal dsribution, ie was a bodily ‘eed, But to suck the stone inthe way Thave described, not hap hazard, bu with method, was also thnk ably need ere then were two incompatible Bodily needs at loggetheads, Such things happen. Bur deep dowa {didn't give atinkers curse about being off ny balance, dragged tothe right hand or the lef, backwards and forwards. And deep down ie wae al the stme (O-me whether sucked a diferent stone each time or always the sre stone, unl the end of ne For they all raed exicly the same [9]De Sade in a harem of quints could not have fed the issue of love's little nourishments more squarely, or that ofthe faceless fuck, or equal treatment (stones, wives, Jews, portions of anat- ‘omy, don’t forget, turn and turn about), and how could one better describe our need for some security inthis damn dsagree- able/dull dark ditficut/disorderly life? And then the resolution, ‘when it comer—isit nota triumph of both will and reason? And the solution ro which allied in dhe end was to throw aay all the stones butone, which Tkept now in one pocket, now in another, land which ofcourse Ion lo, or threw away, oF gave away, OF swallowed. As we shall see, and be ashamed because we aren't ashamed to ‘ay it, lke that unpocketed peppermint which has, from finger- ing, become unwrapped, we always plate our sexual subjects first, Ieis che original reason why we rad...the only reason why Its therefore appropriate tha Blow and blue should be—at our ‘earliest convenience—utterly confused, $0 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 jin ied 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 tse of sexual words of various sorts, and I shall pour one ofeach vile kind into the appropriate porches of your eats, for pronoune- ing and praising print tothe ears what the decently encouraged eye does happily. The chird can be considered, in asense, che very (19) heart of indirection, and thus the essence ofthe artist's art—dlis- placement the pasage ofthe mind with all is 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 pilloweases, Ihence to dents in these and creases, stains and other cries of pas- sion which have left thir prints and finaly to the painted chalk- ‘white oriental face of amorously handled air and mountains, lewaly entered lakes. The fourth I shall simply refer to now as the skyblue eye (Somewhere, it seems to me, there should be @ brief pinch of suspense) and the ith, wel, e's really what I'm ‘running inco all my inks about, so had better mention it: the ‘use of language like lover. .. not the language of love, but the love of language, nor matter, But meaning, not what the tongue touches, bue what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs, ~* # So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, con- tive to contain one another, a ifthe botle ofthe genil were is belly, che lamps breath the smoke of the wraith. There is chat lead-tke look. There i the lead itself, and al chose bluey hunt- ers thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too. There's che blue pill chat the bull’ ced, the nose, the plum, the Blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of deat Isie th sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us ro 1 deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic con- clusion? What seems to line our life with satin? whar brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Lonelines, emptiness, worthlessnes, Le]grief. each iv an absence in us. We have no pain, but we have lseall pleasure, and che lip that meets our lip is always one half of oar own, Our state is exactly the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces, come to view us and t0 say toone another that we never looked better; that we seem at last at peace; thar our passing was—wellsad—still—doubsless forthe bes (all this in a whisper lest the dead should hear). Dis appointment, constant los, despair... ast, a soft quality in the at, a color, a flueer: permanent in their passage. We were not up toit. We missed it. We could not retain. Ie wll never be back. Joy-breaking gloom continues to hammer. So it’s true: Being without Being is blue. Just as blue pigmene spread on canvas may help a painter ac- curately represent nature or give to his work the aforesaid me ancholy ast, enhance a pivotal pink patch, or signify the qualities ‘of heavenly love, o 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 spot of the color here and there somewhere on them like the bluccap salmon with its dotted head; or things are called blue carclesly because they are violet or purple or gray or even ‘vaguely red, and thav’s close enough for the harassed eye, the way the brownish halo which surrounds the Dame of a miner's safety lamp o warn of fredampis said tobeabluecap too. Orthey aremisnamed for deeper reasons inthe ninth century, when the Scandinavians raided Africa and Spain, chey carried of samples of the blue men who lived there all the way to Ireland, hence nig _gerblueis applied to an especially resinous darkness sometimes tal by those who are no longer Vikings. And Partridge reports the ‘expression: th sky as be as a razor. Find an eye as blue as inde- cency itself an indecency as blue s the smoke of battle, ora bat- tle asblueas the los of blood. We might remain with such won- ders as blue as... as blue as... for good and forever. ‘Anyway, sith since the first week had as many working day), I shall describe and distinguish three functions for blue words, ‘modes of production, a Marxist might describe them, and I shall angue 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 che first place. As blue blaw, blue blazer, and bluebush. By my private count, you may not be surprised co learn, that makes sixteen separate thoughts T hope to wind my Quink-stained mouth around—tura, of ‘course, and tum about. (3)