No Wasted Word (Archive Edition): Bluets by Maggie Nelson
No Wasted Word is a bi-monthly column where Caitlin Reade Keenan discusses and reviews books by contemporary writers published by independent presses.
Written by Caitlin Reade Keenan
I first read Bluets (Wave Books) at my Grandmother’s house. I read it in one sitting while lying on the concrete beside her turquoise, saltwater pool. Occasionally I would dip my hands into the cool water to sprinkle some on my belly. I fingered the Spanish, cobalt tiles around the pool’s rim and began to think more about grandmother’s home than I’d ever had before. My whole life I’d taken for granted her blue decor. Everywhere though, in places I’d not even thought to look was the color blue. Her hand towels, embroidered with periwinkle flowers, the rims of her wine glasses, deep indigo, her placemats, a weave of cerulean and sky. There was a jar of sea glass, blues only, candle holders in sapphire and throw pillows of navy, the art all one shade of blue or another and though I knew my grandmother’s home was lovely and well decorated, I’d always take for granted its blueness. I began to wonder why blue? Why the loyalty? Why the decades spent collecting one color? This is a question that Bluets led me to ask and one that it was convincingly able to answer.
Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is an exploration of the author’s attraction to the color blue as well as the story of her breakup with a man she refers to as “a prince of blue.” The nontraditional format is a numerical list of form of some longer thoughts, some fragmented thoughts, factual information, quotes and some deeply personal revelations, all relating in one way or another to blue. Though she talks about blue in the abstract and with a reverence, she does not say, “This is beautiful because, I like this blue because.” She knows that she cannot simply answer the question, “Why blue?” Nelson writes, “People ask me that question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose who we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.” That response is perhaps the best way to explain how Nelson uses her love of blue and loss of a relationship as the subject matter for this text. Nelson has no choice what takes a hold of her but she wants to explore that hold and its personal meaning to her.
The end of her relationship deeply hurt Nelson, she speaks of its pain causing her the inability to focus, to write, to think of anything else. She pushed away some friends and sought help from a psychiatrist. She writes in entry number 94, “This is the dysfunction talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.” This constant re-circling back to the departed lover is a central to the text and Nelson makes the braided exploration of the color and the loss of the relationship effortless for the reader.
Nelson is cagey about the specifics of the man for whom she is grieving. She doesn’t give us much more details about their time together other than that he gave her blue presents, left for another women and was good at fucking. This is a smart choice. I don’t want to know any more about Nelson’s man, nor of details of the end of their relationship. I don’t want him real because as a reader it’s more powerful to see him through Nelson, as the man she envisions. She’d risk alienating me if she made him concrete. Instead of feeling her pain, I might be disgusted that she’d wasted so much grief over someone I saw as a loser.
Some reviewers have been critical of the work as self-indulgent. But those reviewers are missing the point. In entry, number 131 Nelson writes, “‘I just don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough,’ one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?” The aim of Bluets is to communicate how heart-wrenching the despair Nelson feels is and to explore that despair because it feels better to do that than to try to feel better. She is taking comfort in it because she is too lonely without it. Anyone that has gone through a bad breakup can relate to that.
Also, just because the book is emotionally involved and self-referential does not mean that one does not learn a multitude of information from this book. Nelson has done a great amount of research on the history of the color and is well versed on other authors’ writings about blue. She cites numerous philosophers, writers and musicians such as Plato, Epicurus, Wittgenstein, Goethe, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. She also includes delightful blue trivia such as the Bowerbird’s mating ritual of collecting blue trinkets in their nesting place and Benedict de Saussure’s invention of a “Cyanometer.”
The book is exploratory and reading it feels like being a dream-like state because of the carefully crafted poetic language. Nelson directly addresses the exploratory nature of the text. Specifically she discusses Goethe’s fear that writing is destructive and worries how to, “keep the essential quality of [of the thing] still living before us, and not to kill it with the word.” Nelson’s response, “I must admit, I no longer worry much about such things. For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is. What does your poetry do?– I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language (John Ashbury).”
Nelson does not claim to find an answer for why she is so affected by blue or why she cannot move on from her lover. What is more important is the mediation on those things and the acknowledgement that those things are her consuming for her. She makes no prediction for her future. The crux of Bluets is that there is no crux. There is no climax and revelation in life and so there in not one here. Maybe that is why now, I do not want to ask my grandmother about her blue, her love for the color and her collection of it. Perhaps, that is why I want to follow Nelson’s lead, and simply stand among her blues and let them rinse over me.
